NEW YORK — It took Ina Polak 35 years to discover the dusty piece of paper that probably saved her and her family in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
It wasn’t until she was cleaning her mother’s New York City apartment following her death in 1980 that she discovered the document listing her, her sister and parents. It was a Salvadoran citizenship certificate.
“My first reaction was ‘Oh, now I understand!’ ” said Polak, who is 87.
She and her family were Dutch Jews, with nothing to connect them with the distant Central American country of El Salvador. Yet the certificate dated 1944 became their lifeline, thanks to a man named George Mantello.
Mantello, a Jew born in what is now Romania, was one of a handful of diplomats who during World War II saved thousands of Jews and others on the run from the Nazis by giving them visas or citizenships, often without their governments’ knowledge.
They were men such as Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. consular official in Marseille, France, who issued visas and other travel documents that are credited with helping to rescue about 2,000 people; or Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese envoy in Lithuania, thought to have saved 3,500; or Dr. Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consul in Vienna whose visas got 18,000 Jews to safety in Shanghai.
Best known of all is Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, whose efforts probably helped save 90,000 Jewish lives in Hungary before he vanished.
Now the work of Mantello is getting fresh attention as scholars dig into newly released files and piece together the lives he saved by gaming the diplomatic bureaucracy during the Holocaust — the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II.
Working as first secretary in the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland, Mantello used a network of contacts to issue papers to Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1942 and 1944 — up to 10,000 documents, according to his son, Enrico Mantello.
The same figure is given by the late historian David Kranzler in his 2000 book about the diplomat called “The Man who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz.” The book also describes Mantello’s critical role in publicizing the so-called Auschwitz Protocol, a description of the Nazis’ biggest death camp by two escaped inmates.
It is not known how many lives were saved by Mantello’s documents — “definitely, hundreds,” says Mordecai Paldiel, a Holocaust studies professor at Yeshiva University in New York. A letter from Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who worked with Mantello, speaks of “thousands” saved.
Without the Salvadoran certificate, Polak and her family would likely have been worked to death in Bergen-Belsen or sent to other camps or the salt mines. Instead they were moved to a small camp enclosure full of Jews with Latin American documents, and finally put on a train out of Bergen-Belsen along with 2,400 people and were rescued by U.S. troops in April 1945.
“Back then,” Polak said, if a German official “saw a paper, and if it had the right stamp on it and the signature, then it was legal. People with these papers were eligible, in the Germans’ eyes, to be sent to a neutral country, to a better camp.”
Mantello sent out notarized copies of the certificates and kept the originals, more than 1,000 of which were found in a suitcase in a Geneva basement in 2005 and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by his son three years later.
Now museum researchers are trying to trace recipients of the certificates to get an idea of how many of them actually saved lives and learn the full scope of Mantello’s rescue efforts. The citizenship certificates can be viewed on the museum website, .
Judith Cohen, director of photo archives, says she has discovered how two Dutch families were released from Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 thanks to the documents, and sent to be exchanged for German prisoners.
“We know that Salvadoran certificates actually helped pull someone out of the concentration camp and send them to freedom,” she said. She notes the Jewish saying that “he who saves just one person is like he who has saved the whole world.”
Among those to whom he sent citizenship papers were his parents in what then was Hungary, but they arrived one or two days too late, and his mother and father, with the rest of the Jews in their town, were sent to Auschwitz and killed.
