ADL pays tribute to 'Mexican Schindler' for helping save 40,000

Anti Defamation League chairman Glen Lewy (left) and Abraham Foxman, national director, flanked Laura Bosques Manjarrez, representing her father, Gilberto Bosques Saldivar. (Anti Defamation League)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Gilberto Bosques Saldivar has never been the subject of a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg. American history books seldom, if ever, mention his name.

But the former diplomat from Mexico, stationed in France during World War II, helped save as many as 40,000 Jews and other refugees from Nazi persecution.

"It is still a chapter of the Holocaust that has not been written," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "I believe that there are a lot of other cases that we do not know about that are surfacing little by little."

At a November reception held in Saldivar's honor in Beverly Hills, the ADL presented his daughter with a posthumous Courage to Care Award, which was created in 1987 to recognize non-Jews who helped rescue and hide refugees during the Holocaust.

Foxman noted that, other than industrialist Oskar Schindler and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, most non-Jews who defied the Nazis and helped Jews during the Holocaust are not well-known.

Even Schindler's efforts were largely lost to history until Spielberg made the movie "Schindler's List."

Calling Saldivar the "Mexican Schindler," Foxman said, "Bosques's life is a shining example of human decency, moral courage, and conviction, and his actions highlight the less well-known initiatives of Latin Americans who helped to save Jews during the Holocaust."

Foxman reflected on others who reached out to Jews in need.

Their generosity, he said, is "difficult to comprehend because they frequently risked everything, including the lives of their families, to help people who, very often, they did not know at all. Difficult also because - apart from their willingness to help others - they do not seem to have had much in common. They were Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Evangelical, Baptist, Lutheran, and also Muslim."

Foxman owes his own life to such a person.

"I stand here before you because of someone like Gilberto Bosques Saldivar," he said.

As a young boy in Poland during the war, Foxman was sheltered by a Catholic woman in an "overwhelmingly unfriendly" Europe.

"Were it not for her, I would not be alive today to bear witness," he said.

Foxman described Saldivar's efforts when he served as Mexican consul general in Marseilles, France, in 1939: He rented two chateaux to house European Jews and other refugees, including leaders of the Spanish Republic, who were defeated in the Spanish Civil War by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

Over two years, he issued about 40,000 visas and chartered ships to take Jews and other refugees to various African nations, where they then went on to Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil.

Saldivar was arrested, along with his family and about 40 consular staff members, by the Germans in 1943 and was held for about a year near Bonn, Germany, until Mexico reached an agreement with the Nazis for his release.

In 1944 Saldivar wrote that he had implemented "a policy of help, of material and moral support to the heroic defenders of the Spanish Republic, to the relentless brave people who fought against Hitler, Mussolini, Franco," and others, according to the ADL.

Saldivar later served as an ambassador to Cuba, Finland, Portugal, and Sweden.

He died in 1995 at the age of 103.