Yad Vashem Quotes
During WWII, he ignored and defied the orders of his own government to issue no visas for the safety of war refugees fleeing from invading German military forces in the early years of World War II. Between June 16 and June 23, 1940, he frantically issued Portuguese visas free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror, 12,000 of whom were Jews who were thus saved from murder. He was fired by the Portuguese dictator and spent the remainder of his life in disgrace and poverty. In 1966 Sousa Mendes was honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the "Righteous Among The Nations," Also in 1987, the Portuguese Republic began to rehabilitate Sousa Mendes' memory and granted a posthumous Order of Liberty medal,
Schindler was a very wealthy industrialist who risked his own life and kept over 1000 Jews from being sent to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem’s, Israel’s Memorial of the Holocaust has a duty to convey the gratitude of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. This mission was defined by the law establishing Yad Vashem, and in 1963 the Remembrance Authority embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of Righteous Among the Nations to the few who helped Jews in the darkest time in their history.
