Diplomat issued visas to save thousands during Holocaust

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 during the Holocaust 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 contributed to saving 90,000 Jewish lives in Hungary before he vanished in what became an abiding mystery of the Holocaust.

Now the work of Mantello is getting fresh attention as scholars dig into newly released files.

Mantello used a network of contacts to issue up to 10,000 documents, according to his son, Enrico Mantello.

- AP