A case study on José Arturo Castellanos who helped save thousands of Jews during World War II was presented to students in Mrs. Claudia Vallejo’s Spanish III Honors and Spanish AP classes when they connected via Zoom with Ezequiel Castellanos, Museum Educator at the Holocaust Museum Houston.  José Arturo Castellanos is called El Salvador’s equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust – and took it.  

“Only recently has his story been told. He was a Salvadoran diplomat who rescued Jewish people during the Holocaust,” said Mr. Castellanos. “José Castellanos always tried to do the right thing.  He studied in La Escuela Politécnica Militar de El Salvador and was in the Salvadorian Army for 26 years.  After serving in the army, he became a general consul who is a representative of the government who resides in a foreign country to help and protect the citizens of the consul’s country.  He also had the power to issue visas, a document that authorizes a person to enter or to leave a country. It is timely to teach about him and honor him during Hispanic Heritage Month and bring attention to the connection between the Jewish People and Latin America.  Many Jewish people ended up living in America Latina during and after the Holocaust.”

In 1941, Castellanos was in Geneva, Switzerland, a country that was neutral during World War II.  A year later he became the Salvadoran General Consul in Geneva. One day, he befriended a Transylvanian-born Jewish businessman named György Mandl who told him about the Jewish situation, the suffering of Jewish people and asked for help from Castellanos. To protect his friend, Castellanos appointed him to the fictitious post of First Secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello. Mandel-Mantelloproposed to Castellanos that they issue Salvadoran documents to help save the Jews in German-occupied central Europe, especially Hungary. By mid-1944, what had begun as small-scale distribution of the visas grew into a mass production of nationality certificates. Castellanos approved an estimated 40,000 passports and birth certificates for Jews from different countries so they would not be caught by the Nazis and sent to death camps. Adding more authentication to the documents that were signed by Mantello, they were stamped by other consulates in Geneva before being sent over the border to recipients who filled in their details.

Castellanos lived a quiet life after the war. In 1977, he died at the age of 83. He was honored on July 15, 2010, by the Embassy of El Salvador in Israel and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum as a “Righteous Gentile” for saving thousands of Jews during World War II.

During the class session with the Holocaust Museum Houston, the students learned that the general consul is a diplomatic position and there are serious consequences if a consul exceeds his or her job.  Castellanos was also criticizing the dictator in El Salvador, and he couldn’t run the risk to be sent back to El Salvador where he would have faced serious consequences.  But Castellanos had to make a decision; should he help his friend?  After knowing the difficult situation of the Jewish people, does Castellano have the responsibility to help?

Photo provided by Museum of Jewish Heritage