Jewish Refugees' Reactions to Welcome and Rejection in Portugal

• In Event: Jewish Refugees’ Responses to Entrapment in Places of Temporary Sojourn during Flight from Holocaust Persecution

Abstract

How do refugees experience welcome by locals in a country of transit, and how do they experience rejection at the border? When Europe was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, Portugal became a safe haven for thousands of persons fleeing from Nazism. Before reaching Portugal, however, thousands of Jewish refugees arrived in southern France, wanting to cross the border into Spain. They were told that they had to obtain a transit visa for Portugal. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in the French city of Bordeaux, in which refugees were present in very large numbers, decided to disobey orders and grant a very large number of visas. In so doing, he enabled between 10 and 15,000 people, most of them Jewish, to enter Portugal in June 1940. The Portuguese authorities assigned them to a number of different cities and seaside resorts. There, the refugees were taken aback by the warmth with which the locals received them, as they suggest in their written and oral testimonies. However, this experience was not ubiquitous. In November 1940, a train containing 300 Jewish refugees coming from Luxembourg reached the Portuguese village of Vilar Formoso, on Spanish-Portuguese border. The refugees were not allowed to disembark, for reasons that are unclear. After ten days locked in the train at Vilar Formoso’s station, they were sent back to France, where they were interned and freed some months later. Some 50 eventually died in extermination camps. While they were on the train going to the Portugal and then trapped waiting at the border, they experienced feelings and thoughts ranging from relief to desperation. This paper is based on an analysis of these refugees’ stories, in written and oral form. Findings contribute to our understanding of how refugees experience a positive reception from locals, and how they experience rejection at a border, the latter being an issue of great relevance today.

Author

• Margarida Ramalho, History, Territory and Communities, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal