Diplomats used their power for good

 

Some people may have learned something new about the mid-20th century in Europe from a display of large placards in the atrium of the J.W. McConnell Building. Others who have long wondered why no one did anything to stop the Nazis have taken some comfort from it.

The freestanding boards recall, in photos and text, some of the more than 100 diplomats who risked their careers, and in some cases, their lives, to save Jews from Nazi regimes.

They include a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, a British official in Berlin, and the Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France, signed 30,000 visas alone.

Visas for Life is a travelling exhibition mounted here by the Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University and the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies that has visited 130 institutions so far, including the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The curator of the display is Eric Saul, from Los Angeles, who discovered the stories of the diplomats through his work as a volunteer interviewer for a Stephen Spielberg project about Shoah survivors. He spoke at the official opening at Concordia on March 8. So did Montreal businessman Thomas Hecht, whose visa was issued by Mendes so many years ago.

Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honourable Diplomats will continue in the atrium of the J.W. McConnell library building until March 27. Then it will be in the Richard J. Renaud Science Complex on the Loyola Campus from March 30 to April 11.

The sponsors of this exhibition will hold a conference called Democratic Discourse in a Multicultural Society on April 3. Professor Frank Chalk said one of the speakers will be one of his former students, Brent Beardsley. Now in the Canadian Forces, Beardsley was with Gen. Romeo Dallaire during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.