LISBON ā Portugal paid official homage Tuesday to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who during World War II helped save thousands of people from Nazi persecution, by placing a tomb with his name in the countryās National Pantheon.
Leading Portuguese politicians and public figures attended the formal televised ceremony as the tomb was placed alongside other celebrated figures from Portuguese history at the landmark Lisbon building.
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The speaker of the Portuguese Parliament, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, said Sousa Mendesā conduct lent prestige to Portugal.
āPeople who at the decisive moment put their and their familyās safety at risk for the greater good are rare. Sousa Mendes was one of those people,ā Ferro Rodrigues said in a speech.
The ceremony marked the completion of Sousa Mendesā 80-year journey from ostracized Portuguese civil servant to honored international personage.
Perhaps Portugalās most famous 20th-century diplomat, Sousa Mendes defied his superiors, including dictator António Salazar, when as consul in Bordeaux, France, in 1940 he handed out visas to many people who feared being hunted down by the Nazis.
The Portuguese visas allowed people, including Jews fleeing the Holocaust, to escape through neutral Portugal by air and sea to the United States and elsewhere.
The Portuguese diplomatic service was supposed to ask for the Lisbon governmentās specific consent to grant visas to certain categories of applicants, as the country trod a careful path of neutrality, but Sousa Mendes gave out visas on his own initiative.
Leah Sills, a board director of the Sousa Mendes Foundation in the United States, said she flew in for the ceremony āto be able to honor the man that rescued my father and my grandparentsā on May 24, 1940.
āItās been just a beautiful experience,ā she said.
Ćlvaro Sousa Mendes, a grandson of Aristides Sousa Mendes, said his family had seen an ambition fulfilled.
āThis was a ceremony we had been requesting for a long time,ā he said. āFinally he was recognized ... with National Pantheon honors.ā
Breaking the rules got Sousa Mendes fired from the diplomatic service, with public shame attaching to his family at the time. He died in poverty in 1954.
Decades later, he won recognition for his key role in saving people from the Nazis.
In 1966, Israelās national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized Sousa Mendes as a āRighteous among the Nations.ā
Last year, he drew praise from Pope Francis, and last March the U.S. Senate in a motion saluted āthe humanitarian and principled workā of Sousa Mendes.
It wasnāt until the late 1980s that he earned recognition in Portugal, with authorities posthumously granting him accolades.
In 2017, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa bestowed Portugalās highest honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty, on Sousa Mendes.
Last year, the Portuguese parliament voted to honor the former diplomat at the National Pantheon by placing there a plaque and a tomb without his body. Sousa Mendes wanted to be buried at his birthplace near Viseu, in northern Portugal.
Of the 19 historical figures entombed at the National Pantheon, 12 contain the personās remains.