Aracy de Carvalho received the honorable title of “Angel of Hamburg,” De Carvalho is the only Brazilian woman mentioned in the Holocaust Museum, in Israel, among 18 other diplomats who helped save Jews from genocide. In 1982, she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations, a title given by the Israeli government to people who took extraordinary risks to help persecuted Jews. De Carvalho passed away peacefully in her home back in Sao Paulo in 2011, at 102. A victim of Alzheimer’s, just like her tragic Illness, her acts of heroism have been forgotten by many. So who was Aracy De Carvalho before becoming a hero? De Carvalho was born in Rio Negro, Paraná, on December 5, 1908. She was the daughter of a Brazilian father and German mother, her family moved to Sao Paulo in 1930, she later married the German Johann Eduard Ludwig Tess, from whom she separated five years later. During that time, like many women, De Carvalho, fell victim to the stigma that marked separated women. However, that did not stop her from pursuing greatness. Fearless, multilingual, and cultured, she embarked with her five-year-old son on a ship bound for Germany in 1936. With Hitler already in power, De Carvalho lived with an aunt in Hamburg. De Carvalho was fluent in Portuguese, German, English, and French, with her education, she was quickly able to find work at Itamaraty (the Brazilian foreign ministry), as head of the passport section of the Brazilian consulate. While adapting to the country, she witnessed the expulsion of Jews from the civil service, their banishment from schools and universities, and saw them lose their rights and property. *** This is where we rescue De Carvalho’s story from oblivion. In the 1930s, while De Carvalho was the head of the passport section, in Brazil, under the government of Getúlio Vargas, a series of secret executive orders were approved, banning Jews from entering the country. Defying the rules of Nazi ruled Germany, and an anti-Semitic period in Brazil, De Carvalho took various risks, and with her own initiative in a heroic approach, saved the lives of dozens of Jews, who thanks to her selfless act were able to migrate to Brazil, escaping from Nazi persecution. Shocked by the persecution of Jews, Aracy issued more than a hundred visas in Hamburg during the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), with the support of the young diplomat João Guimarães Rosa, who was later appointed deputy consul in the city. Later, Guimarães Rosa and De Carvalho fell deeply in love, a connection born from the same principles. Even at serious risk if discovered, De Carvalho began to omit from superiors any information that would identify an applicant as a Jew, she would issue passports without the red letter “J.” It helped countless Jewish families escape death in Hitler’s concentration camps. She would secretly transport Jews in the consular service car and help them hide at her home. De Carvalho would also accompany Jewish refugees to ships and conceal their jewels and money in her purse to avoid the Nazi authorities from confiscating them. In her later years, many reporters would ask the same question on her courage in which De Carvalho would always reply, “it was the right thing to do.” In 1942, when Brazil broke diplomatic ties with Germany and allied with the United States, England, and the Soviet Union against Hitler, the couple were held captive by the Gestapo in a hotel for 100 days; until the establishment of the exchange of diplomats between the two countries. In 1982, De Carvalho was awarded the highest honor for non-Jews who risked to protect victims of the Holocaust and was declared Righteous Among the Nations by the government of Israel. She was also honored at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and Jerusalem. De Carvalho’s story is fascinating and sadly often forgotten. Like many heroes during that period, she occupies an essential role in history, and we must do our job in keeping her story alive.
One of Brazil’s two Righteous Among the Nations — non-Jews recognised by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem for saving Jews from the Nazis — is featured on a new postage stamp in the South American country. The stamp with the face of Aracy Moebius de Carvalho Guimaraes Rosa, who obtained visas that paved the way for several Jews to take refuge in Brazil, was released on Wednesday. She also is known by the nickname “Angel of Hamburg.” Aracy de Carvalho served as head of the passport section of the Brazilian consulate in Hamburg, Germany. The Brazilian president at the time, Getulio Vargas, restricted the entry of Jews into the country. “One of the tactics adopted to camouflage her actions was to omit the letter J, in red, on passports, a mark imposed by the German government as a way of identifying the Jew,” historian Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro told the UOL news website.
Born in Brazil to a German mother, Aracy de Carvalho moved to Germany in 1936. She took the job at the Brazilian consulate and married assistant consul Joao Guimaraes Rosa, who later would become a famed Brazilian writer with his masterpiece “Grande Sertao: Veredas.” The couple remained in Germany until 1942, when Brazil broke relations with Germany and joined the Allies. Aracy de Carvalho was recognised by Yad Vashem in 1982. She died in 2011. Brazil’s other righteous gentile is the diplomat Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, who worked in France during World War II.
JTA — A historical drama series that premiered Sunday in Brazil was supposed to give belated recognition to a woman nicknamed “the angel of Hamburg” for her actions during the Holocaust. Titled “Passports to Freedom,” the show produced by the South American media giant Globo and Sony Pictures has significantly amplified the little-known story of Aracy de Carvalho, who is credited with saving several Jews while working at Brazil’s consulate in Hamburg until 1942. But two respected Brazilian historians are calling the story an exaggeration, arguing that de Carvalho followed orders during her time at the consulate, incurring little to no personal risk in issuing standard visas to German Jews who escaped. As a consulate worker, de Carvalho helped at least five Jewish families flee in 1938-1939, facilitating their departure to Brazil, according to her file at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. In 1982, the museum recognized her as a Righteous Among the Nations — a title for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. She died in 2011. Historians Fábio Koifman and Rui Afonso questioned her claim to the title in a book published this year titled “Jews in Brazil: History and Historiography.” In interviews in the days leading up to the TV series’ release, the pair triggered a debate in Brazilian media about her legacy. De Carvalho had not spoken much about the actions attributed to her during her lifetime, but has received growing recognition in recent years. “The evidence shows there was no heroine in this story,” Koifman told the Portuguese-language edition of the BBC’s website this week. The fanfare around de Carvalho’s actions is part of a “creation of a myth,” the OUL news site quoted Koifman as saying. Koifman told the BBC that de Carvalho did not have the authority to hand out visas, none of which bore her name or signature. The ones issued show no signs of falsification and were handed out in compliance with official Brazilian policy. All visas were signed by the consul, Joaquim Antônio de Souza Ribeiro, or his deputy, João Guimarães Rosa, who met de Carvalho at the consulate and later married her. All visas were issued in compliance with the restrictive visa policy of the Brazilian government, the historians wrote.  A Yad Vashem security guard in the empty Hall of Names in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem on April 19, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) Like many other countries, Brazil introduced restrictions to immigration that seemed designed to block the heavily Jewish flood of refugees from Europe. According to some historians, authorities in Brazil were especially discriminatory toward Jewish prospective immigrants. In the 1930s, the Brazilian government required applicants to deposit a sizable sum of money into its national bank to be let in. This excluded many Eastern European Jews living in poverty, and also many German Jews whose possessions had already been stolen by the Nazis. De Carvalho was involved in obtaining several tourist visas for Jews who fled Germany. The visas were instrumental to their escape flights, but the historians argue that de Carvalho acted as expected of her by her government, incurring little personal risk. A message for Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is laser-projected on the National Congress buildings in Brasilia, Brazil, April 11, 2018. (Roque de Sa/Agencia Senado via Fotos Publicas) “You could say there was goodwill, or another motive behind the issuing of those visas but there’s no proof of this being the case,” Koifman and Afonso wrote in their book. Rumors that de Carvalho removed the letter J from the German passports of the applicants were only that, the historians wrote. “All the passports had J in them,” Koifman told the BBC. Several people whom de Carvalho assisted testified about her actions to Yad Vashem, which relied on those testimonies in recognizing her as a Righteous Among the Nations. But the visas issued to those people, including one woman named Margarethe Levy mentioned in the Yad Vashem file about de Carvalho, show no irregular action on the part of the consulate, the historians wrote. They call Yad Vashem’s recognition of de Carvalho as a Righteous Among the Nation “an error.” “These situations, where myths are created, occur when memory does not correlate with history,” they wrote in their book. The creators of the show defended its narrative. “We have access to countless testimonies of descendants of survivors who spoke with great emotion about what they had heard from their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents,” Mario Teixeira told OUL. He also cited the “very profound research done” by Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem did not immediately reply to a request for a comment on the issues raised by Koifman and Afonso. |
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