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Unknown hero saved thousands of Hungarian Jews (May 3) - Yitzhak Mayer was a 16-year-old Jewish boy living in Budapest when he and his parents were given El Salvador citizenship papers. But they never needed to use them. Both miracles were the work of one man who has remained virtually unknown to this day: George Montello. According to Dr. David Kranzler, who spent fifteen years extensively researching the subject and whose book, The Man who Stopped the Trains: George Montello, El Salvador, and Switzerland's Finest Hour, is due out in the fall, Montello, a Jew, arrived in Switzerland in 1942 after serving as the Honorary Consul of El Salvador in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia between 1939 and 1941. Between 1942 and 1945, Montello arranged for 8,000 to 10,000 sets of El Salvadorian citizenship papers to be given to Jews and others at risk in the surrounding Nazi-occupied countries. "We owe a moral debt to El Salvador. People need to know [about] the act of bravery of a small country in our time of dire need," said Dr. Chaim Katz, acting chairman of the B'nai B'rith World Center in Jerusalem, which hosted Kranzler. El Salvador is one of only two countries whose embassy is situated in Jerusalem. According to Suzana Hasenson, the acting Charge d'Affairs at the El Salvador Embassy, there are no actual El Salvadorian documents. "As far as I understand," she said, "they were giving out blank papers and telling people to fill in their names and add their pictures." Virtually no one has ever heard the name George Montello. Retired Supreme Court Justice Gabriel Bach was one of the prosecutors in the Eichmann trial. "I was in charge of the Hungarian part of the trial. Nobody, not even the Jewish witnesses, mentioned him at the trial." Next Holocaust
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