20 June 1940. In Bordeaux, in the West of France, Ruth Sorel and Michal Choromanski receive a visa for Portugal. The city was bombed the night before, but the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, keeps issuing visas in an assembly line manner, risking his own life by defying the forbiddance by Portugal’s dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Within a few days in June of 1940 Sousa Mendes issued some 30,000 visas to refugees fleeing the German Occupation.
His deeds are well documented by the Sousa Mendes Foundation. Their online database lists thousands of people who received a visa. It shows Sorel’s and Choromanski’s passport photos and the page of the visa registry book with their names.
However Sorel and Choromanski did not go to Portugal, possibly because the border between France and Spain was closed only a few days later. Instead they travel to Great Britain, where they board the “Highland Monarch,” a passenger ship bound to Brazil.