THE WORLD ENTIRE

A tribute to a Portuguese bureaucrat who defied his own government to help thousands of refugees escape as Nazi armies swept through France.

Being part of a large family, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was accustomed to opening his villa’s kitchen regularly to feed his less fortunate neighbors. As consul general in Bordeaux, France, near the Spanish border, he chose principle over the orders of his country’s foreign ministry when faced with floods of refugees in 1940. Over 23 frantic days in June and July, he organized efforts to grant visas to all comers—even setting up a table in the street and personally leading one refugee group over an obscure border crossing—before being summoned back to Portugal and summarily stripped of his job and even ousted from his home. Brown tells her tale simply and with rhetorical flourish as Mendes counters the repeated “No. No. No” of his superiors with a defiant chorus of “Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.” She fills in further details with a timeline and a long afterword that notes the many posthumous honors for what she characterizes as possibly “the greatest individual act of rescue in all of World War II.” In somber-toned illustrations, Castrillón surrounds her sober, dignified main figure with lively children and tight groups of weary-looking families in period dress.

An inspiring, well-earned salute.