George Mantello
| George Mantello | |
|---|---|
| Born |
György Mandl 11 December 1901 Lekence, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 25 April 1992 (aged 90) Rome, Italy |
| Resting place | Israel |
| Known for | Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust |
| Children | Enrico, Andrea and Susanna |
| Parent(s) | Baruch Yehudah Mandl and Ida Mandl (née Spitz) |
| Relatives | Rabbi Yitzchok Yaakov Mandl (paternal grandfather) Josef Mandl (brother) |
George Mantello (11 December 1901 – 25 April 1992) was a Jewish diplomat who, while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland from 1942 to 1945, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing them with fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers. He was also instrumental in publicizing in mid-1944 the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Mantello was born György Mandl to Orthodox Jewish parents – Baruch Yehudah Mandl and Ida Mandl (née Spitz) – in Lekence, Transylvania, a region with mainly Romanian, Hungarian and German ethnic inhabitants which changed hands three times between Hungary and Romania during the 20th century. David Kranzler writes that his father owned a mill and the family was regarded as well-to-do. Mantello had three sisters and two brothers, one of whom, Josef, became involved in Mantello's rescue work.
Mantello became a textiles manufacturer in Bucharest, where he met Salvadoran consul Colonel José Arturo Castellanos in the 1930s. After escaping to Switzerland from the Romanian Fascists, he went to work for Castellanos at the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva.
In 1944 he became involved in the effort to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Mantello sent his friend, a diplomat from Romania, Florian Manoliu, to Hungary, in order to find out what was happening there. Manoliu went to Budapest, obtained reports from the Jewish leader Moshe Krausz at the 19 June 1944, and immediately returned with the reports to Geneva. One of the reports was probably Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl's abridged 5-page version of the full 33-page : both the Vrba–Wetzler report and Rosin-Mordowicz report. The reports described in detail the operations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
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