He was "someone who changed the course of history during the darkest episode in humankind's past". That is how Luís Medeiros, a curator at the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum, recalls for Euronews the man he describes as "one of the greatest figures in the country's cultural history", for the role he played in saving tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat born on 19 July 1885, is a name that cannot be ignored whenever the period of the Second World War is discussed, a conflict fought between 1939 and 1945 that resulted in the deaths of around 40 million civilians.
