The righteous Spaniard
March 13th, 2008
“Hello? Is that Gideon Lichfield?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Good morning. This is Helena Bonham-Carter.”
Well, not Helena, as it soon became clear, but her mother, Elena, who had got my number from a mutual acquaintance and wanted to know whether Jerusalem was safe to visit after last week’s attack at a yeshiva that killed eight people. For a moment I weighed up whether the blood of the mother of one of the world’s most famous actresses would be on my hands. Then I shrugged and said, “of course it’s safe.”
She and assorted relatives showed up this week for a ceremony at Yad Vashem in honour of her father, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Paris who issued an estimated 1,500 Spanish visas in the summer of 1940 to help French Jews escape the approaching Nazis. Having disobeyed foreign ministry instructions, he was demoted and lived out the rest of his career in minor posts, dying in 1972. However, the visa registry from his time in Paris went missing and people whom he had saved proved hard to trace. Not until last year did his children manage to gather enough evidence to satisfy the examiners of Yad Vashem that he merited “Righteous Among the Nations” status.
It was a sweet ceremony in the gardens of Yad Vashem, attended by a flush of aristocratic-looking, besuited Spaniards and various branches of the Propper family (which now lives in five countries, including Israel). It was marred only by the hopeless inability of Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, to pronounce the honoured man’s name; he stumbled and hesitated and finally came out not with “Ca-ye-khon” but “Cal-khe-yon”. This, coming after his speech about the 22,000-odd other “righteous gentiles” honoured at Yad Vashem, left the distinct impression that he was simply too busy to devote time to any of them.