Professor Mayer

A documentary film. In 1944, the Mayer family was living in Budapest when the Nazis invaded. Like thousands of Jews in the Hungarian capital, the Mayers were evicted from their home by fascist militias. They went into hiding and could easily have been deported to a death camp, along with some 500,000 other Hungarian Jews. But they carried a document that protected them: a “certificate of nationality,” issued by a diplomat from El Salvador, José Arturo Castellanos. From his post as consul-general in Geneva, Castellanos and his deputy George Mantello issued such certificates to some 13,000 Hungarian families, saving up to 40,000 Jews. Castellanos’ motives are not completely clear, but his heroic gesture brings immense pride to the small Central American nation to this day. The Israeli Holocaust memorial museum Yad Vashem declared him “Righteous Among the Nations” in 2010, putting Castellanos in the category of Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.