In essence, everyone knows that tens of thousands of Jewish refugees passed through Portugal during World War II. How they arrived, how they lived, where they prayed, where they went – for decades, no documentary has been produced about these facts. The only film productions focused on the figure of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, not for his love of the Jews, but for the fact that he disobeyed the Catholic regime of the time.
The Porto Holocaust Museum broke the cycle of silence that for decades was dedicated to the Jewish lives of refugees. The museum's cinema shows the arrival in Porto of hundreds of refugees who, in the Kadoorie synagogue, debated the past, present, and future.
The new generations of Portuguese – about 300,000 young people to date – now have a filmic vision of what the refugees' passage through Portugal was like. In a country where Holocaust education is reduced to little more than vague language about tolerance that ultimately works against Jews and the Jewish state, the museum shows the truth: the clothes the refugees wore, their family dramas, their conversations in Yiddish, the objects they brought and even a religious ceremony of shacharit.
