Page "Aristides de Sousa Mendes" Paragraph 10

On into June 19, the assembly line marched on through stacks and stacks of visas, even as the city was bombed by German planes.

At this point, Sousa Mendes rushed to the consulate at Bayonne, near the Spanish border where his visas were being honored for the crowds rushing out of the country.

Finding that consulate overwhelmed, he took over responsibility from his subordinate there, Consul Machado, and set up a second assembly line to process thousands more exit documents.

( Machado reported this behavior to Portugal's ambassador to Spain, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, whose maternal grandfather was German, who favored Germany and worried that accepting those unacceptable to Hitler would ruin Portugal's relationship with Franco ; Teotónio Pereira promptly set out for the French border.