Aracy de Carvalho and Jewish Rescue from 1930s Germany: A Righteous Brazilian

Aracy de Carvalho (1908-2011), ’Righteous Among the Nations’, saved German Jews by facilitating their emigration to Brazil in the late 1930s, while working at the Brazilian consulate in Hamburg. Margarethe Levy (1908-2011), who left for Brazil shortly after Kristallnacht with her husband, was one such case. In the late 1970s, she claimed the title of Righteous from Yad Vashem for Carvalho, who had become her lifelong friend. The main thread of this book follows the crossed migrations of these two women between Brazil and Germany, and the long friendship that brought them together. Through this axis it traces the migratory paths of a group of German Jews who, like Levy, left Hamburg to settle in São Paulo.

Mônica Raisa Schpun is a Historian at the Center for Colonial and Contemporary Brazilian Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France.