Giorgio Perlasca

Giorgio Perlasca was born in Como, Italy. In the 1930s, Perlasca volunteered to fight for Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. Disillusioned with Mussolini's alliance with Nazi Germany and the enactment of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938, Perlasca broke with fascism. During World War II, he worked as a purchasing agent for an Italian meat-importing company in Budapest. When Hungary was invaded by Nazi Germany in March 1944 and the puppet fascist Arrow Cross Party seized power in October, Perlasca was in danger of internment.

Using a letter of safe passage granted by the Spanish ambassador Angel Sanz Briz—who was assisting Jews based on a 1924 Spanish decree offering citizenship to Sephardic Jews—Perlasca found sanctuary at the Spanish embassy. In late November 1944, as the Soviet Red Army encircled Budapest, Sanz Briz was recalled to Switzerland. Realizing that the Arrow Cross would immediately raid the Spanish-protected safe houses holding thousands of Jews, Perlasca enacted an extraordinary bluff: he forged diplomatic papers appointing himself 'Jorge Perlasca', Spanish Chargé d'Affaires.

For forty-five days between December 1944 and January 1945, Perlasca brazenly faced down Nazi authorities and Arrow Cross thugs. He issued thousands of forged Spanish protective letters, fed safe-house occupants from embassy funds, and even confronted SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann at Budapest freight stations, personally pulling Jewish families out of railway cars by falsely declaring them Spanish citizens. After Budapest's liberation, Perlasca slipped back to Italy to live an ordinary life as a clerk, never mentioning his heroic deception until Hungarian-Jewish survivors tracked him down in 1987.