Nearly seven decades after the rescue actions carried out in Budapest in 1944, Hungarian authorities paid tribute to two Portuguese diplomats by unveiling a commemorative plaque bearing their names, Ambassador Carlos Sampaio Garrido and Chargé d’Affaires Alberto Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho. The plaque was installed on the exterior wall of the former Grand Hotel Dunapalota-Ritz, the building where the Portuguese Legation in Budapest was then located.
The location is symbolically charged. In the spring and summer of 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, this diplomatic address became a place of documentation, protection, and urgent negotiation. Garrido and Branquinho, acting within the constraints and authorizations of Portuguese policy, issued visas and protection papers connected to Portugal and provided shelter and support to those targeted for deportation. Contemporary documentation and later historical accounts credit their intervention with saving approximately 1,000 Hungarian Jews.
Today, the plaque can be found on the facade of the InterContinental Budapest on the Danube Promenade (1052 Budapest, Apáczai Csere János utca 12-14), marking the former Ritz site and preserving, in the urban fabric, the memory of the Portuguese Legation’s wartime role.
Behind Budapest’s Great Synagogue on Dohány Street, in the small courtyard known as the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park, a simple black marble plaque set into the ground honors rescuers who acted during the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Surrounded by a mound of pebbles, the memorial invites a distinctly Jewish gesture of remembrance: visitors add a stone, a quiet sign that a name has been visited and carried forward.
The plaque is commonly described as the “Righteous Among the Nations” memorial, referencing the Israeli honorific for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Its gold-lettered names recall a wartime network of protection in Budapest, when neutral diplomats and other rescuers issued protective papers, intervened with authorities, and helped establish safe houses for Jews under threat of deportation, forced labor, and murder.
Among the names engraved are internationally known rescuers such as Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, Ángel Sanz Briz, and others. The memorial also includes the Portuguese diplomat Alberto Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho, who served as Portugal’s chargé d’affaires in Budapest in 1944, and whose name is recorded in this Wallenberg memorial context. Carlos Sampaio Garrido, Portugal’s minister in Hungary, is also commemorated here, his name added to the plaque later, reflecting the growing public recognition of Portuguese rescue actions in Budapest.
This ground-level memorial gains additional meaning from its immediate surroundings. A few steps away stands Imre Varga’s Holocaust “Tree of Life” (also known as the Emanuel Tree), a weeping-willow sculpture whose metal leaves bear victims’ names, making the park a layered site of memory: a place that mourns the murdered while also marking those who chose to help.
