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.
This tomb marks the final resting place of Monsignor Joaquim Carreira, a Portuguese Catholic priest remembered for having sheltered Jews and other persecuted people in Rome during the Second World War. Although his decisive actions took place far from Portugal, in the heart of wartime Italy, his grave in Soutos-Caranguejeira has become a tangible memorial point, linking a small parish in central Portugal to one of Europe’s darkest chapters and to the history of rescue.
Born in 1908 in the Caranguejeira area, Carreira was ordained in 1931 and, in 1940, was sent to Rome, where he served as vice-rector and later rector of the Pontifical Portuguese College (1940–1954). When the German occupation of Rome began in September 1943, the city entered a period of raids, denunciations, and mass arrests. It was in this climate that Carreira offered refuge within the College and helped protect those targeted by Nazi and Fascist persecution, including members of the Jewish-Italian Cittone family. In an official report concerning the 1943–1944 academic year, he recorded the moral core of his decision: he had offered “asylum and hospitality” to people pursued under “unjust and inhuman laws.”
Testimonies and journalistic research indicate that he assisted dozens of individuals, with accounts commonly placing the number of those sheltered and supported at around 40 to 50 people during 1943–1944, including Jews. Some sources also note that his help extended beyond hiding and protection in Rome, involving support for escape routes and preparations for travel via Portugal, with Lisbon appearing as a crucial gateway on the way to safer destinations.
Carreira died in Rome on 7 December 1981. He was initially buried there, but in 2001 his remains were transferred to the cemetery of Soutos-Caranguejeira, returning him to his native land. In April 2015, in Lisbon, his family received the medal and certificate associated with the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” and later that year a commemorative plaque bearing the Yad Vashem medal was placed on his grave in Caranguejeira. Today, the tomb functions as a quiet geographic anchor for a story of courage, discretion, and practical solidarity, a life lived in service to faith and to those who, at the time, had nowhere safe to go.
