Justa: Aracy de Carvalho and the rescue of Jews

In Justa , Mônica Schpun tells the moving story of Aracy and Margarethe: two women whose destinies were intertwined by their resistance to extreme intolerance in the years leading up to and during the Second World War.

One was Brazilian, head of the passport department at the Brazilian consulate in Hamburg. The other was German and Jewish, the wife of a successful dental surgeon. Both, young in the 1930s, played a decisive role in the escape to Brazil of Jews persecuted by the Nazis. Aracy worked at the same consulate where her husband, the writer Guimarães Rosa, was beginning his diplomatic career as deputy consul.

In 1938, the persecution of Jews led Maria Margarethe Bertel Levy and her husband to seek out their civil servant, Aracy, in an attempt to leave Nazi Germany. From this encounter, the two women—Brazilian Aracy in Hamburg and German Margarethe in São Paulo—created a network of solidarity and built an escape route for Jews from Germany to Brazil. Both women had to navigate a doubly hostile historical context: in Germany, the early years of the Third Reich and World War II; in Brazil, the Vargas Era (1930-1945), which created a restrictive and embarrassing immigration policy for Jews.

Drawing on a wealth of bibliography, previously hidden documents, and interviews, Mônica Schpun recounts the relationship between these two strong women and reconstructs the city of Hamburg in the early decades of the 20th century. The author shows how the persecution of Jews intensified and how they sought to circumvent this repression. In Brazil, the author focuses on the city of São Paulo in the first half of the century. It was there that most of the Jews saved by Aracy and Margarethe settled, integrating into an emerging urban fabric, each having to deal, in their own way, with the tragic baggage brought from Europe.

In Justa , the author follows the fifty years of life and movements of these families and reconstructs, with a rich research work, the story of Aracy and Margarethe and the friendship that spanned the 20th century and saved lives.