Samuel was born Szmul Mordka Sknornicki. His parents were Aron Skornicki (1860-1921) and Hiah Koen Skornicki (1857-1925). He was the second youngest of five siblings. His older brothers were: James/Shiah, Yudel/Jacob, Fajwel/Felix and his younger sister was Perla/Pauline. His four siblings and his mother all immigrated to the United States.

The following detailed history is from:

yadvashem.org/es/stories-from-our-collections/consul-skornicki-montero.html

Samuel Skornicki was born in 1899 in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland. He married Raizel-Rosalie Sliwinsky from Łódź, and in 1923, the couple moved to Paris. There, Skornicki studied Law at the Sorbonne University in Paris and qualified as a Civil Law lawyer. Most of his clients were Jews who, like him, had emigrated from Poland .

The Skornickis, secular Jews, were comfortably settled and lived in a Parisian apartment. In 1934, their only daughter, little Arlette, was born. Skornicki, from an ideological point of view, had a socialist perspective. "My father wanted to live in France, the land of freedom and human rights," Arlette recalls. Her mother and her siblings immigrated to the United States .

Following the German occupation of France in June 1940, the Skornickis left Paris for Toulouse. They moved little Arlette to the town of Lavaur, where she lived with a Christian family. Her parents, Samuel and Raizel visited her from time to time. Although Samuel had a valid passport and visa for the United States, he decided to stay in France. In Toulouse, Skornicki ran a textile factory and from 1941 she was actively involved in the Resistance, disseminating clandestine ideological pamphlets, helping British pilots reach Spain and providing false documents. While in Toulouse, Skornicki established connections and met with the Spanish Consul, Enrique Compte Azcuaga, who was sent to Saint-Étienne. The Consul required someone with legal training and administrative skills to help him handle the many requests from Jews seeking to leave France, and appointed Skornicki as legal advisor to the Embassy in late 1942 .

The Polish Jew who became Spanish

Consul Enrique Compte Azcuaga, aware that Samuel Skornicki's name could not pass as Spanish, provided him with identity documents from the Consulate indicating that he was a Spanish citizen named Santos Montero Sánchez. On April 1, 1943, Skornicki received a royal certificate that accredited him as staff of the Spanish Consulate. Raizel, his wife, received documentation in the name of Rosa Montero. Skornicki took Montero's name from the label of a liquor bottle on the consul's desk, the brand name of which was "Montero."

Skornicki, despite being a polyglot, fluent in Polish, Yiddish, Russian, German, English and French, could not speak Spanish, but he could understand it. Additionally, he was assisted by Consulate staff, mostly Spanish Republicans who kept their true identity secret from him.

At the beginning of 1944, Consul Enrique Compte Azcuaga left France and returned to Spain for health reasons. He appointed Skornicki as his replacement in a lavish farewell ceremony and thus, Skornicki-Montero became the acting Spanish Consul in Saint-Étienne .

The false Consul

From late 1942 to early 1944 under his administration as legal advisor, the Consulate became a center where documents were forged, weapons were hidden, and shelter was provided to Jews and members of the French Resistance movements Combat and Groupes Francs de the Loire , in which he himself collaborated. In his meetings with the Gestapo , Skornicki sometimes saw lists of Jews destined for arrest. He managed to read the names backwards on the sheet in front of him, memorized them and was thus able to warn the Jews in question. During his period in office, he managed to obtain exemptions for thousands of Spanish citizens who would be sent to Germany to work through the STO (Compulsory Work Service) .

In March 1944, after a French Resistance attack on a German train near Saint-Étienne, the Germans began a house-to-house search. A German police unit arrived at the Consulate. This is how Jean Nocher, a member of the Resistance and founder of the clandestine group Espoir , relates in his collection of Colonel Rémy's stories, La Résistance dans le Lyonnais (unpublished in Spanish) :

«So here, in Saint-Étienne there is a house like the others and yet it is a haunted house. We are in Cours Fauriel, in the beautiful house assigned to the Spanish Consulate: an officer and a dozen men from the Gestapo have just appeared in the garden, trying to search the premises. They are looking for the former owner of the villa .

Suddenly, a small, burly, powerful and lively man emerges from the house, administers a masterful kick in the back to one of the Germans and makes the officer stand at attention, exclaiming :

- I am the Consul of Spain, I represent the Caudillo (Francisco Franco) in France. Salt !

The Greater Reich police retreated, folded in half. A few hours later, the Commander Major of the Place de Saint-Étienne apologizes :

- Mr. Consul, I hope that this incident does not have an unfortunate consequence for the friendship of our two countries, and I have come to personally express my apologies to you .

- Mr. Commander Major, I do not want to follow up on this incident, but I am forced to demand an official letter from you .

- But of course, and I will send it to you as soon as I return to the Kommandantur .

Thus, he kept his word without smelling the comical nature of the situation at all .

Because this irascible and dignified character, who occupied the very official functions of the Fascist Consul, was none other than Samuel Skornicki, a Polish Jew, sentenced to death by the Gestapo of Toulouse, wanted by the Sichereitdienst (SS Security Services), and who coquettishly pressed until the photo ID from the German police archives was stuck to his diplomatic passport .

Let us add that the distinguished diplomat, although polyglot, did not speak a word of Spanish. Nevertheless, he calmly maintained the role with an acrobatic mastery that defied the worst dangers . »

Along with the apologies of the commander of the German police of St. Étienne upon appearing at the Consulate, he gave Skornicki a new weapon to protect himself. Skornicki passed the weapon to the members of the Resistance who had attacked the train and who were hiding in the basement of the Consulate at the time .

Recognition

After France was liberated, and before the Skornickis returned to Paris, he received recognition from the Resistance organizations for which he collaborated and in which he participated. The people he had saved wrote him letters of gratitude, so that he would not be suspected of being a collaborator, who had housed the Nazis in the Consulate and had befriended members of the Gestapo during his time in office. Among them, León Kleiman, who wrote :

«If I am alive at this moment, I owe it exclusively and only to you. Throughout my life, my thoughts will be for you and your family, since, on the eve of being taken away by the Gestapo, you came to pick me up in the Consul's car, with the latter's agreement, and thanks to your convincing words. I decided to follow you, and that same night, the Gestapo came to pick me up to execute me, at my house. Then he housed my family and me in the consulate facilities, assuming all the dangers and all the risks with a selflessness and selflessness whose merit I will never be able to praise enough .

In turn, the Jew of Russian origin, Itkin Rubin added in his letter of October 1944 :

«You did not hesitate to risk your life to save ours. Even though you knew the Gestapo and Militia were chasing us, you hid us at home during the crucial months before liberation. If we are fortunate to live in peace and be free, it is thanks to your heroic kindness and courage. While many of my peers are being tortured or have died in terrible physical and mental suffering, and while many children have been separated from their parents, I am blessed to have my entire family around me and this is thanks to your kind hospitality . »

In 1947, Jean Nocher's book, L'aventure héroïque de Skornicki-Montero, patriote français (unpublished in Spanish) was published. That same year, the French Government awarded him a medal and a Certificate of Merit for his clandestine activities. In 2015, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation published the book Beyond duty: the humanitarian response of the Foreign Service to the Holocaust by José Antonio Lisbona .

Samuel Skornicki died in Paris in 1974 .

In 2019, his daughter, Arlette Ziessholtz-Foldes, donated documents and photographs to Yad Vashem as part of the Israeli national project "Putting the Fragments Together," some of which are shown here.