Gilberto Bosques Saldívar, the 'Mexican Schindler,' is honored by the Anti-Defamation League

Gilberto Bosques Saldívar has never been the subject of a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg. American history books seldom, if ever, mention his name, and he does not have his own Wikipedia page, in Spanish or English.

But the former Mexican diplomat, stationed in France during World War II, helped save as many as 40,000 Jews and other refugees from Nazi persecution.

"It is still a chapter of the Holocaust that has not been written," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "I believe that there are a lot of other cases that we do not know about that are surfacing little by little."

At a reception held in Saldívar's honor last month in Beverly Hills, the ADL presented his daughter with a posthumous Courage to Care Award, which was created in 1987 to recognize non-Jews who helped rescue and hide refugees during the Holocaust.

Foxman noted that, other than industrialist Oskar Schindler and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, most non-Jews who defied the Nazis and helped Jews during the Holocaust are not well-known.

Even Schindler's efforts were largely lost to history until Spielberg made the movie "Schindler's List."

Calling Saldívar the "Mexican Schindler," Foxman said, "Bosques' life is a shining example of human decency, moral courage and conviction, and his actions highlight the less well-known initiatives of Latin Americans who helped to save Jews during the Holocaust."

Foxman reflected on others who reached out to Jews in need. Their generosity, he said, is "difficult to comprehend because they frequently risked everything, including the lives of their families, to help people who, very often, they did not know at all. Difficult also because -- apart from their willingness to help others -- they do not seem to have had much in common. They were Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Evangelical, Baptist, Lutheran and also Muslim."

Foxman owes his own life to such a person.

"I stand here before you because of someone like Gilberto Bosques Saldívar," he said.

As a young boy in Poland during the war, Foxman was sheltered by a Catholic woman in an "overwhelmingly unfriendly" Europe.

"Were it not for her, I would not be alive today to bear witness," he said.

Foxman described Saldívar's efforts when he served as Mexican consul general in Marseilles in 1939: He rented two chateaux to house European Jews and other refugees, including leaders of the Spanish Republic, who were defeated in the Spanish Civil War by the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco.