WASHINGTON – During the Holocaust, an estimated 30,000 Jews were protected by their status as citizens of a small, Central American country.

And on Wednesday, the Embassy of El Salvador was letting the world know.

Colonel Jose Arturo Castellanos, a figure who has remained relatively unknown in the annals of Holocaust history, made a significant difference by issuing Salvadoran citizenship certificates to Jews across Europe, in his capacity as Salvadoran Consul General in Geneva.

Now, more than 60 years later, the Salvadoran government is seeking to have Castellanos declared “righteous among the Nations,” by Holocaust remembrance authority Yad Vashem. The title is awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

In addition to Castellanos, El Salvador Consulate First Secretary George Mandel-Mantello, a Romanian Jew, played an equally important role.

The granting of Salvadoran citizenship papers started when a French-Jewish refugee approached Mandel-Mantello about getting documents for a number of French Jews.

These were granted and then Montello began issuing citizenship papers to Jews he knew and those brought to him through Jewish organizations. Castellanos authorized and put his full support behind the practice, even though he had no authority to approve manufacturing of the  certificates.

And when the two finally partnered with the Swiss Legation, the certificates were distributed to a far broader population. By the end of the war, 10,000 documents were distributed, often with multiple family members on each.

When the war ended though, Castellanos rarely talked about it.

For years his daughter, Frieda Garcia, knew nothing of her father’s actions, but now is helping bring them to light.

“The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again,” Garcia said at the news conference held at the Salvadoran Embassy.

The people who spoke there included Garcia, Mandel-Mantello’s son, Salvadoran ambassadors Rene A. Leon and Ricardo Moran Ferracuti, along with Brad Marlowe and Leonor Avila de Marlowe, the husband-wife team that recently created “Glass House,” a documentary chronicling the story.

Latin America’s involvement with the Holocaust was checkered, as the panelists demonstrated.

Bolivia and the Dominican Republic, for example, “opened the doors on Jewish immigration during the Holocaust years, while others accepted Nazi criminals as refugees after the war,” said Dina Siegel Vann, who is Jewish and from Mexico. She spoke at the event as the director for Latin and Latin America at the American Jewish Committee.

But the spotlight is now beginning to shine on other countries, as well.

“Castellanos and the little country of El Salvador became the means for all these thousands of people to survive,” Leonor Avila de Marlowe said.