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A list of over 3,000 Jews who were issued with fake documents by Polish diplomats during World War Two in an effort to help them survive under German-Nazi occupation has been added to the database of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC.
The so-called Ładoś list – named after Aleksander Ładoś, Poland’s de facto ambassador in Switzerland during the war – has only come to light in recent years as researchers uncovered the complex and secret operation run by Polish diplomats and Jewish organisations.
They sought to obtain fake passports and citizenship certificates from Latin American countries for Jews trapped in Europe. It was hoped that those documents could be used by their recipients to avoid being sent to German-Nazi death camps and to escape Europe in exchange for German prisoners of war.
New evidence published today sheds further light on the incredible – and until recently little known – story of how during the Second World War a group of Polish diplomats produced thousands of fake passports intended to help Jews survive the Holocaust https://t.co/KoDvWuqr1a
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) December 12, 2019
USHMM notes that work by the Pilecki Institute, a Polish state body, has been able to identify 3,282 Jews who were issued with falsified documents from Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti and Peru.
Among them, the names and surnames of 3,023 people have been confirmed, and can be searched on the USHMM website. The Pilecki Institute estimates that a further 5,000 to 7,000 recipients of documents secured by the Ładoś group remain unknown.
It believes that between 24% and 45% of those who received the fake documents managed to survive the Holocaust. Among them is Uri Strauss, a Jew from Amsterdam, who in 2021 attended a Pilecki Institute event at which he showed a copy of the counterfeit Paraguayan passport he received.
Other recipients of documents from the Ładoś group include two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman, both of whom survived the war and later lived in Israel – and Hannah Goslar, a close friend of Anne Frank.
The Pilecki Institute’s director, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, says that he hopes the inclusion of the Ładoś list in the USHMM database will “increase our chances of finding more previously unknown stories and enriching our research with new sources and documents”.
Excellent news and indeed I found my great uncle’s name on the USHMM’s Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database as being one of the thousands of Jewish names contained in the Ładoś List. pic.twitter.com/lDaym8rCLE
— Jeffrey Cymbler (@JCymbler) December 5, 2024
Last week, in a separate development, the US Congress approved the Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust Congressional Gold Medal Act. If signed by the president, it would award Congressional Gold Medals to 60 diplomats who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.
Among those who would be honoured are Ładoś and two of his associates, Konstanty Rokicki and Stefan Ryniewicz. Another is Henryk Sławik, a Polish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Hungary.
Poles also make up the largest national group among non-Jews honoured as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel for risking their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Image credits: Instytut Pileckiego and Poland in Denmark (under CC BY 3.0 PL)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
