Ładoś Group
It was Konstanty Rokicki who was most involved in acquiring blank passports and filling them out; Abraham Silberschein and Chaim Yisroel Eiss and Alfred Schwarzbaum (a Jewish rescue activist refugee from Bedzin[7]) dealt with smuggling of passports, photos and personal data between Bern and German-occupied Europe, and provided a significant part of the financing of the operation.
Both Ładoś and Ryniewicz intervened in this case in 1943, and exchanged arguments with Swiss foreign minister Marcel Pilet-Golaz and the police chief Heinrich Rothmund.
Juliusz Kühl, who at the outbreak of the war was a 26-year-old graduate of doctoral studies at the University of Bern, facilitated contacts between Jewish organizations and the Legation.
The government, headed now by general Władysław Sikorski, took control of the entire property of the Polish State abroad, including the network of its diplomatic missions.
In the continental part of Western Europe, the Polish government-in-exile was represented by the legations in Switzerland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
Several dozen of Paraguayan documents were produced with a view of enabling influential Jews from the areas occupied by the Soviet Union an escape through Japan.
The legation identified an honorary consul of Paraguay, a Bernese notary Rudolf Hügli, who was ready to sell blank passports and bought about 30 of them.
1957 Yad Vashem's study suggests there were more passports – in particular in 1941 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union and after the creation of Jewish ghettos.
[1][8][11][12] Investigated by the police, Silberchein described it as follows: I had a meeting at the Polish Legation in Bern with Mr I secretary Ryniewicz and Mr. Rokicki, who manages the consular section.
Passports were issued for Jewish citizens of Poland, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Hungary as well as for Jews deprived of their Germany citizenship.
The ordinal numbers of passports found in the Silberschein archives in Yad Vashem suggest that at least three series of these documents had been produced, tallying altogether to least 1056 pieces.
The money was transferred to Rudolf Hügli by Polish diplomats – Rokicki, Kühl and Ryniewicz – and brought him enormous income.
In this case, an argument erupted between Silberschein and Ryniewicz, who accused former of acting on his own hand and giving the matter a resemblance of conspiracy.
Ryniewicz also took successful intervention to save Barreto and cover up the case and inspired similar action by the Polish Legation in Lima.
In 1943, Silberschein established contact with a Jewish employee of the General Consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, George Mandel-Mantello.
The Polish legation was probably informed about the number of issued passports and about contacts between Silberschein-Mantello, but there is no evidence that it participated in the production of documents.
[4][14] In December 2019 list of names of 3262 holders of passports issued by Ładoś Group was presented at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw.
Aleksander Ładoś announced the description of the rescue action in the third, unfinished volume of memories, but he died without having written the story.
In August 2017 Markus Blechner, the Honorary Consul of Poland in Zürich, together with journalists Zbigniew Parafianowicz and Michał Potocki described the scheme, recognizing the contribution of all group members to the survival of passport holders.
[1][12][17] A number of documents related to the Ładoś Group were acquired by the Polish Ministry of Culture, with the assistance of Honorary Consul Markus Blechner, from a private collector in Israel in 2018.
[18] Named the Eiss Archive, they were displayed in the Polish embassy in Switzerland in January 2019, and later were transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland.
