“The new part of the Archive importantly broadens the knowledge on the scope of Ładoś Group’s activities,” said Dr. Jakub Kumoch, former Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Switzerland, who cooperated with Blechner during the talks on obtaining both parts of the collection. “I expected that one of the photos could represent Rutka Laskier as an important part of her more distant family was provided with passports. The names of Wolf Begin and Dawid Wdowiński, as well as of right-wing Zionist leaders, constituted a surprise for me. This marks a new trace in the research”, added Kumoch, current Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Turkey.
According to Jakub Kumoch, there is no evidence that the people whose photographs have just reached the Museum actually obtained the passports. According to him, it is equally legitimate to claim that there was not enough time to forge them. The photographs arrived probably already after the Swiss police had discovered the passport operation and honorable consuls who used to sell them to Ładoś Group had been fired, or maybe just before Eiss’s death.
Kumoch and other authors of the Ładoś List, published in December in Polish and in February in English, claim that Polish diplomats and their Jewish partners attempted to rescue between 8 to 10 thousand Jews from over 15 countries of occupied Europe. They came mainly from Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and pre-war Czechoslovakia. The names and surnames of 3254 of them have so far been successfully restored.
Among the documented owners of Ładoś’s passports, one can find for example writers Yehiel De-Nur alias Ka-Tsetnik 135633, Georg Hermann, Marietta Moskin and Stanisław Wygodzki, rabbis Aron Schuster and Israel Spira, as well as future Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland Adam Rotfeld with his parents. The list also includes the names of Hannela Goslar, Anne Frank’s friend, Dutch mathematician Bob Herschberg or the leaders of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, among others Icchak Cukierman and Cywia Lubetkin.
According to the authors, at least 2 to 3 thousand individuals covered by the activity of the Ładoś Group could have survived the Shoah. The majority of them are Jews from Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland.
The list was published by the Pilecki Institute under the patronage of the World Jewish Congress. It has so far been presented in Warsaw, London, New York, Hartford, and Berlin.