Memoria [EN] Nr. 12 / September 2018 | Page 23

Chaim Eiss and Polish diplomats. It also includes letters between Jews staying in the ghettos and Silberschein, who was one of the intermediaries between Polish Jews and the diplomatic post - said the curator of the Exhibition, Hanna Radziejowska of the Pilecki Institute.

The Motto of the exhibition is the poem titled “Passports” by a Polish Jew, poet and Warsaw ghetto chronicler Władysław Szlengel murdered in 1943:

I'd like to have Paraguayan passport,

of gold and freedom is this land,

oh, how nice it must feel to be the subject

of the land called: Paraguay.

I'd like to have Uruguayan passport,

have Costa Rican, Paraguayan,

just so one can live peacefully in Warsaw,

after all, it is the most beautiful of lands.

The Bernese Group was an informal form of cooperation between Polish diplomats from the Polish delegation in Bern and representatives of Jewish organisations for the rescue of European Jews. Under the guidance of Ambassador Aleksander Ładoś, the group provided fake South American passports among others Under the leadership of Ambassador Aleksander Ładoś, the group provided false South American passports, among others: Paraguay, El Salvador, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti and Honduras, which protected its owners from deportation to extermination camps in occupied Poland by the Third Reich. According to various estimates, a total of about 4 thousand such documents were issued. The number of those saved remains unknown.

The vernissage at the residence of the Ambassador was attended by activists and representatives of the Polish diaspora in Switzerland, Jewish communities, representatives of the diplomatic corps and the Swiss authorities. Talks are ongoing to present the exhibition again this year in Rapperswil, Geneva, and other places in Switzerland.

Isabelle Chassot, the director of the Federal Office of Culture with director Piotr Cywiński