The exhibition, entitled Passports of Life, documents one of the most remarkable humanitarian operations undertaken between 1940 and 1943 by a group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists in Switzerland, under the leadership of Aleksander Ładoś, who headed Poland's legation in that country.
Aleksander Ładoś (1891-1963) Image: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain]
Its members forged passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust.
The exhibition’s motto refers to the opening lines of the poem The Passports by Polish-Jewish poet Władysław Szlengel: “I’d like to have a Uruguayan passport, oh, what a beautiful land it is / How nice it must feel to be the subject of a land called: Uruguay / I’d like to have one for Costa Rica and Paraguay too / so that I could live peacefully in Warsaw.”
The Warsaw-based Pilecki Institute, which is named after Capt. Witold Pilecki, known as the "Auchwitz volunteer" and a victim of two totalitarian systems, Nazism and communism, has for several years conducted research and archival queries on the activities of the Ładoś Group.
The exhibition runs in Berlin until the end of February.
Monday’s opening ceremony included an introductory lecture by British historian and writer Roger Moorhouse, whose latest book The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust's Most Audacious Rescue Operation focuses on the activities of the Ładoś Group.
(mk/gs)