Group of Polish WWII diplomats helped Jews ‘regardless of the costs’: president

Andrzej Duda was speaking during a ceremony at Warsaw’s Belweder Palace to showcase a historical archive that documents a Polish diplomatic effort to help Jews during World War II.

The archive, which Poland’s government obtained last year, contains historic documents showing how a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland produced passports of Latin American nations in an effort to help hundreds of Jews escape from Poland at a time when the country was under Nazi German occupation, according to officials.

The so-called Eiss Archive originally belonged to Chaim Eiss (1867-1943), an Orthodox Jewish activist who was a member of the Bern-based group, which forged Latin American passports to save Jews.

Duda said on Tuesday that the documents showed how the group, led by the Polish ambassador to Switzerland at the time, Aleksander Ładoś, worked to “save people regardless of the costs involved … in a struggle against lawlessness, cruelty and everything they disagreed with so deeply.”

The Eiss Archive, after undergoing conservation and being thoroughly analysed by historians, will be added to the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in the southern Polish town of Oświęcim, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.

(gs/pk)

Source: IAR