For a long time now, something bad has been happening at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
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The institution's different activities to commemorate the memory of the Holocaust are seen by more and more groups as being based on strange political considerations and motives that go against the purpose for which it was founded.
In order to illustrate the issue, I will focus on a single case of non-recognition by Yad Vashem of two Polish diplomats as Righteous Among the Nations. These diplomats were members of the Berne Group (also known as the Lados Group, after the head of the group Alexander Lados). The group worked during World War II at the Polish embassy in Switzerland to save thousands of Jews in occupied Europe by supplying them with forged South and Central American passports, which saved some of these Jews from being sent to the death camps. The response to the request for recognition by Yad Vashem raises many questions about the quality of the work of those who deal with these requests, and as many questions regarding the motivations of the decision-makers responsible for the issue.
A committee is responsible for recognizing people as Righteous Among the Nations; its members are volunteers, each of whom specializes in the history of the Holocaust in a country or region of Europe, and speaks the relevant languages for each country or region.
The committee members are anonymous, so as to avoid external pressures on them. At the head of the committee is a senior judge, who served on the Supreme Court; since 2005 this has been Judge Jacob Turkel. On the Yad Vashem website, the decision-making process is briefly described: "Before the meeting (of the committee) each member receives a dossier for assessment and presents his/her recommendations to the committee. After a discussion in the committee, a vote is held. All of the decisions are brought for the approval of the chairman before they are officially validated."
According to the Yad Vashem website, these are the criteria for being recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations:
- Active involvement of the rescuer in saving one or several Jews from the threat of death or deportation to death camps.
- Risk to the rescuer's life, liberty, or position.
- The initial motivation being the intention to help persecuted Jews: i.e. not for payment or any other reward such as the religious conversion of the saved person, adoption of a child, etc.
- The existence of testimony of those who were helped or at least unequivocal documentation establishing the nature of the rescue and its circumstances.
The person who initiated the process of recognizing the Polish diplomats from the Berne/Lados Group is Markus Blechner, a Swiss Jew who will celebrate his 80th birthday this week and whose family came from Poland.
His parents succeeded in escaping from the Nazis in advance and planned on reaching the United States via Switzerland, but ultimately they spent the entirety of the war in Switzerland and remained there when it finished. Blechner, who for years has been the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland to Switzerland, was already acquainted in his youth with one member of the Berne/Ladosh Group, Julius Kuhl, who was the only Polish-Jewish member of the rescue team. Kuhl was a good friend of Blechner's father.
Only recently, following an operation to uncover documents connected to the activities of the Berne/Ladosh Group, did Blechner discover that his father was also involved in sending money to purchase South and Central American passports to save Jews from occupied Europe.
The activities of the Berne/Ladosh Group were quite complex: two Jewish activists who came from completely different political extremes – Rav Israel Haim Eiss from Agudat Yisrael and Avraham Zilberstein, formerly a member of the Polish Parliament and an activist in the Zionist movement – were responsible for providing the names of Jews to be saved and money for the forging of South and Central American passports, and purchasing them from the consulates that represented the same countries, in coordination with the members of the Polish delegation.
Employees of the Polish diplomatic mission in Switzerland were used for coordinating the rescue plan, the headquarters of the operation and for forging the passports, which were passed on to Jews in the occupied countries. These passports couldn't be used for the purposes of immigration, i.e. leaving the countries that were occupied by the Nazis, but only granted those holding them partial protection from being sent to the death camps. Until today we know about the existence of tens of thousands of forged passports and around one thousand Jews who were saved thanks to them.
In order to understand the courage of the Polish diplomats who were involved in the rescue mission, one has to remember that, with the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, Poland ceased to officially exist. At the same time, the Polish government-in-exile, first in France and afterward in Britain, continued to run the affairs of Poland from afar and maintained diplomatic missions, which prior to the war had been embassies.
The position of the Polish diplomatic missions in Switzerland was particularly sensitive, in light of the constant pressure from the Nazi regime on the Swiss authorities to close them down. At any moment, the illegal activities to forge passports could have given the Swiss a reason to close the mission and jail the staff for criminal activities.
The Swiss carried out a retrospective investigation of the Berne/Ladosh Group, which ultimately didn't lead to sanctions due to the weakening position of Nazi Germany. Hence, all the employees of the mission who were members of the group endangered their status and freedom, and, to a certain extent, also their lives. The intensive activities to forge passports were done with the approval of the person responsible for the mission, Alexander Ladosh, and with the involvement of his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz.
The diplomat who was responsible for the forgeries was the consul, Konstanty Rokicki. The rescue work was carried out in order to save persecuted Jews and not for profit and there is ample evidence and testimonies regarding the existence of the operation. Hence, all the conditions for recognizing the Polish diplomats as Righteous Among the Nations are in place.
In 2017 Markus Blechner made the first request to Yad Vashem to recognize the three non-Jewish Polish diplomats as Righteous Among the Nations for their part is rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. During the same period, Blechner also approached the Polish ambassador to Switzerland, Jakob Kumuch, and told him about the episode. Jakob Kumuch and his staff began an extensive investigation of all the documents at the Polish embassy from the same period, as well as in additional archives in Poland and other places. This investigation allowed us to see, for the first time, the full range of the rescue operation.
It was impossible to ignore this episode. However, Yad Vashem decided to reduce its dimensions. A while after the outbreak of the "Crisis of Holocaust Memory" between Poland and Israel around what was dubbed in Israel the "Polish Holocaust Law," the committee for recognizing Righteous Among the Nations decided to recognize only Consul Konstanty Rokicki. The announcement of the decision added that "the consular staff" Ladosh and Ryniewicz would receive letters of appreciation. But Lados and Ryniewicz weren't consular staff.
They were the head and deputy of the diplomatic mission, i.e. they were responsible for Rokicki, and they allowed him to forge the passports. In short, they were responsible for the rescue efforts. Since I was involved in media exposure of the rescue operation, I approached Yad Vashem and I blamed them for their mistake. This approach ended in fixing an additional mistake: Ladosh and Ryniewicz were "upgraded" to the position of consuls, but they were still denied recognition. In the clearest way possible, whoever prepared the response to the request for recognition carried out negligent work.
The relatives of Rokicki announced that they would refuse to accept the award of Righteous Among the Nations as long as the remaining diplomats weren't also recognized. The Polish government saw the carelessness of the committee as a deliberate Israeli political move aimed at preventing recognition of the efforts of the Polish government-in-exile to save Jews during the Holocaust and to perpetuate the impression that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
Survivors and their descendants, who owe their lives to the Berne/Ladosh Group, made an official complaint to Yad Vashem, who agreed to re-examine the issue of recognition in light of the many documents that were uncovered over the last three years. For the sake of this issue, Mordecai Paldiel, who served as the head of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations department for 24 years, was also recruited to check every aspect of the affair, reaching the unambiguous conclusion that every Polish diplomat deserved recognition. The positive decision of the recognition committee could have realigned Polish-Israeli relations on a path of understanding and dialogue, despite the destructive policy of the Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, towards Poland.
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But Yad Vashem will not go back on its mistake. On the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 2021, the head of the Righteous Among the Nations department, Dr. Joel Zisenwine, told Markus Blechner that the plenary of the recognition committee had decided to stick to its decision not to recognize Ladosh and Ryniewicz as Righteous Among the Nations.
"This decision is not relevant," Blechner says in response. "It has no reasoning. I demand a detailed explanation. When a court gives a ruling, it includes reasons. Here, there is no information about the reasons that led to the decision. You have no idea who made the decision, who was in favor, who was against. The committee is run in secrecy, like some secret organization. There is no transparency, there is no possibility to appeal or to present a complaint. In Poland there is anger about the decision. If Ladosh isn't deserving of recognition, it isn't clear what the members of the committee are doing. This attitude does tremendous damage to Yad Vashem's image."
In knowing all the details of the episode, I support Blechner's all: only full transparency regarding this issue will make it clear if Yad Vashem is playing a role in the deterioration of the crisis between Poland and Israel, and what is motivating Yad Vashem to recognize only some of the Polish diplomats – not only in Switzerland – as saviors of Jews.
