The bill, known as “The Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust,” honors diplomats from 28 countries, including five from Poland.
Four of them – Aleksander Ładoś, Konstanty Rokicki, Stefan Ryniewicz and Juliusz Kuhl – were members of the so-called Ładoś Group. Based in Switzerland, acting under the leadership of Aleksander Ładoś, who headed Poland's legation in that country, they 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 Congressional Gold Medal was also awarded to Henryk Sławik, a Polish politician, diplomat and social worker who, as the head of the Citizens’ Committee for Care to Polish Refugees in Hungary, helped save many Hungarian and Polish Jews. He was executed in the Nazi German concentration camp Mauthausen in August 1944.
The bill, which was unanimously adopted by the House of Representatives, says that the Congressional Gold Medal goes to the diplomats who “resisted the antisemitic Nazi agenda, risking their families, careers, and lives to help innocent Jewish people flee persecution” and who “valiantly defied that systemic hatred by bravely doing what was right to stand up for not only the Jewish community, but all the mankind”.
The Congressional Gold Medal is the oldest and highest civilian honor in the United States.
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Source: IAR, PAP