The list comprises the names of 3,282 Jews who were saved during World War II 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.
They forged passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust.
The Ładoś List has been compiled by Poland’s Pilecki Institute in cooperation with numerous partners in Poland and abroad.
Aleksander Ładoś (1891-1963). Image: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain]
Prof. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, the director of the Pilecki Institute, has told Poland's PAP news agency that the publication of the Ładoś List in the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database of the Holocaust Museum in Washington "is of great importance" from the perspective of both research and international cooperation.
"This has created the opportunity to gain access to wider sections of the public and as a result to trace new, hitherto unknown facts and enrich current research with new sources and documents," Ruchniewicz said.
According to Poland's Pilecki Institute, of the 3,282 people whose names are on the list, the fate of 1,441 remains unknown, whereas several dozen people are still alive.
Among those saved in the Ładoś operation were several participants in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, such as Cywia Lubetkin and Icchak Cukierman, alongside Jewish resistance leaders from Slovakia, France and Italy.
Adam Daniel Rotfeld, the future foreign minister of Poland, was also saved during the effort, along with Hannah "Hanneli" Goslar, a friend of Anne Frank, and Mirjam Finkelstein, mother of the British politician and newspaper editor Lord Daniel Finkelstein.
Adam Daniel Rotfeld. Photo: Wojciech Kusiński/Polish Radio
The Ładoś operation is described by historians as one of the largest rescue missions of WWII. It is the subject of a book by British historian Roger Moorhouse entitled The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust's Most Audacious Rescue Operation.
(mk/gs)