The brave effort was orchestrated by a group of diplomats led by Aleksander Ładoś, the Polish government-in-exile’s de facto ambassador to Switzerland.
The exhibition at the Maisel Synagogue in the Czech capital comes after Poland’s Pilecki Institute at the end of last year released a list of names of more than 3,000 Jews who were provided with fake passports by Polish diplomats based in Switzerland during the war.
The Bern-based group, led by Ładoś and including Jewish activists, is credited with helping potentially thousands of Jews escape from Poland at a time when the country was under Nazi German occupation.
Aleksander Ładoś (1891-1963) Image: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain]
Among those helped by the Bern-based group in the early stages of the war was Yosef Burg, a Jewish man who later became one of the founding fathers of the state of Israel, according to a report last year.
Poland’s government in August 2018 announced the recovery of a historical archive documenting the effort in which its diplomats helped rescue Jews from the Holocaust during World War II.
The collection originally belonged to Chaim Eiss (1867-1943), an Orthodox Jewish activist who was a member of the Bern-based group led by Ładoś.
One of the Polish diplomats who was a member of the group, Konstanty Rokicki (1899-1958), was last year posthumously recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial centre as a Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The Prague exhibition follows similar shows at venues including the Jewish Museum of Switzerland in Basel and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.
The Israel Hayom newspaper last year described Ładoś as an “unsung hero” who led a massive effort to save thousands of Jews from extermination during the Holocaust.
(gs/pk)
Source: IAR/PAP, polskieradio.pl