Konstanty Rokicki, a Polish consul in Bern who played a major role in saving Jews during the Holocaust, died on July 18, 1958. His actions within the Lados Group, involving the forgery of Latin American passports, made it possible to save at least several hundred people. Although Rokicki died in obscurity and poverty, he has been a Righteous Among the Nations for several years and his restored grave was unveiled in 2018 by President Andrzej Duda.
Passport action
Konstanty Rokicki (1899-1958), born in Warsaw, was a Polish diplomat and veteran of the Polish-Bolshevik War. From 1939 to 1945 he served as consul in Bern, where together with Aleksander Lados, Stefan Ryniewicz, Juliusz Kühl and Jewish activists Abraham Silberschein and Chaim Eiss he formed the Lados Group.
Between 1941 and 1943, Rokicki, together with Jewish diplomat Julius Kühl, produced several thousand illegal Paraguayan passports that served as protective documents for Jews imprisoned in the ghettos of German-occupied Poland. Diplomats from Bern personally bribed the honorary consul of Paraguay, notary Rudolf Hüglie, to obtain blank passport forms, which were then filled out by Rokicki with the names of Polish Jews. The Paraguayan passports were of special value because in 1944, under pressure from Poland and the Holy See, Paraguay temporarily recognized their validity.
Passports of Life
The passport operation, supported financially and politically by the Polish government-in-exile, consisted of forging documents of Latin American countries (Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Peru). The creators of Lados List, posted on the website paszportyzycia.pl, estimate that the group issued between 8,000 and 10,000 such passports, which helped save between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews from ghettos in Poland and other countries in occupied Europe. Often smuggled into camps, these passports gave holders a chance to avoid deportation to death camps.
As Jakub Kumoch, former Polish ambassador to Switzerland and co-author of “The Lados List,” points out, Rokicki went down in history as a great rescuer of the Jewish community. He filled out thousands of Paraguayan passports by hand, which required extraordinary precision and courage, given the risks of falsifying documents in neutral Switzerland. The embassy in Bern, which operated continuously throughout the war, was a unique location in Europe, making this action possible thanks to Switzerland's neutrality and the presence of diplomatic missions from Latin American countries.
Commemoration years later
After the war, Rokicki refused to cooperate with Poland's communist authorities, which condemned him to a life of poverty. He died on July 18, 1958 in Lucerne, in a shelter for the poor. His grave was found and restored thanks to the efforts of Polish diplomats. In October 2018, Polish President Andrzej Duda attended Rokicki's memorial ceremony at the Lucerne cemetery, where, in the presence of survivors and their families, the consul's new tombstone was unveiled.
“The activities of Consul Konstanty Rokicki, who issued false passports during World War II, saving hundreds of Jews in occupied Poland, symbolize a ‘brighter star’ amidst the blackness of despair of those years,” he said. - President Andrzej Duda said at the time.
In 2019, the Yad Vashem Institute awarded Rokicki the title of Righteous Among the Nations, which was the result of the efforts of the Polish Honorary Consul in Zurich, Markus Blechner, and the research of historians and diplomats, including Jacob Kumoch. At the same time, they refused to honor Ambassador Lados and his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz. The website passportyzycia.pl, which is the platform of the Pilecki Institute, gathers up-to-date information about the action, and includes the Ładosia List with more than 3,200 names of people who received passports.
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