THE FORGERS

Historical study of an overlooked hero of the Holocaust.

When Poland was occupied during World War II, its legitimate government went into exile. That government posted diplomats who were sometimes recognized, sometimes not, with the Reich momentarily placated by the naming of one, Aleksander Ładoś (1891-1963), not as ambassador but as a temporary chargé d’affaires to Switzerland. “A former journalist and diplomat,” writes Moorhouse, author of Poland 1939 and Berlin at War, “Ładoś had served in a number of significant diplomatic posts through the 1920s and ’30s.” Ładoś had a widespread network of contacts who pulled together, once it became clear that Poland’s Jews would be in the vanguard of victims of the rapidly developing Shoah, to find ways to deliver at least some of them to safety. They did so by securing doctored passports and visas, most from Latin American countries and then delivering them to a lucky few. On that note, Moorhouse estimates that the “Ładoś Group” issued passports and other identity documents to somewhere between 8,300 and 11,400 people (the discrepancy comes from the fact that passports sometimes covered whole families and not just individuals). Less than half are known to have survived, since passport holders were often transferred from death camps to “internment camps” where they were subject to starvation and disease. Moorhouse writes circumspectly of sensitive subjects such as how choices were made as to who would receive the forged papers. He also notes that corruption figured in the larger enterprise of document forgery, with some characters outside the group selling documents at a premium. While Moorhouse allows that other groups were active along the same lines—one Polish underground organization “produced some fifty thousand forged documents, on average around one hundred every day”—he makes clear that the forgotten Ładoś deserves to be remembered, as do his lieutenants.

A capable investigation of a little-known aspect of World War II history.