The Lados Group in the News

Two very different but significantly interconnected books

From the Polish American Journal, May-June 2022 (p. 10)

THE ŁADOŚ LIST
Jakub Kumoch (editor) et al.
Copyright 2020
The Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor
With patronage by the World Jewish Congress

TUTTI’S PROMISE
K. Heidi Fishman
Copyright 2017
MB Publishing

Reviewed by David Trawinski

This month we will review two very different but significantly in­terconnected books. The first is best described as a historical reference document. The second is a very ten­derly written testimony to the life-saving impact that the group behind the first book accomplished.

“The Ładoś List” is the refer­ence book published by the Wi­told Pilecki Institute of Warsaw. Most will remember the Institute’s namesake as the courageous Pol­ish Home Army officer who volun­teered to enter Auschwitz and then escaped to report on the horrific ongoings there. This book is just as heroic, only in a more nuanced manner. You see, during the Second World War, a group of Polish diplo­mats, led by Aleksander Ładoś, the Polish Envoy in Bern, Switzerland, purchased illegal passports and certificates of citizenship from the countries of Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti and Peru.

The Ładoś Group, working with two Jewish organizations - The World Jewish Congress and Agudat Yisrael (Union of Israel) - forged these documents with the sole intent of saving Jews caught behind the borders of Nazi occupied coun­tries. If Jewish people could show they had for­eign citizenship, they had markedly better chances of surviving deportation to concentration or death camps. The entire process is described in detail in the book’s first 51 pag­es, complete with much photo-documentation in­cluded. Space limits my describing the details here, but it is safe to say that the enterprise was as complex as it was heroic.

The next hundred or so pages form the true “Ładoś List.” It details each person by name, their country of origin, the year of their birth, and the type of document issued by the Ładoś Group. Most sobering is the last column, entitled “Fate,” where each soul is listed as Survived, Un­known or Perished. Of 3,059 docu­ments known to have been issued, 776 were known to have survived (25.4%), but unfortunately in 1,377 (45%) cases the fate was unknown. Sadly, even with these forged doc­uments 906 (29.6%) souls were known to have perished. But the list is far from complete in catalog­ing the entire efforts of the “Ładoś Group,” as detailed records could not be kept for fear of their being captured. War historians believe some 8,000 to 10,000 Ładoś docu­ments were issued. In that case, ex­trapolating the survivors’ statistics would yield some 2,000 to 2,500 lives saved, not including those who might have survived in the un­known status group.

This brings us to our second book, “Tutti’s Promise” by K. Heidi Fishman. It is a remembrance of her mother’s experiences during World War II. Tutti’s father had moved their Jewish family from Germany to Amsterdam before the war, only later to become entrapped when the Nazis overran the Netherlands in May 1940. Tutti’s father was able to procure a “Ładoś Group” Passport, but it did not preclude the family from becoming col­lected up and sent first to a transit camp in the Netherlands, and then on to the Theresienstadt Camp in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia. In fact, Tutti’s father was selected for transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a most certain death sentence, when upon boarding the train, he one last time presented his Paraguayan “Ładoś Group” passport. He was amazed when he was pulled from the board­ing line and presented with a slip of paper bearing his name and the German word “Ausgeschieden,” meaning “Withdrawn.” The passport not only allowed his rejoin­ing his family that day, but facilitated their survival to be liberated from that camp seventy-seven years ago this month.

A few words are in order for Fishman’s writing style. This work of 214 pages (endnotes except­ed) was targeted for young readers, age 10 and up. I found it to be excel­lently written, mostly from young Tutti’s perspective. It conveys the importance of the subject with tre­mendous respect, but without being overly graphic in its descriptions. I can think of no better way for a pre-teen to have a “safer” first learning experience about the Holocaust. In fact, I would recommend all parents to keep a copy of “Tutti’s Promise” in their homes for them to read with their children as an introduction to this horrific topic.

The chapters are very short, per­haps two to four pages, and one or two a night would be a fantastic shared read for parent and child. And from page 104 of “The Ładoś List,” entries 1526 - 1529, we know that the story of the Lichtenstern family of Tutti, her brother, and her mother and father comes with a positive ending. Most fittingly, their family’s passport image graces the cover of “The Ładoś List.”