The “Polish Oskar Schindler” was honoured this week at a ceremony in Lucerne, Switzerland, where a new tombstone was erected on his grave.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda laid a wreath at the resting place of Konstanty Rokicki, the Polish Consul in Bern who produced several thousand illegal Paraguayan passports to save Jews stranded in ghettos in his home country.
“We bow our heads to all those who were victims of the Holocaust during the darkest years of the 20th century and perhaps also the darkest era of human history,” Mr Duda said during Tuesday’s ceremony.
Between 1941 and 1943, Rokicki and his assistant, the Jewish diplomat Juliusz Kuh, forged the Latin American documents which they smuggled into Poland and the Netherlands.
But instead of being honoured at the end of the Second World War, Rokicki, a second lieutenant of the Polish Army, died in poverty in Lucerne in 1958, unrecognised for his courageous actions.
He was buried in an unmarked grave at Friedental cemetery “where the poor people were buried,” according to Joanna Kulakowska-Kumoch, who works in the Polish Embassy in Bern today.
“His grave was removed in late 1970s and I’m not sure there was any tombstone there as no one cared about it.”
She added: “The aim of the saving operation was not actually sending people to Paraguay but to prevent them from being sent to death camps like Auschwitz and consequently almost straight to gas chambers.
“Instead they were sent to internment camps like Bergen Belsen because Germans didn’t know what to do with them.”
Survivors and their descendants, representatives of the Polish state authorities, Lucerne’s municipal authorities and Jewish and Polish residents attended the unveiling ceremony on Tuesday at the Friedental Cemetery in the city, 60 years after his death.
Rokicki and Kuhl were part of a much broader covert operation in Switzerland known as the Bernese Six, made up of four diplomats, a representative of a World Jewish Congress arm assisting Jewish victims of the war, and a member of Agudat Israel political party.
Half the members of this group were Jewish.
Rokicki’s role was to acquire and fill out the blank passports, while others — Abraham Silberschein and Chaim Yisroel Eiss — smuggled them and provided funding.
In a letter of gratitude to the Polish government, Agudat Yisrael said that were it not for Rokicki and Kuhl, “it would not be possible to save many hundreds of people.”
Kuhl went on to become a Canadian citizen and was revered as a Holocaust hero. But little was known of Rokicki and the mystery surrounding his missing tombstone remains unsolved.
