In the Captivity of One’s Own Beliefs, or Who is Inconvenienced by Our New Knowledge Regarding the Ładoś Passports A Polemic with the Article Paszporty złudzeń. Sprawa paszportów południowoamerykańskich widziana z Będzina [Passports of Delusion. The Case of the Latin American Passports as Seen from Będzin] by Michał Sobelman (“Zagłada żydów. Studia i Materiały” 2020, vol. 16, pp. 700–717) Dr. Jakub Kumoch, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Switzerland (2016–2020) and to Turkey (from 2020) The most recent edition of the “Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały” year- book contains an interesting, although in my opinion completely misguid- ed attempt at a critique of The Ładoś List (Kumoch et al., 2019), a publication that I myself edited and which was printed in Polish in December 2019 by the Pilecki Institute, and thereafter presented in English in February 2020 – as a supplemented and corrected version (Kumoch et al., 2020) – at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library and at the seat of the World Jewish Congress. The attempt in question was undertaken by Michał Sobelman, a historian, translator of literature, and the spokesman of the Israeli Em- bassy in Warsaw, whose interest and involvement in the subject of the Holocaust spans many decades. Although I do know him and hold him in high regard, having had the opportunity of talking with him about Ładoś on a number of occasions, I cannot agree either with the conclu- sions which he put forward in the article, or – and with this above all – the methodology that he employed. I am referring to his article solely to the extent to which it focuses on a critique of The Ładoś List, its methodology, and the inferences drawn regarding the activities of the Polish envoy to Switzerland, Aleksander Ładoś, and his staff. For a considerable part of Sobelman’s analysis (its most valuable fragment, in my opinion) is devoted to how the Latin Amer- ican passports were viewed by the activists of left wing Zionist organiza- tions in the Będzin ghetto, with less focus being given to the procedure of creation of these documents. Michał Sobelman also provides an excellent portrayal of the tragic alternative with which the young, ideological Zi- onist activists were faced: avail themselves of salvation, or fight to the end, gun in hand, as the avant-garde of their nation. Had he confined himself to this alone, his article would constitute a superb supplementa- tion of our research. However, the author has proceeded to a critique of The Ładoś List through an attempt at generalization, this by returning to the narrative of historians who studied the issue of the Latin American passports before the opening of Swiss archives, and imputing to our team 575 a deliberate overstatement of the number of those saved. Unfortunately, his argumentation is contrary to sources. Thus, I will attempt to respond to his charges in this very regard. The central thesis of the article is altogether clear: the reinstate - ment of Aleksander Ładoś and his collaborators to the collective memory in 2017 marks nothing new, historians “have long known” about Ładoś, while the list compiled by myself and the team of researchers, which con- tains the names of more than 3 thou. holders of Latin American passports REVIEWS AND REVIEW ARTICLES REVIEWS falsified in Switzerland is – and I think that the suggestion has been quite obviously made – a typical pretense based on a hollow argument. The Ładoś passports were but “passports of delusion”, they did not save lives, while the fact that nearly one quarter of those mentioned in the list and more than 45% of all those whose fates have been determined survived the Holocaust are data that can be waved aside. There is also a return to theses which we have already exposed, and first and foremost to the as- sertion that the production of Latin American passports for the purpose of saving Jews from the Holocaust was the work of Jewish Zionist organ- izations (Sobelman, 2020, pp. 701–703), whereas graphological research has demonstrated that at least 50% of these documents originated from the Consular Section of the Polish Legation. I commenced my reading of Michał Sobelman’s article from the bibliography. It is interesting, for it contains the Hebrew memoirs of cer- tain of the holders of the Ładoś passports, and also reports, elaborated in Israel, of persons associated in Jewish organizations which acquired passports for their members (pp. 716–717). I would like to reiterate: if this were the bibliography of an article about the Ładoś passports as seen through the memoirs of the Jews of Będzin, it would constitute a noticea- ble contribution of the author to research into the falsified Latin American documents from Bern. I noticed with astonishment, however, that all of the publications concerning the production of the passports are accounts penned long after the War. Quite obviously, materials of this type reflect primarily the state of knowledge and memories of their authors at the time of writing, and sometimes also their attempts at achieving a specific level of self-creation; in consequence, they must be carefully verified as a rule, ideally by a juxtaposition with sources originating from the period which the researcher is describing. It is therefore surprising that Michał Sobelman’s study does not contain even one (!) document from wartime Swiss archives, without which it is simply not possible to conduct thor - ough research into the issue at hand. Indeed, practically everything that we know about the process of production of the passports was determined thanks to the Swiss police surveillance of the Ładoś group. I could readily enumerate what is missing from the article: steno- graphic records of the examinations of the main protagonists of the op- eration – among others of Abraham Silberschein (Audition de Abraham 576 Silberschein…, 1943) and Chaim Eiss (Abhörungsprotokoll Proces-verbal d’audition Verbale d’interrogatorio Eiss Israel, 1943), as well as the testi- mony of Juliusz Kühl and Rudolf Hügli (Notiz im Sachen Hügli Rudolf…, 1943), and also that of Saul Weingort (Abhörungsprotokoll Proces-verbal d’audition Verbale d’interrogatorio Weingort Saul, 1943). Whereas the very fact that these examinations did take place contradicts Michał So - belman’s uncritical quoting of the exposition of an Israeli historian who maintained that the production of the passports was a safe undertaking, and that during its course only one person – Alfred Schwarzbaum – was REVIEWS AND REVIEW ARTICLES REVIEWS arrested (Sobelman, 2020, p. 706).1 Finally, the article makes no mention of the minutes of discussions between Aleksander Ładoś and the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs (Conférences avec M. Lados…, 1943), or be - tween the deputy Polish envoy, Stefan Ryniewicz, and the Chief of the Swiss Police for Foreigners, Heinrich Rothmund (Notice du Chef de la Division…, 1943), which were elaborated and have subsequently been de- classified by the Swiss authorities. The former – and this I would like to recall – blackmailed Switzerland, threatening a scandal if the country continued to torpedo the passport campaign, while the latter demanded that Silberschein be released from jail. In any case, such a selective approach to sources is nothing new, and has accompanied studies into the Ładoś group for years. In 2015, the very same research error was made by Dr. Agnieszka Haska, who pub- lished an article about Ładoś (Haska, 2015, pp. 299–309) basing herself essentially on Polish-language sources and a scholarly book for the gen- eral public about Recha Sternbuch, which had been published in English (Friedenson, Kranzler, 1984). She also made use of the memoirs of Juliusz Kühl, Aleksander Ładoś and Stanisław Nahlik, even though none of them wrote about how the passports were manufactured.2 However, she omit- ted the Swiss Federal Archive, which had by then been opened for many years. Thus, Dr. Haska contributed to the continuation of the paradigm of “Jewish causality” of and “Polish goodwill” for the operation. In The Ładoś List we fundamentally advanced the thesis that it was the Legation that was both the initiator and the nucleus of the operation, and that Jewish 1 I am referring to the following publication: Ronen, 2011, p. 246. 2 Nahlik’s tendency to create a false narrative and confabulate should be noted. A typical indication is the description of the lavish wedding which Juliusz Kühl purportedly organized for himself in 1943. But a photograph taken during the event, which was passed on to me by Kühl’s family, contradicts this. Furthermore, memoirs penned by Kühl himself or written down by a close associate in the 1970s or at the beginning of the 1980s contain numerous entries that are inconsistent with the facts (for example, Kühl stated that in 1939 Poland was ruled by the National Democratic Party, and that Grabski was the Prime Minister). However, Ładoś did not finish his memoirs and did not describe the passport operation (Nietytułowane pamiętniki Juliusza Kühla, n.d.; Pamiętniki A. Ładosia, 1961–1963; Nahlik, 2002, vol. 3). organizations acted as its partners, without whom the undertaking would 577 have been limited and deprived of logistical support. Michał Sobelman builds his argumentation in a similar vein, bas- ing himself on two studies authored many years after the Bernese “pass- port scandal” and setting them in opposition to our source-based research. Heini Bornstein, the former Swiss Zionist activist quoted uncritically by Sobelman, wrote thus in a book published in Israel in 1996: At the beginning of 1943 in Geneva, it came to be known that REVIEWS AND REVIEW ARTICLES REVIEWS the German authorities were ready to exchange their citi - zens located in various South American countries for the cit- izens of these states living in the Third Reich.