In July 1958, two newspapers in Lucerne, Switzerland, printed a small death notice no one would ever have recognized as an obituary. There was no "we regret to inform" and no mention of any mourners. Just plain facts: "Konstanty Rokicki, profession: consular officer, Polish citizen, born in 1899, funeral Monday, 10 a.m."
Two days later, Rokicki would be buried in Lucerne cemetery, in a section reserved for the poor. There is no evidence that anyone was at the funeral.
Twenty years later, the mound of earth marking his grave was flattened and then replaced by lawn. Sixty years later, when reporters from the Polish daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Canada's Daily Globe and Mail discovered Rokicki's story, no trace of him remained anywhere.
Today we know quite a lot about his deeds. As the Polish consul in Bern during World War II, it has been estimated that over 12 months in 1942-1943, Rokicki forged about a thousand Paraguayan passports. All bear the mark of his distinctive handwriting.
For many Jews in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bendzin, and in the Nazi concentration camps in Vught and Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands, these documents were a lifeline. Instead of being shipped to extermination camps, these prisoners ended up in internment camps, and some were exchanged for Germans captured by the Allies, even while the Holocaust was in progress.
The names of almost 400 of the roughly 800 Jews he saved are known. At least 20 are still alive. The story of the Paraguayan passports has been mentioned often in Holocaust literature and in memoirs penned by survivors.
Only one thing was missing from these ubiquitous accounts: the name of the person who made it happen.
The survivors never learned the facts, the communist authorities in Poland swept Rokicki under a rug, and almost no one reviewed any of the archives. For a quarter of a century after Poland regained independence, no one told the story.
"Why are we learning about this after so long?" the last survivors may ask.
I would very much like to be able to give them an answer.
Rokicki had, in effect, been dead to Poland for 13 years before he finally succumbed to lung cancer "after a long struggle," as people say.
After the war ended, in July 1945, he slammed the door of the Consular Section of the Polish Embassy in Bern, refusing to serve the new, pro-Moscow authorities. He did not receive any recognition for his service, never received a pension and probably never knew that the grateful Agudath Israel had written a special thank-you letter to the Polish government-in-exile, mentioning him by name. That letter was destined to gather dust in a London archive for more than 70 years. By the time a diplomat found it, Rokicki's only descendant – a daughter – was already dead.
After 1945, Rokicki abstained from writing any memoirs or personal notes. The latest documents date from when he worked at the consulate in Bern between 1939 and 1945, under Ambassador Aleksander Lados and his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz. In this capacity, he supervised the work of Juliusz Kuhl, a Jewish embassy employee. Together they formed a close-knit team, later known as the Bernese Group or, more accurately, the Lados Group. Alongside their Jewish partners – Abraham Silberschein and Chaim Eiss – they paid significant bribes and obtained Latin American documents for at least 5,000 people. The money for the bribes came from Jews and the Polish government-in-exile. The papers were procured from members of the local community of elite lawyers, honorary consuls of Paraguay, Honduras and Haiti. Most of them were produced by Rokicki himself, and the rest were modeled on these.
He never bragged about it. What we know about this operation comes from reports filed by the Swiss Fremdenpolizei, which investigated the group's activities.
"Each time, the forms were obtained from [honorary consul of Paraguay Rudolf] Hugli and filled out by Consul Rokicki, and then returned to Consul Hugli for signing," Juliusz Kuhl testified under interrogation.
"According to the available documents, Mr. Rokicki and Mr. Kuhl were deeply involved in the extensive operation of supplying forged certificates of nationality to Polish Jews," Internal Affairs Minister Edmund von Steiger wrote.
In another document, the police explicitly stated that the documents were forged by Rokicki. After Lados, the ambassador, threatened the Swiss authorities with scandal, the matter was hushed up and kept secret for decades.
In 2017, a note written by Rokicki was discovered.
"Is this a Mrs. or a Miss? I cannot issue a passport without first name," he wrote in a note to Silberschein that was delivered in late 1943 – one of the few remaining traces of Rokicki's rescue work in Bern.
The next record of Rokicki's work is from December 1946, more than a year after Poland was "liberated" and the communist regime took power. The police wanted to expel him from Switzerland due to "reservations about the financial standing of the person in question" – a typical phrase used to indicate that someone was too poor to live in Switzerland.
The subject of the Rokicki family's poverty would be a recurring theme in all subsequent documents. And yet, this was someone who had channeled hundreds of thousands of francs to Latin American consuls as bribes. It is evident that he and the Lados Group never turned the rescue operation into a business. Money earmarked for lifesaving endeavors ended up in the bank accounts of provident "honorary consuls" and disappeared behind the veil of Swiss banking secrecy. Some of the money lined the pockets of middlemen who prowled ghettos and camps.
Ultimately, Rokicki was allowed to stay in Switzerland. In correspondence with the police, the Swiss Foreign Affairs Ministry admitted that he had forged documents in 1942 and 1943, but stressed that "in issuing passports to his compatriots, he was not motivated by personal gain, but by patriotism."
In addition, Rokicki had nowhere to go. After six years of brutal and genocidal Nazi German occupation, Poland had turned into a Stalinist paradise. The death camps had gone, but people still disappeared and were never heard from again. Prewar military and diplomats were among the most persecuted.
Rokicki did not consider himself a citizen of communist Poland, characterizing himself as a stateless person. There is no evidence that he was in touch with his compatriots. He disappeared. His family affairs (and his divorce) were only gleaned from documents submitted by his daughter when she applied for Swiss citizenship many years later. She claimed to be apolitical and stated that she did not maintain any contact with the Polish diaspora. Until her death in 2008, she wrote and said very little about her father.
Neither Lados nor his diplomats ever mentioned Rokicki. The only exception was Stanisław Nahlik, the embassy's cipher officer, who became a law professor after the war as well as an informant for the communist Security Service. In Nahlik's highly embellished, narcissistic and often unreliable memoirs, Rokicki is mentioned several times, but never in the context of the passport operation.
Juliusz Kuhl, who should know the most, wrote his memoirs in Canada in the 1970s, but never mentioned the man to whom he once gave stacks of blank passports for signing. To this day no one knows what came between the former "brothers in arms."
Documents show that Rokicki also stayed away from Ryniewicz and Lados, as they, together with Kuhl, tried to make a living in exile and became involved in a series of business ventures. Their ways eventually parted: Lados lived in poverty in France, Ryniewicz had a car wash business in Buenos Aires, and Kuhl left for the United States and Canada, where he founded a profitable construction company.
Rokicki is not mentioned in any of the numerous documents about them. It is not known how he made a living or managed to survive. He changed his address many times, something highly uncharacteristic for the Swiss. There is no evidence suggesting he ever tried to obtain a Swiss passport.
With the exception of Kuhl, all Rokicki's Jewish partners died before him: Chaim Eiss died of a heart attack in November 1943; Abraham Silberschein passed away in Geneva in December 1951. Both left archives behind, but for years, the documents were regarded merely as family heirlooms. In addition, the documents mention the action sparingly, as it was largely a crime. Ultimately, the men took the secret to their graves.
Only Lados remained. There is no doubt that everything that Rokicki had done was approved and most probably ordered by the diplomat, a former ambassador to Latvia and consul general in Munich. Lados also authored a volume of memoirs, but the third section, at the beginning of which the author promises to describe the passport operation, is incomplete, ending abruptly with a note that the author died while working on the book, in December 1963. Like Rokicki, he battled cancer from the late 1950s. Pictures showed that only a handful of people attended the funeral of one of the biggest Holocaust rescuers.
The content of the Swiss archives is rather depressing when it comes to the former Polish vice-consul. Rokicki is mentioned in documents from the late 1940s. In 1949, he was the subject of correspondence between the Swiss Foreign Affairs Ministry and a Swiss diplomatic outpost in Brazil. The reason: a money order, worth 120 francs, that his brother and sister-in-law wanted to send him for Christmas. We learn from this correspondence that Rokicki was in hospital and his financial situation was "precarious."
Rokicki himself kept his silence about the operation. The only records he left behind contain no complaints about his fate or requests for help.
Another piece of evidence comes from a request for assistance in 1952 from an Israeli man whose sister was married to Rokicki's brother. The man wanted back a suitcase that he had left in 1939 in the Swiss Embassy in Warsaw. Rokicki tried to help, leaving another trail by writing to the Swiss Foreign Affairs Ministry. It is evident that he no longer lived in Bern, but in Oberageri in the Canton of Zug, in the middle of Switzerland. It was evident that he did not want to be associated with "red" Poland in any way.
When Nathan Eck, the eminent Polish and Israeli Holocaust historian and holder of a Paraguayan passport (one of the few who survived the extermination camp in Vittel), made the first attempt to describe the passport operation in 1957, he never once even mentioned Rokicki. Silberschein was dead, and his widow and secretary, Fanny Hirsch, who probably typed the letters to Rokicki herself, never said a word of him. There is a possibility that she did not want to expose Rokicki, who was still alive, and took all the "responsibility" on herself.
Rokicki was overlooked by most historians. Both Polish and Jewish writers focused on Kuhl and Lados. Only one Holocaust scholar, Dr. Danuta Drywa from the Stutthof Museum, discovered Rokicki's trail, but her well-researched book is still only a manuscript awaiting publication.
And thus, until the articles in the Polish and Canadian newspapers in 2017, Rokicki did not exist. The collection of documents left by Chaim Eiss only recently saw light. The several hundred pages of correspondence between Silberschein and Rokicki, published in its entirety on the Yad Vashem website, has not drawn much attention. They comprise a long list of requests for passports, people's names, and Rokicki's reports about matters he dealt with.
Rokicki was never rewarded for his deeds, in life nor in death. The archive of the Warsaw-based Bureau of History of the Armed Forces mentions the Cross of Valor, which he received for his bravery during the 1920 Polish-Soviet war, when as a junior officer he led a cavalry charge against the Bolsheviks, and the Medal of Independence, granted in 1938 to officials who displayed distinguished efforts in the struggle for Polish independence.
There is also some evidence that the first document forged by Rokicki was nothing less than his own birth certificate. He increased his age by a year to be allowed to join the Polish Legions in 1916 and fight for an independent Poland.
He probably never knew that the passports he distributed were so effective. In the 1940s and 1950s, many believed that most of the passport owners had been sent to Vittel internment camp in occupied France and massacred by the Nazis by the spring of 1944. Rokicki did not know that many more had actually survived in Bergen-Belsen and that one of the biggest groups of rescued Jews were former German citizens. He never knew that his passports had saved Jews from a dozen European countries.
After more than 70 years of obscurity, his epitaph has at last been written in Lucerne by modern Poland and the last survivors, who finally paid homage to the heroic diplomat.
