(Jewish Group) The Poles Who Tried to Save My Father
In the midst of the international controversy over who was responsible for World War II and its carnage, three immutable realities must underlie any constructive discussion: Nazi Germany started the war by invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939; Poland did not bear any responsibility for the Hitlerite aggression of which it was the target; and the histories of Jewish Poles and Christian Poles during the Holocaust era are symbiotically albeit often uneasily intertwined.
The third of these realities is epitomized by a fascinating and eye-opening document that my friend Jakub Kumoch, the Polish ambassador to Switzerland, sent me a few days ago: a list of 3,262 Jews in countries under Nazi occupation for whom forged Latin American passports and certificates of citizenship were issued at the height of the Holocaust by a group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists in Switzerland known as the Bernese Group.
More than 25% of the names on the list–835 out of the 3,262–belonged to Jews from my father’s hometown of Będzin in southern Poland, followed by 497 from Warsaw, 262 from Amsterdam, 215 from the city of Sosnowiec near Będzin, and smaller numbers from other cities. The disproportionate representation of Jews from Będzin on the list is due to the efforts of Alfred Schwarzbaum, a refugee from that city then living in Lausanne.
This list is of far more than academic interest to me. Among the 3,262 names are those of my father, Józef Rozenzaft, born in 1911; my grandfather, Mendel Rozenzaft, born in 1864; my father’s first wife, Braindla Rozenzaft (née Erlich), born in 1903; and her daughter from her previous marriage, Sulmit Bajtner. My father is the only one of the four listed as having “survived.” I also found the names of a number of my father’s friends from Będzin, such as David, Miriam, and Menachem Liwer, Iser Londner, and Jechezkiel (later Jack) Rozmaryn.
In my father’s case, I have known that a forged certificate of Paraguayan citizenship, a letter dated Nov. 17, 1942, on the letterhead of the Consulate of the Republic of Paraguay in Bern, had been prepared for him since I learned about it early last year upon receiving a copy of it from Markus Blechner, the honorary consul of Poland in Zurich, who had discovered it in an Israeli archive.
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