Uncle „Passport”

“In the name of the Republic of Paraguay”. Passport no. 168/42. Bearer: Arie Liwer, born 27 July 1906, Paraguayan merchant with dark eyes and of average height. Portrait photograph below. Validity: two years.

This document saved its bearer’s life.

Who was Arie Liwer? What is the story of his “passport for life”?

Before the war, Arie Liwer was an activist in the leftist Zionist youth organization “Gordonia” in Będzin. Like many other young Jews, he dreamed of creating a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, or the “Land of Israel”. The group organized meetings, lectures and trips in preparation to travel to Palestine and become halutzim (pioneers) in building a new world for their people.

At the beginning of the war, in the first days of September 1939, Liwer left Będzin in a wave of other refugees. To avoid encountering the Wehrmacht, he took a circuitous route to Kielce, where his parents were staying at the time. However, the Germans caught him in Pińczów and held him for several days at a church together with a large group of refugees, threatening everyone with death. When the guards left, Liwer and a group of Poles returned to Zagłębie Dąbrowskie. Along the way he saw the results of the Germans’ advance: burnt-out houses, bodies of Jews and Poles, evidence of plundering.

Będzin looked no different upon his return. On 8 September 1939, the Germans set fire to a synagogue filled with Jews at prayer. They did not allow the fire to be extinguished, and shot anyone who tried to escape. Two hundred Jews were burned alive.

In the first months of the occupation, Arie Liwer became involved in underground social activities. He took over the leadership of the Brit HaHalutzim (Pioneer Alliance), which carried out the clandestine teaching of Jewish youth. He co-founded a group called Lakray (Battle), preparing Jews from the Zagłębie region for an uprising against the Germans. By April 1943, he and his comrades had acquired several guns, and prepared hideouts and bunkers for defense against the Germans. In addition, Liwer headed an agricultural labor camp set up by the Judenrat in Zagłębie; the Zionists quickly took it over and turned it into an informal kibbutz. Jews working there were less likely to be deported, and had better food than in the ghetto where starvation was rife. The German authorities tolerated these agricultural labor camps. They were located outside the ghetto, so no one was surprised that Jews were moving freely outside their designated areas every day.

By the end of the summer of 1942, however, moving about outside the ghetto had become dangerous. Every now and then, the Germans dragged someone off to the death camps. In February 1943, Liwer had to move from the farm to the rudimentary ghetto in Będzin’s Środula district.

Liwer carefully observed how the occupiers’ policies toward the Jews grew more severe month by month – killings in broad daylight on the street, the forced wearing of armbands bearing the Star of David, omnipresent starvation. As early as the spring of 1940, he had stated at an underground meeting that the Germans were aiming to annihilate Jews as a people.

That same year, a letter from one Natan Szwalb from Switzerland began circulating among the Będzin conspirators. An Aunt “Certificate” and an Uncle “Passport” were offering birthday presents. Liwer and his friends did not take it seriously.

Everything changed with the arrival of Natan Eck from Częstochowa in autumn 1942. Abraham Silberschein, founder of the “RELICO” Jewish Relief Committee in Switzerland, sent him a Paraguayan passport. Eck was preparing to leave and encouraged the Będzin Jews to apply for similar documents which were being arranged by employees of the Polish Legation in Bern. Because of the secrecy of the whole operation, the inhabitants of the Zagłębie ghettos did not know that the Polish state was trying to rescue its citizens.

Eck was soon arrested, but after some time Arie Liwer received a letter from him that he was safe in an internment camp. The Jews of Będzin had confirmation that the passports offered a chance of rescue from the ghetto.

To deceive the censors, letters and postcards with photographs sent to Switzerland with requests for passports were written in German, in a familiar tone, as if to distant relatives. However, there were more applicants than passports. Someone had to get them first. Members of Zionist organizations decided to share the fate of their compatriots in the ghetto and apply for passports for only two members from each organization. Among this select group was Liwer, who received a Paraguayan passport in March 1943.

It arrived just in time, for he was soon arrested on 21 April 1943. Through the Judenrat, he handed over the passport to the Gestapo. What followed was a few days of uncertainty in prison before a decision was finally made: the “foreigner” would be interned. Before leaving, he still tried to deliver several passports to Częstochowa, but without success. He managed to say goodbye to his family of ten huddled in a small room with a kitchen in Środula. However, he arrived from his family later than agreed with the German prison commandant. The officer beat up a Jewish policeman from Liwer’s escort, and hurled insults at the prisoner himself. The German could not stand that he was not allowed to beat a Jew just because he had an “American passport”.

The next morning, on a bus carrying Liwer and other passport holders to the train station, the same German grumbled: “Just don’t forget to send me coffee…”

On 14 May 1943, the “Paraguayan merchant” Liwer arrived at the internment camp in Tittmoning, Bavaria, where he met Natan Eck – the very same who had previously encouraged him to apply for a passport. From there he was transferred to the part of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp designated for interned foreigners, where he awaited a prisoner exchange for German citizens in Allied countries. Liwer was sent to North Africa in February 1945 as part of an exchange for Germans being held by the British.

Despite his harsh wartime experiences, Arie Liwer fulfilled his dream of Palestine. On 10 September 1945, after a voyage on board the Winchester Castle, he set foot on Eretz Yisrael.