World Jewish News

Survivors of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz arrive to the former camp in Oswiecim.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Restitution advocates criticize Polish policies as overly onerous

Poland’s fiscal policies related to issues stemming from the Holocaust have come under fire recently by Jewish groups concerned with caring for survivors and obtaining restitution for lost property.

Within the past week both the World Jewish Restitution Organization and an Israeli umbrella organization for survivors groups panned various Polish efforts to deal with the financial aspects of the country’s legacy as one of the primary locales in which the Nazi genocide occurred.

On Tuesday Colette Avital, the chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel told attendees at a survivors’ conference in Kfar Maccabiah that she thought that the criteria for proving eligibility for pension payments from the Polish government for survivors living in Israel were onerous and unnecessarily complicated.

Poland recently widened the pool of those eligible for the monthly payments, finally including expatriate survivors who were citizens during the war and either fought against the Nazis or were incarcerated in ghettos or camps on Polish soil.

While this was a move welcomed by survivors, its implementation leaves something to be desired, Avital told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

“The documents that you were in a camp or ghetto are not necessarily easy to get,” she said, describing elderly survivors with limited mobility would have to go to archives such as Yad Vashem’s to obtain the necessary papers.

Once such proof is obtained, it has to be translated into Polish and notarized, both of which entail considerable effort and expense for those with limited means and mobility.

Many survivors who were children in Poland also have difficulty with the multi-page Polish language forms and anyone who changed his or her name after immigrating to Israel would have to present proof of their original name as well, she said.

Once the necessary proofs are submitted to Warsaw, another round of paperwork is sent back here, entailing further efforts to penetrate Bureaucratic Polish jargon.

“I think it is excessive,” Avital complained, recalling suggesting an “easier way” to Warsaw.

Israel already certifies people as Holocaust survivors as part of its own welfare system and the state of Israel “was ready to make life easier and give access to their files and give affidavits” to the Poles, she said.

“They rejected it.”

According to Ma'ariv, there are between ten and fifteen thousand eligible survivors currently living in Israel.

According to the Polish government, the new regulations put Israelis eligible for pensions on equal footing with their counterparts living in Poland. Until April, beneficiaries living in Israel had to have a bank account in Poland or authorize someone there to receive payments on their behalf.

Last week the WJRO heavily criticized Warsaw and called on newly sworn in President Andrzej Duda not to sign legislation which “would set a six-month deadline for rightful owners or their heirs to participate in administrative proceedings for claims filed decades ago…and would not provide for sufficient notice.”

“In addition, the law would end the practice of appointing a trustee to represent an heir who has not been identified, and would strip away an owner’s right to seek the return of large categories of properties, including those in public use. The legislation would lead to the dismissal of claims unless all the owners of the property participate in the administrative proceeding within the six-month window,” the restitution body stated.

While Poland has returned communal property, they have not handled the issue of personal property confiscated by the Nazis and later nationalized by the Soviets well at all, Avital said.

While other countries in the former Warsaw Pact have instituted restitution laws regarding personal property, Poland has failed to do so.

“Other countries in the east bloc have been much more amenable…and have dealt with the issue in a swifter and more positive way,” she said. “I would say that when we are speaking about reclaiming property the worst place from our point of view is Poland.”

Poland’s pre-war Jewish population of 3.6 million means that there is a significant amount of property that would need to be returned if such legislation was passed and many in Poland have said that the resulting economic dislocations would be harmful to their country’s economy.

“For us the issue is not whether the legislation is constitutional or not but rather the fact that it is unjust,” WJRO chief of operations Gideon Taylor told the New York Jewish Week.

“The reality is that most people can’t recover their property because in order to succeed in court it is necessary to prove that the confiscation of their property by Poland’s former Communist government was incorrectly carried out because of a technical error,” he explained.

Last month forty two Congressmen sent Secretary of State John Kerry a bi-partisan letter urging him to address this issue.

“Beyond the physical and emotional trauma they suffered 70 years ago, and the impact that trauma continues to have on their lives, many Holocaust survivors in the United States and around the world live in poverty while knowing the property that was stolen from them and their family remains in the hands of governments and private owners who have no rightful claim,” the legislators wrote.

Several weeks later New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, together with New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer and California State Treasurer John Chiang wrote Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz to begin restitution in earnest.

Last year fifty British lawmakers sent a letter to then Prime Minister Donald Tusk demanding the passage of a restitution law.

“The restitution issue was neglected by all consecutive governments basically from the fall of Communism. I highly doubt that it will change right now,” Piotr Kadlcik, the immediate past president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland.

By SAM SOKOL

JPost.com