Poland urged to act over old property claims (made by families who lost property to Nazis & Soviets)

[Turborama]

Source: BBC

April 02 2011 Last updated at 01:27 GMT

By Adam Easton, Warsaw -

Poland is postponing moves to partially compensate families who lost property during the upheavals of Nazi occupation and communism.

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, criticised the government's decision to suspend work on a law designed to address the historical property claims of Jews and other Polish citizens.

"As a moral challenge, any government must face this challenge and should not walk away and I would hope that the Polish government could do the same," Rabbi Schudrich told the BBC.

Earlier this month the Polish treasury ministry announced it had completed work on a compensation bill but it would not be sent to parliament because it would add a huge 18bn zloty (£4bn; $6.3bn) to the public debt.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12938349

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Justice delayed is justice denied

May these claims - as well as those of disenfranchised people around the world - never be allowed to expire.

[McCamy Taylor]

6. Yeah, and I have land in North Georgia illegally stolen from my Cherokee ancestors.

I want it all back, right now.

[cali]

10. that's a poor comparison.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[izquierdista]

3. How WRONG you are

You need to get that bullshit idea out of your head before it contaminates the rest of your thinking. Poland was one of the LEAST anti-Semitic places in Europe going back to the days of Kazimierz Wielki. A quick trip to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_III_the_Great) will inform you that he was centuries ahead of his time in bringing religious tolerance to Poland, which had the effect of drawing Jews from other places that were less welcoming. There was no "Polish Inquisition", with the Church burning Jews, heretics, and other "infidels". It is no accident that in the settlement pattern of Jews in Europe was concentrated in places which for a long time were under Polish/Lithuanian rule (including much of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia).

Well what about pogroms, you ask. I think you will find if you actually STUDY the history of the area instead of paint with a broad brush, that Jews provided a convenient scapegoat for Russian czars, Prussian aristocrats, Austro-Hungarian princes, and other assorted royalty to vilify to their subjects. And sure, some Poles have forgotten the legacy of their Kazimierz and have participated in the anti-Semitism cooked up around them, but as a group, they are the LAST people you should be pointing to.

[joshcryer]

4. Thanks.

[COLGATE4]

7. Wishful thinking coupled with historical inaccuracy. Pointing to

Kazmierz is interesting but modern history of the treatment of Jews in Poland (from the 1800's on) is one of continuous greater or lesser widespread antisemitism. This was allowed to flourish unchecked with the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in 1939, where the Einsatzgruppen were ably assisted in their 'labors' by Poles. It's also no coincidence that the extermination camps were located in Poland, where they received enthusiastic approval from the Jews former 'neighbors. (You may want to see the film "Shoah", which documents everyday Poles lining the tracks and spitting and cursing at the Jews as the cattle cars headed for Treblinka rambled by. Some of the more 'Christian' also offered to sell the Jews water in exchange for gold jewelry). While the Russian Czars certainly were no Jew lovers either and have their hands fully covered with enough blood for a lifetime, the Poles are anything but the lily-white accepters of Jews that you describe.

[emilyg]

12. This Pole thanks you.

[jbeing]

5. The Poles are just hoping...

...that enough survivors die off that it won't cost them anything. Let's not forget that many of them have made quite a nice profit from what was stolen. My parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. When they came home after the war, guess who had stolen everything? And guess who threatened them if they tried to get back what was their family's for generations? And guess who actually killed many of the survivors (after saying that Jews used children's blood to make Matzo - true story)? And guess who forced them to walk out of the Poland to safety in Germany (Safety in Germany?)? So guess who has the most to gain from pretending like nothing happened and paying lip-service to anyone who brings up the subject of Polish corruption, theft and collaboration with the Nazis?

That's the true meaning of Solidarity. They wanted the freedom and property back that the Russians stole from them. FROM THEM? What about what they stole from the Jews, Gypsies, Socialists and others sent to concentration camps? The word Omerta comes to mind - A Solidarity of Silence.

Nice sleight-of-hand by their government throwing this off on the Russians. I guess there were no Polish Communists. The Polish people have so much blood on their hands and have stolen so much that they should turn half the country into a prison and make the inmates work to compensate the Holocaust survivors to be let out to the free half. Then, imprison the other half, and still that would be ten times as merciful as the Poles were to the people Ghettoed and sent to camps. That's how bad it was. That's the guilt they share.

They worry about putting their government into debt. They have had a heavy blood debt since 1939. Seventy years later they haven't come close to repayment. If this was owed to the World Bank, what do you think would have been happening to Poland's economy right now?

The point -- You don't ask criminals and murderers to come up with their own punishment. No one is stepping up to act as judge for fear of offending Polish sensibilities and hurting their pocketbooks about old history. Now, most of the world is collaborating with the Poles to bury the past.

My mother used to say that every generation has it's own Holocaust -- from caves to camps. And no one seems to learn anything except how to be more efficient about genocide. She said that not one Pole ever even said "I'm sorry," let alone did anything about reparations. Murderous, thieving bastards!

[COLGATE4]

8. K&R

[Kolesar]

9. "Who?" and "Guess who?": you better tell us because you are truly obscure

You have an odd way of stating those references.

[jbeing]

11. Thought it was clear

that I spoke of the Poles. Did anyone else misunderstand about whom I writing?

If so, the Poles, the Poles, the Poles.

Is that clearer?

[emilyg]

13. My birth father ended up

in Auschwitz for hiding Jews. My mother had a kidney destroyed in a beating by the Nazi's for hiding Jews. We knew many priests who hid Jews in their churches.

[jbeing]

14. I feel for your family

But the vast majority of Poles were not so righteous.

Most hated Jews and were happy to see them go. Many took what was left behind and still hold onto the property they stole.

That is what I'm referring to. Even now, the government is playing games with the survivors.

Your family is to be respected and blessed for their courage.

[emilyg]

17. My love goes

to you and your family.

[COLGATE4]

15. People like your birth father and mother who suffered for protecting Jews

are exceptional people and should be recognized as such. I am somewhat more doubtful re the 'many priests who hid Jews in their churches'. There were a lot of people, including priests who apocraphyally claimed to have done that once the war was lost. For some of us it's rather hard to imagine how so many Polish Jews were eradicated with all the Poles falling all over themselves to protect them.

[emilyg]

16. You can doubt all you want. I was

there - you were not.

[jbeing]

18. Unfortunately

you were not the only one there. I lost an entire family - 3 generations gone. My mother and father were starved, beaten and nearly worked to death. I have nothing but respect and awe for anyone who managed to survive. Except those who enriched themselves at the their expense. And many of them are Poles. Many.

In no way do I want to disrespect you and your family. But there are others that deserve contempt.

[emilyg]

19. We all suffered

Holocaust: 3 Million Holocaust Victims Were Non-JewsSix million Polish citizens were killed during the Holocaust - only half were Jewish. ... three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly Catholic, ... 6 million Polish citizens, half of them Jews, were killed by the Nazis. ... many Poles were sent to concentration camps that virtually every Polish ...
www.holocaustforgotten.com/Lucaire.htm -

[jbeing]

20. So let me get this straight...

Since so many Poles were killed, it's okay for those that weren't to steal the Jewish (or anyone else's) property, threaten and kill the survivors on their return, and not offer any restitution? That's the topic of this discussion. Not who was treated the worst. It was no picnic for anyone, except those that have benefitted from stolen property, businesses and personal items.

[COLGATE4]

21. Linking to an unknown source which only cites the writings of a

deceased author is hardly authoritarian. The numbers quoted are highly suspect and give no cites to verify them, and the entire tenor of the link seems intended only to make the case that "why do people pay so much attention to the Jews? Poles were killed, too". While undoubtedly non-Jewish Poles suffered greatly during WWII, it is also true that many of the deaths can be attributed to the Russians who occupied Poland under the German-Russian non-aggression pact. The link is also based on heavily skewed facts, such as "of the first 400 inmates of Mauthausen, most were Poles". The Nazis did indeed consider Poles to be 'inferior', and planned for them to be slave laborers for the benefit of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, the killing apparatus of the Third Reich was dedicated from day one until the virtual end of the war to the extermination of the Jews.

[emilyg]

22. Then do your own research.

[emilyg]

23. My aplogies for hijacking this thread. I'm done.

[jbeing]

24. You did not

highjack the discussion. There's plenty of pain for all of us to share. I disagreed with your emphasis, not with your substance.

I was only trying to focus on the stolen lives and property. War is so damaging that it sometimes take generations to recover from the scars.

This is a subject that has dogged me since I was a child. It destroyed my father and later my mother. The one thing they repeated was to get back the property and things that the Nazis and Poles stole from us. I tried to and the more I learned, the more disgusted I became about the thefts and the collaboration of so many Poles with the Nazis. And they still refuse to make an effort at restitution.

Not all Poles are guilty, but there seems to be a lack of accepting responsibility for what the majority of Poles did -- much of it before, during and after WWII.