An American legal expert has discredited Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski's claims that Poland provided apt compensation for U.S.-based Holocaust survivors.
Speaking to Polish Radio earlier this month, Sikorski said that “the United States gave up the right to represent its citizens in such cases,” following a 1960 deal with Poland, by which Warsaw agreed to pay 40 million dollars to Washington over a twenty year period.
However, writing in The Jewish Week, Menachem Rosensaft, a law professor and President of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, says that Sikorski is “wrong on the law.”
In his article, 'Poland's Foreign Minister Misspeaks on Restitution,' Rosensaft states that the 40 million dollar sum (current value 300 million) did not cover the majority of U.S based Holocaust survivors, but rather those emigrants who were already U.S. Citizens prior to World War II, or who managed to secure citizenship prior to confiscation.
“This agreement was never intended to cover the claims of Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to the United States long after their property was first seized by the Nazis and then nationalized by the Communist regime,” Rosensaft writes.
“[It] was meant to provide compensation to individuals who were American nationals at the time their property was confiscated,” he adds.
The professor goes on to say that Prime Minister Donald Tusk's stated reasoning for stalling further compensation to dispossessed landowners is “spurious”, alluding to Tusk's claims that Poland “cannot afford it owing to the 'global financial crisis”.
Poland's current stalled bill, which would be applicable to former landowners of all religious denominations, be they Polish Catholics, Orthodox Jews or Armenian Catholics, has been in the pipeline since the collapse of communism.
After 1989, thousands of property claims were successfully won, but likewise, thousands remain outstanding.
Rosensaft also bashed Sikorski, whose wife Anne Applebaum is a distinguished American historian of Jewish descent, for his alleged historical ignorance:
Countering Sikorski's claims that in occupied Poland, the Holocaust "was conducted against our will by someone else," Rosensaft stated that the foreign minister "could benefit from a history lesson," citing examples of Polish atrocities against Jews:
“Poles who hid Jews at the risk of their own lives were vastly outnumbered by those who denounced Jews to the Nazis, plundered their property, and shamelessly moved into the homes of Jewish families that had been deported to death and concentration camps,” he writes.
“In addition, the Polish people daily continue to reap benefits from properties worth millions upon millions of dollars that Jews had owned in Poland before 1939.” (nh)