Nadene Goldfoot
Warsaw,, Poland summoned the Israeli envoy, Tal ben-Ari Yaalon for a briefing on the new law.
The Polish deputy Foreign Minister, Pawel Jablonski, assailed Israel's "inappropriate" criticism of law barring restitution claims. The Polish bill could cut off World War II restitution claims in a very bitter diplomatic row.
The bill passed the lower house of parliament last week. It is intended to give greater legal certainty for the present day owners of the Jewish prewar properties. These properties have historical claims dating back to the Nazi German occupation. "It could effectively block the descendants of Jewish families from claiming properties left empty during the Holocaust. Israel has condemned the legislation as "IMMORAL"
"Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski, who insisted the new regulations do not bar any property claims, which should be made through courts. Poland also says it mustn't be made responsible for property seizures by Nazi Germany during its World War II occupation of Poland."
"Poland’s parliament is processing the changes to prevent ownership and other administrative decisions from being declared void after 30 years. It says this is a response to fraud and irregularities that have emerged in the restitution process. The changes still require approval from the Senate and the president.
The World Jewish Restitution Organization said it was “deeply disappointed” by Poland's response to the concerns."
"Jews did have claims on their own property but they were frozen during the Communist era. "Between 1952 and 1989 Poland was governed by a communist administration established after the Red Army's takeover of its territory from German occupation in World War II". Poland has never had a comprehensive law on restitution claims since the fall of Communism in 1989. Families have sought restitution or compensation, finding it has been a long and chaotic process. Poland has discovered in some cases, even fraudulent claims for restitutions, so they say. " What Poland is now proposing had been followed in the past and was a futile act, giving the Jews nothing.
This is a challenge to Israel's new government. "Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Sunday responded to comments made by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki last week in which he said that Poland would not “pay” for German crimes — “not one zloty, not one euro, not one dollar.”“Poland’s prime minister should check the facts again. On Polish soil millions of Jews were murdered and no law will erase their memory,” Lapid wrote."
Anti-Semitism in Poland ,Ukraine and the whole Pale of Settlement lasted from WWI throughout WWII. Chaim Weizmann (Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952) .had written to friends on November 29, 1918 that the newly liberated Poles there are tying to get rid of the Jews by the old and familiar method which they learnt from the Russians.
Hitler had written that when he was in Vienna, he had discovered the truth about the Jewish conspiracy to destroy the world of the "Aryan", by means of political infiltration and corruption, using their tool the Social Democratic Party and the working class. Marxism was a Jewish trap. This was all part of the hype to turn Poles into Jew haters.
By August, 1936, the Polish Ministry of Commerce in Warsaw, ordered all shops throughout Poland to include, as part of the shop sign, the name of the owner as it appeared on his birth certificate. This caused people to know if he was Jewish or not, providing incitement for the anti-Semite. Between 1921 and 1937, 395,223 Polish Jews emigrated. This was 10% of the Jews.
What the Poles kept hearing was Hitler's propaganda that the Jews were an evil disease, poisoning the blood of decent humanity, a conscious plague-bacillus infecting the pure, innocent "Aryan". Iran's Ayatollahs and presidents give off this same propaganda. Ben Helfgrott, a young Polish Jew remembers that at the age of 7, signs daubed on Jewish-owned shops in his home town of Piotrkow, "don't buy at Jewish shops', and "Jews Out', and the equally Nazi-echoing slogan, "get out to Palestine." So it didn't take just the Germans to cause the grief that Jews received, Mr. FM Pawel Jablonski. Poles were just as guilty and need to pay the consequences.
Post-invasion Poland, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Germans invaded Poland on Friday, September 1, 1939 and people saw on the German railway carriages that carried the Germans, the slogan: We're off to Poland---to thrash the Jews. As if the Poles needed help, here came an invader of both Jew and Pole. That night, recalled then 18 year old Alexander Wojcikiewicz, a Jew, Jews of Warsaw prayed as never before. The synagogue at Tlomackie Street was full to overflowing and large crowds stood and prayed outside. From the 1st day, Jewish soldiers fought alongside Polish soldiers in the battles for the frontier, and later, in the battles around Warsaw. Warsaw had more than 3,000 Jews among some 10,000 citizens killed during more than a week of intense aerial bombardment. On September 2nd, in Piotrkow, home of 15,000 Jews, Romek Zaks was killed, the 1st Jewish victim. ( I have 12 Zaks on my sister-in-law's tree with Deborah "Doba" Zaretsky Zak born in 1912 in Ekaterinaslav, Russia.).
In Kielce, home of more than 18,000 Jews, hundred were seized on the Day of Atonement morning, from some of the smaller synagogues in the city, and dragged to the market place. there, their beards were sliced off. Bareheaded, and in their fringed prayer shawls, they were forced to dig ditches. The men were ready to collapse. People were laughing at them. Someone remarked, "IF THERE IS A G0D,, LET HIM STRIKE THESE NAZIS DEAD. Late that night the Jews were set free.
In Piotrkow, the Day of Atonement was marked by another aspect of the new "Nazi order." The Germans forced several thousand Polish prisoners of war, many of them Jews, into the hall of the Jewish Religious School, and forbidding access to lavatories,, forced these thousands of men to relieve themselves in the school hall. They were then ordered to clean up the excrement with their prayer shawls, Holy books, and the curtains of the Holy Ark and embroidered covers of the Scrolls of the Law.
Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, more than 400,000 Jews in Warsaw, the capital city, were confined to an area of the city that was little more than 1 square mile.
Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. On November 16, 1940 the Jews were forced inside the area of the ghetto. Although a third of the city’s population was Jewish, the ghetto stood on just 2.4% of the city’s surface area. Masses of refugees who had been transported to Warsaw brought the ghetto population up to 450,000.
In November 1940, this Jewish ghetto was sealed off by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards, and anyone caught leaving was shot on sight. The Nazis controlled the amount of food that was brought into the ghetto, and disease and starvation killed thousands each month.
Surrounded by walls that they built with their own hands and under strict and violent guard, the Jews of Warsaw were cut off from the outside world. Within the ghetto their lives oscillated in the desperate struggle between survival and death from disease or starvation. The living conditions were unbearable, and the ghetto was extremely overcrowded. On average, between six to seven people lived in one room and the daily food rations were the equivalent of one-tenth of the required minimum daily calorie intake.
The Warsaw Ghetto, November 1941. Some 450,000 people, most of them Jews, were packed into an area of some 1.3 square miles, ten times the density of modern-day high-rise cities. Typhus was spreading like wildfire through the dirty, crowded streets of the ghetto. Typhus, the Nazis said, was why a ghetto was necessary in the first place; Jews spread disease. Ten of thousands lay ill and dying, and a harsh winter — when the sickness caused by the typhus bacterium is especially virulent — was still ahead. The Nazis blocked food and supplies from getting in. Thousands were dying from famine, and those who lived were more susceptible to infection and death. Then, inexplicably, miraculously, despite the ideal conditions for typhus’s spread, the disease ebbed away. Historians couldn’t explain it, and witnesses at the time called it miraculous.
The crowded ghetto became a focal point of epidemics and mass mortality, which the Jewish community institutions, foremost the Judenrat and the welfare organizations, were helpless to combat. More than 80,000 Jews died in the ghetto. In July 1942 the deportations to the Treblinka death camp began. When the first deportation orders were received, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Judenrat, refused to prepare the lists of persons slated for deportation, and, instead, committed suicide on July 23, 1942.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was a violent revolt that occurred from April 19 to May 16, 1943, during World War II. Residents of the Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Poland, staged the armed revolt to prevent deportations to Nazi-run extermination camps. The Warsaw uprising inspired other revolts in extermination camps and ghettos throughout German-occupied Eastern Europe.
The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. The genocide took the lives of three million Polish Jews, half of all Jews killed during the Holocaust.
Poland's relations with Israel were on a fair level following the aftermath of the Holocaust. In 1947, the PRL voted in favour of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which lead to Israel's recognition by the PRL on 19 May 1948.
However, by the Six-Day War, Poland severed diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967 and supported the Palestine Liberation Organization which recognized the State of Palestine on 14 December 1988. In 1989, PRL restored relations with Israel.
To aid and abet; that's what Poland did for the Germans to slaughter half of 6 million Jews. In the USA, to aid and abet makes Poland just as guilty of the crimes of out and out murder. Poland didn't just aid and abet, either. They joyfully did the crime. They believed in the crime. Just where do you get off, Poland, for not admitting to the truth?
Our paternal grandmother, Zlata Jermulowske, was from Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania that was taken over by Poland, being it was right on the border. Luckily, she immigrated to the USA much earlier on May 6, 1903, before 1924 when it was most difficult for Jews to enter the USA.
Resource:
added paragraph, 6/29/21 6:30am
The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_People%27s_Republic#:~:text=Between%201952%20and%201989%20Poland,occupation%20in%20World%20War%20II.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poland-israel-in-diplomatic-spat-over-polands-property-law/2021/06/28/dac804ac-d804-11eb-8c87-ad6f27918c78_story.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/topic/israel-poland-relations/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-hellish-warsaw-ghetto-social-distancing-and-hygiene-defeated-typhus/
https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2021-06-28/poland-israel-in-diplomatic-spat-over-polands-property-law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/warsaw-ghetto-uprising
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