But Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk on Thursday said that the new US law would not carry any real consequences for Poland.
He said, under the new law, the US state department would have to monitor and annually report countries meeting their obligations under the Terezin Declaration.
The Terezin Declaration, signed by 46 countries in 2009, aimed to speed up the restitution of artworks and other private property that had been seized, stolen or coerced from people during the Holocaust era.
But the law, which was first put before Congress late last year, was strongly opposed by some Polish organisations in the United States.
Edward Jeśman, the director of the Polish American Congress of Southern California, said Poland and other countries in the region would have to pay monies for property that belonged to European Jewish Holocaust victims with no living descendants or legal heirs to unrelated Jewish organisations.
“It is about to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign nation and to try to pressure her to pay monies to undeserving pressure groups, under false pretences,” Jeśman said in an open letter to the US house of representatives.
He said the return of “‘heirless property’ to individuals or organisations who have not established a direct legal claim to such property, would be financially disastrous,” adding that it could Poland between USD 60-300 billion (PLN 215-1,000 billion), while the country had a GDP of USD 526 billion in 2017.
Meanwhile, Polish law states that ownership of “heirless assets” reverts to the state Treasury.
The European Shoah Legacy Institute, which was set up to oversee restitution under the Terezin Declaration, last year said that Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina lag behind the rest of Central and Eastern Europe in setting up restitution schemes to compensate for property confiscated during the Holocaust or Communist era.
But former Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski was last year quoted by Britain’s Guardian as saying: “Property restitution has been underway in Poland for well over two decades now. Property restitution is a process in which claimants’ ethnic or religious background is irrelevant: the Polish law treats everyone in the same manner.”
Poland was home to more about a third of Europe’s 9.5 million Jews before WWII, while in 1950 there were only some 45,000 Jews still in Poland, and Europe’s Jewish population numbered just 3.5 million, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (vb)
Source: IAR