Talk:Property restitution in Poland

Soviet Union, antisemitism

@Volunteer Marek: Please explain these removals.[1] François Robere (talk) 20:28, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I did, in my edit summaries. All the property that was expropriated by the Nazis or nationalized by the Communists belonged to Polish citizens, so not sure what the purpose of assigning ethnic identity here is. Also, it’s just simply not true that the bill “prohibits restitution of property”. In fact, that’s pretty ridiculous assertion - hence the POV and dubious tags. Volunteer Marek 20:31, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek: RS make that distinction, RS mention antisemitism, and RS mention the Soviets. Ask the RS, not me.

What's your justification for removing sourced material?[2] If you think it's inaccurate, fix it. François Robere (talk) 20:37, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

The bill does not “prohibit the restitution of property”. I did fix it. By removing false information. Volunteer Marek 21:22, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

No, Marek. Removing relevant, well-sourced information is not "fixing". If you think the text is inaccurate, rephrase it. François Robere (talk) 21:26, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

No, Francois, none of the sources say that it “prohibits the restitution of property” hence the information is NOT actually “well sourced”. The Wikipedia text you added was just plain false. Rather than edit warring how about you provide the quotes here which allegedly support that contention? Volunteer Marek 21:32, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

And the Beker source obviously does not mention this law so that’s a pretty clear case of POV WP:SYNTH. Volunteer Marek 21:35, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Beker wasn't cited for this law.

No one's stopping you from rephrasing the text instead of removing it, Marek (recall WP:PARTR). How would you describe this law? François Robere (talk) 21:39, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I will. I would describe it as “putting a 30 year time limit on appealing administrative decisions made by special administrative bodies in a process that has proven itself to be rife with corruption”. Probably add a bit info about the secondary/underground market in fake claims where someone who bought a claim on property from someone who bought a claim on property from someone who bought a claim on property from someone who maybe kind of possibly had some connection to some pre war property that was destroyed during the war if they didn’t forge the documents out right aspect of the whole situation. Oh and the fact that many long time residents, a good number of them quite poor, have been evicted from homes their families have been living in for generations because of this corrupt process.

So yeah, I’ll try to add and rephrase some stuff. In the meantime, please don’t edit war. You do need consensus for inclusion and besides, like I said, the info you added is not only false, but none of the sources actually support the claim you were adding. Which is indeed a misrepresentation of sources. Volunteer Marek 22:03, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I've restored the material with your phrasing, and a whole bunch of other sources.

Feel free to add whatever you see fit. As you know, I'm a friendly editor and am not going to indiscriminately delete your additions like some editors do. François Robere (talk) 10:32, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Where is the Property restitution article?

This article suggests this is an international concept, but where is the Property restitution analyzing this (legal?) concept and country by country situation? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:42, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

There's restitution with various links, but no country-by-country analysis. François Robere (talk) 10:36, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

It might be better to start from such an overview rather than a subarticle like this which is more likely to have problems with notability, neutrality, and so on. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:52, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Piotrus there is overview of restitution efforts in [3] Reprywatyzacja w Polsce i w innych państwach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. Piotr Makarzec Studia Iuridica Lublinensia 2 (2003). In general they are very small and I was surprised that they are much limited in both financial and timeframe scope.--MyMoloboaccount (talk) 21:01, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

See also

VM removed Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act of 2017 amd Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, but I think they can be restored? Oh, I also added a pl interwiki. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:46, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

 Done François Robere (talk) 10:34, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Well, I didn't say 'restore them', just suggested we should discuss this. I'd like to hear VM's view on why he thought those links were bad? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:46, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

An article reflecting sensational nature of tabloid news rather than scholarly research

Sigh...I will keep it short as I am undergoing painful medical treatment but to summarize:

• The article is badly written.It fails to point out major issues of the restitution in Poland while focusing unduly on recent sensationalist news.
• The main issue in property restitution was German property not Jewish one of which there was actually quite little overall(some historians estimate it as little as just 10-15% of claims[4])
• The article paints a picture of somehow Poland blocking people from getting compensation from lost property which is untrue. There were thousands of cases were this happened.
• In 90s and early 00's the whole issue became identified with organized crime and enormous fraud taking place regarding property claims, especially in Warsaw. Especially notorious were supposed claimants leaving abroad who would have to be 100-130 years old and only contacted through their "representatives".
• It is estimated that tens of thousands of people were thrown out in that period based on false property restitution claims, and there were even cases people were murdered.
• There is legislation called Mala ustawa reprywatyzacyjna which was created as reaction to the widespread fraud and abuses.
• The article fails to mention legislation regarding mienie zabuzanskie which is also major topic in history of this issue.
• In general restitution claims compensations aren't that big in surrendering countries, actually in many cases they are just state bonds of limited value.

I suggest adding information from:

[5] Reprywatyzacja w Polsce i w innych państwach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. Piotr Makarzec Studia Iuridica Lublinensia 2 (2003)

[6] Reprywatyzacja a konflikt interesów ekonomicznych jednostek i państw - Polska na tle pozostałych krajów transformacji . Ekonomia i Prawo, 2012. Anna Moszyńska

[7] Krzysztof Patkowski Uniwersytet im. A. Mickiewicza, Poznañ Realizacja programu reprywatyzacji w Polsce w latach 1989–2001 (aspekt polityczny i ideologiczny)

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprywatyzacja_w_Polsce

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprywatyzacja_w_Warszawie

Interestingly there is a list of all the treaties similar to Polish-US Claims treaty with other countries signed by Poland

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umowy_indemnizacyjne

--MyMoloboaccount (talk) 20:59, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

The part regarding the recent restitution law needs to also include the issue of "wild reprivatizations" which actually led up to the decision by the high court to implement the law, as well as the fact that the law just codifies the decision of that court. Might also be worth mentioning that the law passed with almost unanimous support from all political parties (with some abstaining). Volunteer Marek 21:52, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Problematic sentence in lead

"Efforts to restore property often caused a resurgence of antisemitism". Can we have quotations from the cited sources to verify they support this claim? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:08, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

It's SYNTH anyway. Volunteer Marek 06:15, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

How do you know that it's SYNTH if you haven't seen the sources? François Robere (talk) 11:12, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm not the one who asked for quotations. Volunteer Marek 02:50, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

No, you're the one who made the accusation. Have you read the sources before you did? François Robere (talk) 08:50, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Avi Beker, The plunder of Jewish property during the Holocaust, 2001. pp. 9-10:

Efforts made to return property in Eastern Europe have caused a resurgence of antisemitism. In Hungary, Romania and Poland this has found expression in the media and in various publications. Quite often, when meeting with leaders of the WJRO, government representatives have excused the delay in negotiations by claiming that antisemitism could erupt if Jewish property were to be restored. It is interesting to note that certain antisemitic elements in Polish-American circles attempted to hinder the process of property restitution by turning directly to Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, accusing him of being too ‘conciliatory’ to the Jewish groups. The Polish President rejected the accusations and argued that there was no place for racial discrimination and hostility towards religious and national minorities.

Volha Charnysh, Historical Legacies of Interethnic Competition, 2015. p. 1836:

Generational transmission mechanisms can be reinforced by economic incentives (Acharya et al., 2015b). There is considerable evidence that material considerations contributed to the perpetuation of anti-Semitism in post-WWII Poland. As Jews were killed or transferred to ghettos and camps during the war, local Poles took advantage of the situation by expropriating Jewish property (Michlic-Coren, 2000; Törnquist-Plewa, 2006). The share of possessions acquired and the number of beneficiaries were roughly proportional to the size of the local Jewish population. After the war, anti-Semitic attitudes and violence acquired a new purpose—legitimizing the right to the Jewish property and ensuring that the Jewish survivors would emigrate and abandon restitution claims (Gross, 2006).

Property motives have been used to explain the surge in anti-Semitic killings in the late 1940s as Jews returned home from concentration camps or from hiding. Engel (1998) finds written descriptions of 327 Jewish victims of 130 incidents in 102 locations between September 1944 and September 1946 alone.

Tokarska-Bakir (2012) chronicles the experience of a group of Holocaust survivors who after the war returned to Klimontów, a village that had counted 4,500 residents in 1939, 69% of them Jewish. Upon examining the records of home ownership from the 1950s, she finds that at least 125 properties changed hands due to the combination of the Holocaust, the post-1945 murder of returning Jews, and the emigration of possible successors.

Törnquist-Plewa (2006), in turn, draws a link between expropriation motives and contemporary anti-Semitism. In her study of Szydłowiec, a town of 15,000 residents where Jews made up 75% of the pre-WWII inhabitants, she notes that some residents to this day worry that Jews will return to claim their property. She also shows that the older generation managed to transmit anti-Semitic prejudice to the local schoolchildren.

Rafał Pankowski, The Resurgence of Antisemitic Discourse in Poland, 2018. pp. 11-12:

According to a widespread view in the Polish media, the Jewish opposition to the Polish history law has been mostly motivated by a hidden desire for financial gains at the expense of Poland. For example, the headline on one of the most widely circulated Polish newspapers, Super Express, proclaimed on February 3, 2018: “What the Jews want from Poland: forests, factories, houses—worth even one trillion.”

Sometimes the assertion was made subtly, sometimes explicitly. One example of a thinly veiled accusation of materialistic intentions at the core of the protests against the history law was expressed in an interview with Patryk Jaki, a deputy minister of justice who spearheaded the legislation. The headline on February 9, 2018 consisted of the Jaki quote: “We cannot call the Israeli embassy before passing each piece of legislation and ask if they kindly agree to it.” In the interview, asked if the reprivatization [restitution] issue is not the main source of the problem we are facing today, Jaki admitted that “there are many commentators, also abroad, who point to the fact these issues can be linked; it is about big money, but it is easier to attack [Poland] from an ethical position than from a financial position, because it is easier to justify such an attack.”

On February 5, in an interview on state radio, Senator Jerzy Czerwiński (PiS) made the assertion more explicit still when he said: “Another issue is the reaction of the Jewish state…and the political circles inside Israel. Maybe you can call it a conspiracy theory, but I think this was a nervous reaction, not signaled earlier; we heard that representatives of Israel were consulted on the bill. I think this reaction results from a hidden agenda, after all we know that Jewish circles, including American ones, but mostly the State of Israel, are trying to get restitution of property or at least compensation.”

The same claim was made by another pro-government MP, Adam Andruszkiewicz (a former chairman of the extreme-nationalist youth group the Młodzież Wszechpolska [All-Polish Youth]), “This conflict is linked with the reprivatization law. There are opinions that it is because Poland wants to finally solve the problem of inheritance. Some circles connected with Israel are unhappy about it.”37 MP Janusz Sanocki made a similar comment for the Russian Sputnik website: “We, the Polish people, cannot allow German guilt to be transferred on to us, especially because it is followed by Jewish property claims. Some Jewish circles abuse this tragedy and try to obtain financial gain from it.”

Significantly, an analogous view was expressed during a press conference given by the chair of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, to discuss the issue of the new history law: “The reason for the controversy is probably heirless Jewish property. Those Jewish organizations…would like to seize this heirless Jewish property for themselves in order to promote knowledge about the Holocaust or implement their programs.” Israeli Ambassador Anna Azari publicly refuted the archbishop’s interpretation by saying that “combining these two issues represents nothing but an antisemitic stereotype, as if the Jew is not able to fight for his honor, just constantly thinks about money.”

The allegation of financial motivation on the part of the Jews is often accompanied by various other offensive stereotypes and accusations, sometimes seemingly unrelated. Another representative of the Catholic Church, the aforementioned Henryk Zieliński, stated during a TVP Info broadcast: “We have to link it all to Act 447 [a US Congress legislative initiative on monitoring the issue of Holocaust-era property restitution] and the topic of reprivatization….The president [Andrzej Duda] has no other option than to sign the [Polish memory] law because it is a question of our sovereignty…. And then there is the question of the biography of George Soros and what he did as a Jew during the war: Can’t he be called a szmalcownik? [an offensive term denoting an individual who blackmailed Jews during the occupation].”

Piotr Semka, a well-known journalist, responded by saying: “The Israel lobby may try to block funding for the stationing of US soldiers in Poland….This pressure is extremely brutal so we must stand firm.” Another pundit on the same program, Maciej Pawlicki, said: “For Poland it is a matter of survival in the year of the 100th anniversary of its independence…. Actually, Israel’s policy is antisemitic in the long term.”40

François Robere (talk) 11:12, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. I think you are right there antisemitism should be mentioned, but a, it concerns only Jewish property claims, not those related to non-Jewish actors. B, I think various controversies should be discussed in their own section and added to the lead only if they seem due enough. I attempted to do so by creating a section on controversies and briefly mentioning in the lead this issue is controversial, without giving primacy to any particular controversy (and there are others - undue favoritism of the Catholic church, corruption and fraud, as well as tenant rights, to name just a few). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:14, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Of course it does. That's a major part of the problem.

A separate section might be due, but note two of these problems (favoritism of the Catholic church and tenant rights) are also related to antisemitism, and there's an argument to be made for corruption and fraud as well - by virtue of the Polish governments never having streamlined the process out of fear of Jewish claims. François Robere (talk) 09:00, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Neutrality problem: undue focus on Jewish claims

The issue of property restitution is not limited to Jewish claims. The article is currently unduly focused on this one aspect (although arguably I'd concur that this aspect is the most visible and controversial, internationally). I've been reviewing Polish language academic literature on this and its much more balanced, discussing problems with restitution to both Jews and non-Jewish parties, and various legal, historical and economic aspects of this issue that generally are not focused on the Jewish claims. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:07, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

There are lots of English sources on this (remember WP:NOENG). Is the non-Jewish aspect of this more prominent in those? François Robere (talk) 09:01, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Recent changes

@Piotrus:

1. [8] What's the contradiction in saying "they ignored them in 1989, and it took them four years to change it"? Also, Wiki isn't an RS
2. [9][10][11][12] When I brought multiple current sources for current events you said you'd prefer to see something based on academic sources,[13] and here you use current sources for historical events on which we do have such sources?
3. [14][15][16][17] Can you give translations of the relevant parts?
4. [18] A singular incident? You objected to inclusion of much bigger incidents elsewhere,[19] so why put this here?
5. @Volunteer Marek: [20] MMA added this yesterday;[21] I trimmed and corrected it.[22] Can you explain to the lay reader what's the "principal amount", how much is "33% of principal", where is the "exonerated" bit in those sources, how were 10,169 suits settled if only 5,022 claims were recognized, and where does the source claim that "all compensation claims in US would be directed to and dealt with by the US government". Also, can you please CE the text you're restoring?
6. [23] Turns out MMA copied this contemporaneous source (1961) verbatim without citing it (p. 456 here). Surely you can do better? Also, what's the other source (a pre-print with zero citations on GS) used for?
7. [24] I don't necessarily object to the move, but you wrote that "it's unclear if the estimates are for private claims only" for a statement that clearly states "seized Jewish private property"?
8. [25] This is one of those statements that need qualifying lest they appear biased: most Jews who survived the war in Poland subsequently left, hence most claims by Jews would be filed from abroad, and limits on restitution from abroad would disproportionately affect Jews.
9. [26] This is a master's thesis?

François Robere (talk) 10:02, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're asking. What's confusing about 10,169 suits settled and 5022 claims recognized? Etc. Volunteer Marek 06:15, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

What's unclear? You restored a text that's only partly sourced, has linguistic errors, and looks more like a data dump than something a lay reader could understand. Please fix and clarify. François Robere (talk) 11:45, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

No, no I didn’t. Sigh. Ok. Re #5. The numbers and their presentations are pretty straightforwardly from a US DOJ. It’s more or less their words. There’s nothing confusing to them or most readers. Like I said, what’s so hard to understand about the fact that 10,169 suits were settled and out of those 5,022 claims recognized? You didn’t “trim and correct it”, you pretty much removed all pertinent info, including the part about Poland being “exonerated” by the agreement. Where is that in the source, you ask? It’s on page 456 of the given source, first two sentences of the second paragraph. Please actually read the source before making claims about it. #6 No, it is not true that MMA added the text without citing it, they just added the citation in their second edit [27]. Please actually read other users’ edits before reverting them. What are the “linguistic errors” that you mention? I’ll be happy to correct any, if such exist. Volunteer Marek 13:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

The numbers and their presentations are... from a US DOJ. It’s more or less their words You know what else is "their words"? "The Commission received approximately 20,000 registrations on FCSC Form 708 which had been prepared for this purpose."[28] Does it mean that we should quote it? No, because it's unreadable and uninformative.

There’s nothing confusing to them or most readers Said the guy who edits on the American economy, when most Americans are barely financially literate.[29]

what’s so hard to understand about the fact that 10,169 suits were settled and out of those 5,022 claims recognized The source doesn't say that 10,169 claims were settled, it says that 10,169 claims were filed. If only 5,022 awards were given, then 5,147 claims were rejected. "Rejection" ≠ "settlement".

Where is that in the source, you ask? It’s on page 456 of the given source, first two sentences of the second paragraph. That source was added by Piotrus after you restored the text[30][31] - the DOJ source says nothing of the sort. Why did you restore an unsourced statement? And while we're at it, why are you relying on a 1961 source when the process wasn't even completed until 1966? And how could you miss the fact that MMA copied a statements almost verbatim from the very paragraph you're now citing? Yes, please actually read the source before making claims about it.

What are the “linguistic errors” that you mention? I’ll be happy to correct any, if such exist. "between People's Republic of Poland and United States", "Poland paid... to US authorities", "the amount... being 33% of principal". These are pretty obvious errors, Marek. François Robere (talk) 14:33, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Notes