I have the feeling that the above statement by Roman Knoll has been misunderstood by Chesnoff, and subsequently by 4thskorpion."...As early as 1943, a report of the Foreign Office for the Polish Government- in-Exile in London stated:
The return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is quite out of the question, even if the number of Jews is greatly reduced. The non-Jewish population has filled their places in the towns and cities; in much of Poland this is definitive and final in character. The return of masses of Jews would be perceived not as an act of restitution, but as an invasion against which they would have to defend themselves, even by physical means.51"
51. Statement of Roman Knoll, Polish Foreign Office in London in August 1943 in Richard Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves. How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in the History, (London, 1999), p. 179.
I doubt that when Knoll talked about the non-Jewish population filling the places of the Jews in the towns and cities, he was specifically referring to Poles taking possession of Jewish property.
I think it more likely that he was referring to the well-known historical fact that for centuries the Jews of Poland had constituted a socio-economic caste that had performed certain urban economic functions such as trade and artisanry, and that their domination of that socio-economic niche had created an obstacle to the surplus peasant population moving into the towns and taking up urban functions, thereby perpetuating the rural over-population that plagued Poland.
Knoll meant that, with the destruction of the Jewish population by the German occupiers, the socio-economic niche formerly occupied by them had become vacant, and non-Jews were now moving into it, performing the functions traditionally performed by the Jews. That is a point that I have often made on this Forum; the real benefit to ethnic Poles from the elimination of the Jewish population was not so much that they could live in the Jews' houses or wear their underpants, but that they had new economic opportunities, enabling them to leave the land and take up urban occupations.
It is noteworthy that Knoll made his statement in 1943, in that it shows that while the German occupation was still firmly in place, Poles were moving in to do the jobs previously done by the Jews whom the occupiers had killed or deported. That process was facilitated by the Germans themselves, who realised that their destruction of the Jews had created a dire shortage of skilled artisans, and that they needed to give technical training to Poles so as to ameliorate that shortage; thus the Germans created technical colleges for Poles so as to educate a skilled workforce (for the German benefit of course).
Once the German occupiers had gone, the process of turning Polish peasants into skilled tradesmen continued under the new Communist government, thereby relieving the perennial problem of rural over-population and under-employment.