Restitution and the "Gold train"

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The main reasons that so many Jews lost everything were not the Poles, as some presumably ideologically motivated historians claim but because:
- the Soviet Union annexed a large part of Poland. The Poles and the Jews living there were asked to leave. Of course anybody could renounce his/her Polish citizenship and stay. But people generally didn't want to do that for obvious reasons.
- Warsaw was razed to the ground. Over 10% of all Polish Jews lived there before the war. Among those who survived the percentage was even higher for various reasons.

But that wasn't anything new then, Poland was destroyed, and millions of people had nowhere to live. For them the only hope were so called Regained Territories.
For the Jews a few towns (in the same region) were allocated: Dzierżoniów, Wałbrzych, Bielawa, Legnica, Kłodzko. For some time there was even talk about some kind Jewish autonomy there.

It should be mentioned that the new former German territories were civilizationally superior to their old places.
Basically those people exchanged thatched roofs and bottomless mud for nice, modern homes, houses, villages, cities.
And it should be added those people were given new houses, homes, workshops, doctors offices, villas - according to their professions and needs.
Given - like in for free.

Free for everybody even for a Jew who lost his home because some Pole took it.
And that old home was still his, he only had to expend some effort to recover it.

This is how those people worked and lived:

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more here:

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more from the land of anti-semites.

From the album: "Zvei Jahr Judisher Jeshuv in Niederslizsesia, 1945-1947" (Jewish Settlement in Lower Silesia, 1945-1947) by Bronisław Adler.

An excursion with babies in the city. Jewish mothers with their babies in Dzierżoniów:

A Teacher and pupils in a lesson in a Hebrew school:

A children's theater troupe in rehearsals or a performance:

teachers and pupils in a lesson in a Jewish school:

Jewish Settlement in Lower Silesia - teachers and pupils in a lesson in a Jewish school.jpg (36.45 KiB) Viewed 640 times

Celebrating the transfer of a flag between DP youth groups in Lower Silesia after the war:

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Polish Jews in the fifties and sixties.

Jewish clubhouse in Szczecin:

Jewish scouts in Poronin:

a wedding:

young Jewish people:

a Jewish rock band from Szczecin - Następcy Tronów:

singing an anti-war song - Tears of Vietnamese Children:

Where is my father, where is my mother
Wietnamese children are asking the world
those from the South, and those from the North

[4thskorpion]

..and then once again a Polish state sponsored anti-Semitic campaign in 1967-68, which drove as many as 20,000 Jews from the country!

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Not by the Polish State but by a fraction in the Polish communist party.
It wasn't anti-Semitic but an anti-intellectual and then an anti-Israeli campaign. The later against the claimed Israeli aggression on its neighbours.
It's main goals was to suppress Polish political demands and purging of Jewish and other officials, ex-Stalinists, high-ranking rival communists of that fraction.

It was a major Polish crisis and tragedy - but it seems the natives don't matter, again.

The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968 or March events (Polish: Marzec 1968; wydarzenia, wypadki marcowe) pertains to a major student and intellectual protest action against the government of the Polish People's Republic.
The crisis resulted in the suppression of student strikes by security forces in all major academic centres across the country and the subsequent repression of the Polish dissident movement.
It was also accompanied by a mass emigration following an antisemitic (branded "anti-Zionist") campaign waged by the minister of internal affairs, General Mieczysław Moczar, with the approval of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka of the Polish United Workers' Party. The protests coincided with the events of the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia – raising new hopes of democratic reforms among the intelligentsia. The unrest culminated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968.

[4thskorpion]

Not by the Polish State but by a fraction in the Polish communist party.
It wasn't anti-Semitic but an anti-intellectual and then an anti-Israeli campaign.

Antisemitism-in-the-postwar-Period.png (94.27 KiB) Viewed 612 times

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Well, a primary-source-shy and generally devoid of sources political publication, so it's not a crime to use Wikipedia:

The Soviet and Polish communists were troubled by the establishment of Israel and its ensuing success and worried by their perception of shifting loyalties of people of Jewish descent within the ranks of the communist parties and establishments. They saw it as their domestic component of the global Zionism problem.

However, only the events of 1967 and the Soviet dependence altered the relatively correct relations between People's Poland and Israel and gave rise to an anti-Jewish campaign of hate in Poland.

As the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War unfolded in June, the Polish Politburo met on June 6 and made policy determinations, declaring condemnation of "Israel's aggression" and full support for the "just struggle of the Arab countries". Gomułka and Cyrankiewicz then went to Moscow on June 9 for a Middle East conference of communist leaders. The participants deliberated in a depressed atmosphere caused by a strategic defeat. The decisions made included the Warsaw Pact's continuation of military and financial support for the Arab states and the breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel, in which only Romania refused to participate.

And I have a question, morally based - for who the author is is rooting for?
The old Jewish apparatchiks with blood on their hands, or the new apparatchiks with blood on their hands, in that fight for power and leadership within that communist party?

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As to the tragedy of some of the Polish Jews - members of the Polish elites, in 1968 forced to forsake shitty apartments and jobs in one of the poorest European countries for apartments and jobs in Tel-Aviv, New York, London, Paris.
The Poles had to hijack a plane or row across the sea to Sweden for that.
Well, a tragedy...

But this is boring, let's talk about the Jews who stayed, fought and suffered the consequences - serving their country well.
First, student leaders in March 1968:

Adam Michnik.jpg (6.08 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Henryk Szlajfer.jpg (3.45 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Seweryn Blumsztajn.jpg (5.64 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Józef Dajczgewand.jpg (5.99 KiB) Viewed 597 times

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Members of the Committee for Social Self-defence KOR (1976-1977):

Aniela Steinberowa.jpg (4.9 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Marek Edelman.jpg (6.33 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Siergiusz Kowalski.jpg (2.78 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Ludwik Cohn.jpg (9.44 KiB) Viewed 597 times

Adam Michnik.jpg (4.99 KiB) Viewed 597 times

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Let's not forget the final epic battle between Polish Jews (1980-1989):
in this corner - leaders of the Solidarity Movement:

Adam Michnik.jpg (17.94 KiB) Viewed 590 times

Bronisław Geremek.jpg (27.87 KiB) Viewed 590 times

in that corner - the face of the communist regime in Poland:

Jerzy Urban.jpg (35.53 KiB) Viewed 589 times

sources: wikipedia

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Earlier, opinions of Jan Gross, a man known for his inability to see the forest for the trees were posted.
He says that the people of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland lack empathy, and they were always like that as illustrated by his unsupported claim that the Poles killed more Jews than Germans.

This article by an Israeli writer Benny Ziffer neatly illustrates the mistakes (one might say knee-jerk reactions) people like Jan Gross and many others make, trying to write about Holocaust and trying to judge the people of Eastern Europe:

I could not bring myself to pity the refugees who were seen streaming across the roads of Europe.

I’ve no doubt I have lost the ability for compassion as a direct result of the French education I received. Was it the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said that compassion is an extension of our egotism? I recall “Is compassion moral?” being one of the most common questions on the French matriculation exam in philosophy. The student is expected to answer that compassion is largely no more than the instinct for convenience, that it frequently has no connection to morality, and that rational people must avoid the pitfall of their convenience instinct.

It is absolutely clear to me that the Hungarian prime minister is nationalist and right wing, and thumbs his nose at what is being said about him and his country. As opposed to Germany, which is more concerned about its image than anything else, he doesn’t care when people say his cynical and compassionless stand on the refugees – he also claims they are only pretending to be refugees – shows his country in an inhumane light. To my mind, this should be appreciated, since he is revealed as a person who understands the extent of the damage wrought in this world by postmodern illusions, which have accustomed us to deny the essence and relate only to image and the way things look.

[His] logic is that Europe has amassed bitter experience with the Muslim population multiplying there and taking advantage of Western tolerance to undermine the foundations of liberalism and the assurance of Westerners of the rightness of their path. Therefore, one would have to be crazy to put a healthy head into this sickbed and accept more Muslims, who will continue to subvert Europe from within.

Does this mean [he] is racist and Islamophobic? Or our prime minister, who declared that Israel wouldn’t take in Syrian refugees? My answer to this comes straight from the words of the renowned French writer Michel Houellebecq, who for more than a decade has been waging a literary and intellectual crusade against Islam. When he was sued at the time for racism and Islamophobia, he argued that a person who defends his cultural values against those who threaten them cannot be called racist. He said he had no problem with migrants from Arab countries who wholeheartedly adopt French values. His problem is that many of these people, instead of adopting the values of their host continent, barricade themselves in values that contradict the essence of Europe.

[Annelie]

Well this thread has gone astray...

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Not quite , the sentiment expressed here is that Poland, an anti-semitic country, deserves to be punished by the deceivingly named restitution process - seen by many as nothing more than punitive damages.

This anti-semitism is shown by books like the already mentioned Anti-Semitism in the Postwar Period.
Those books scan the history of some country and increment a counter by one per every Jew harmed.

I'm only trying to show that the lives of the Polish Jews weren't much different from the lives of the rest of the population, and the madness of such a counting.
And that those people usually were harmed because they lived and were active politically in Poland (historically a rather unpleasant country to live for everybody) not because they were Jews.

[4thskorpion]

The Polish Town That Refuses to Face Its anti-Semitic Past

From "“The Crime and the Silence,” by Anna Bikont, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 532 pages. 15 Sep 2015"

Again and again, Bikont encounters ears of Jewish financial claims against Jedwabne.

“‘The Jews are about to come and take what belongs to them’ is a phrase I hear all the time,” she writes. If it belongs to them, one might ask, why can’t they take it? To this day, Poland is the only major European country that has no Holocaust restitution law, and numerous Jewish homes in Jedwabne remain in the hands of families who illegally occupied them in 1941. The silence to which Bikont’s title refers masks a continuing injustice.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-1.676334

Even former Polish President Komorowski said in April 2011 that “the lack of a bill on re-privatization is a disgrace for Poland. If such a law is passed, I will not hesitate to sign it.”...and a good job he wasn't holding his breath.