Bill to Return Confiscated Assets Is Blasted as a Half-Step Forward

Marta Juskowiak stood outside an elegant four-story apartment building confiscated from her family by Poland’s Communist government in 1956, and recalled a much earlier day when she first saw the Nazi soldiers who changed her world forever.

“In 1939 I was lying there on this balcony,” said Juskowiak, “and I was watching how the columns of Germans were walking on the street, after Warsaw was besieged and surrendered.”

Juskowiak, 70, has tried since the 1989 collapse of communism to recover the property. Now legal help, of sorts, is on the way: Poland’s powerful lower house of Parliament last week passed a bill that would return to original owners or heirs half--but only half--of the value of the property seized by the Nazis and Communists.

The legislation may be amended by the Senate but is expected to go in some form to President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who has not said whether he would sign or veto it. As currently written, only people who were Polish citizens at the end of 1999 would receive restitution.

Juskowiak sees the legislation as a flawed step forward. “It’s 10 years too late,” she said. “The fact that Poland took so long to take action on the ownership issue is a world scandal. If [the president] doesn’t sign it despite its weak points, then we won’t have any law at all.”

She also predicted that the eligibility ban on non-Poles will not withstand international scrutiny and will be changed. The government of Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek had drafted the bill without imposing citizenship restrictions, but it was amended at the insistence of right-wing lawmakers.

Tomasz Wojcik, a member of Parliament who pushed hard for the bill, said its passage “will introduce justice and at least in part compensate those who lost their property after the war.”

The Treasury Ministry has estimated that claims under the law could cost the government $11 billion, compared with potential lawsuit compensation claims of as much as $67 billion if no action is taken.

Supporters of the bill argue that, besides meeting demands of fairness and justice, the law will encourage investment by clearing up title to properties under dispute. In central Warsaw, for example, development of a huge square surrounding the Communist-era Palace of Culture has been stymied in part by claims of former property owners.

Critics who say the bill goes too far argue that Poland cannot afford the cost. They stress that many people suffered in different ways under the Nazis and Communists, and suggest that the money could be better spent on education, health care or other pressing social needs.

Others blast the bill for leaving out non-Poles and for returning only half of confiscated assets. They say beneficiaries may need to choose between buying back the other 50% of their property from the current owners or accepting compensation coupons of uncertain value from the government.

“This law deprives about 40,000 to 50,000 people of their rights,” argued Miroslaw Szypowski, president of the Polish Union of Property Owners. “And who are these people? Polish emigres who left Poland not because they wanted to, but for political reasons, because of what happened here after World War II. Today their children and grandchildren cannot get their property back. This is absurd. It’s a slap in their face.”

The citizenship requirement hits especially hard at the heirs of Polish Jews, Szypowski added.

“This is really disgusting,” he said. “It’s a group of people who suffered the most. The Nazis killed them. Then the Polish state took their property away and now doesn’t want to give it back.”

Melvyn Weiss, an attorney involved in a high-profile class-action suit in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn that seeks the return of Polish assets to Holocaust survivors or their heirs, called the law “a first step in the right direction.”

“For Poland to take its proper place in the international community, making a gesture only to its own citizens . . . doesn’t serve the purpose,” he said.

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Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.