POLAND

Reopening Old Wounds

A suit renews the debate over Poles and the Holocaust

By Andrew Nagorski

THE accusations, filed in a New York City court in June, couldn't have been blunter. Lawyers representing 11 American and British Jews seeking the return of family property in Poland claimed the Holocaust took place in Poland because of the Poles. "Germany took advantage of the anti-Semitic climate in Poland by locating the notorious death camps there," the class-action suit maintained. After the end of the war, Poland pursued "ethnic and racial cleansing" to seize and profit from Jewish property. Violence against Jews was "part of a systematic scheme to wipe out all traces of the Jewish race," the lawyers concluded.

The Jewish experience in Poland has long been a sensitive topic. And since the country's largest daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, published the full text of the lawsuit earlier this month, the debate has sparked again. This time, though, many Polish and foreign Jews have rallied to Poland's defense. Not that they deny the case for Polish Jews and Catholics who had their property confiscated. Poland has so far frustrated most claimants by failing to pass legislation for the restitution of property seized during and after the war. But the broader accusations have triggered a furious counterattack. "Many years of my life have passed in the shadow of the Shoah, which took the lives of almost all my family," wrote Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik, a famed ex-dissident. Noting that he has felt the sting of anti-Semitism on several occasions, Michnik nonetheless denounced the lawsuit as "a collection of outrageous lies."

There's no doubt modern Polish history is marred by a strong, sometimes violent strain of anti-Semitism. But Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (left) calls it "irresponsible" to assert that anti-Semitism explains why Poland became a Nazi killing ground. "The Germans set up their concentration camps there because that's where most of the Jews lived," he says, referring to the more than 3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the war, nearly 90 percent of whom perished. "It was a matter of transportation, which is what German documents show." The Polish chapter of Children of the Holocaust protested that the charges made in the class-action suit overlooked the many Poles who risked their lives to save Jews. Others were offended by the seeming confusion of perpetrators and victims. "We're talking about a country that was raped by the Nazis and raped by the communists," says Bobby Brown, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (right).

The American Jewish Committee dismisses the lawsuit's treatment of postwar Poland as "unquestionably bad history." Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader of the Polish Jewish community, insists that only "a wild conspiracy theory" could argue that the communist governments wanted to expel all Jews. "There were Jews in high positions of authority," he says. "These Jewish communists didn't want to allow Jewish emigration." Noting that many Polish Catholics and Jews have worked hard in recent years to sort out their tortured history, Konstanty Gebert, the editor of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz, says that the lawsuit's "repugnant, shameful, indecent" language threatens to undermine those efforts.

The lawsuit's other main failing: it treats restitution as a specifically Jewish problem. After World War II, Poland's borders shifted westward and the new Soviet-imposed communist government confiscated property from both Catholics and Jews. Today's free Polish government estimates that it may face about 170,000 claims. Miroslaw Szypowski, the president of the Polish Union of Property Owners, insists the real number may be much higher. About 2,000 claimants, including some Jews, have won back property in court battles, but most remain stymied by the lack of legislation. Szypowski's group is now collecting the names of members who want to become co-claimants in the New York lawsuit. "We fully support the legal case, but we reject its language," says Szypowski.

The Polish government has taken notice and promised to accelerate work on its "reprivatization" bill. "This is such an important problem that it must be dealt with quickly," says Deputy Treasury Minister Krzysztof Laszkiewicz. Mel Urbach, one of the lawyers in the New York lawsuit, is also taking a more conciliatory tone. He wants to broaden the suit to include the Polish claimants, and he talks about redrafting it to take account of the criticisms. "The way the complaint was filed initially was not very sensitive to the suffering of the Poles," he says. "We've been educated since then and this document will be much more balanced." But for everyone involved, it's been a painful learning process.