Terezin Declaration: Holocaust Era Assets

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness very much for this debate and the opportunity to discuss this delicate and deeply emotional subject. I thank her for her kind words about the efforts that the British Government have been making and continue to make in this area.

The 46 states that signed the Terezin declaration in 2009 made a landmark moral commitment to address some of the injustices related to the Holocaust, including the wrongful seizure of property from families and individuals across our continent, particularly in the eastern part. The declaration set out the principles and measures for the signatories to implement not just in the field of immovable property, which we are focusing on today, but also looted art, Judaica, social welfare for Holocaust survivors, open archives and Holocaust remembrance and research. The guidelines on best practice for property restitution that were adopted by individual signatories were intended to be turned into law and practice.

Like many noble Lords gathered in the House today, the Government are frustrated with the lack of real progress since that declaration was signed. The Government, the noble Baroness and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Janner, played a significant role in the original discussions, and we will again be one of the main actors in the review conference later this year to move its implementation forward. The review conference can provide much needed renewed momentum for property and art restitution across Europe. We are actively involved in preparatory meetings, pressing for practical and meaningful outcomes at the conference. We have suggested case studies from those states that have made good progress and practical seminars with lawyers and financing experts, designed to help member states tackle some of the commonly raised issues.

In researching this speech, I was fascinated and moved by the history of the recovery by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, of some of her family silver. One gets a sense of the importance of history, identity and continuity that that can provide, and the difficulty of being able to re-establish it. It is a wonderful story and I recommend to others that they look into it. Some of the family silver had been hurriedly given to a Polish neighbour who had buried it in their garden, and who discovered only when he read the story of the noble Baroness’s search for the remains of her family property that there was a link and he could at last find someone to whom he could restore it.

We are all conscious of the complexities and, I should say, the agonies of Polish history. Two summers ago I read Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands on what happened to all the peoples between Germany and Russia—all the many Jews who lived in that area but also Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians and others. I note that the family of the wife of Norman Davies, who assisted in the recovery and return of the noble Baroness’s silver, lost their property in what is now Ukraine and were forced to move into other vacant property in what is now Poland—everyone has been forced to push west, of course—that for all they knew might well have been confiscated from Jewish Poles.

The status of Polish property records compared with the Austrian ones, which the noble Baroness rightly holds up as a model, are rather less good than they should be, for fairly obvious reasons—the amount of destruction that Poland suffered during the war. The Polish archives are gradually being digitised but there is still a long way to go. In many parts of Poland, with the boundaries having been shifted so sharply, the layers of claims to ownership are extremely complex and contested.

I also recommend the memoir written by the current Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, about his family’s attempt to buy and restore a house in western Poland. As they began to restore it, there were occasions when others came and looked at it and expressed an interest in re-establishing their property ownership—quite often people from Germany or elsewhere. We all understand that Poland has enormous difficulty in establishing who owned what and when; and the years of Nazi, then communist, ownership have made this extremely difficult.

We are focusing on Poland, but Ukraine, whether or not you regard it as a post-communist country, is another case in point. It failed to attend the conference or sign the declaration, as did Russia. Without naming names, it is fair to say that other states that signed up to the declaration have a patchy record in implementing it.

Several Peers touched on the question of what restitution is intended to restore. The noble Baroness said that Holocaust restitution was not about money but victims. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said that we were talking about moral accounting. As some noble Lords may know, the Austrian central fund has restored a small percentage of the estimated value of the property. In the Polish case, part of our concern we have is that the Polish Government are extremely worried about how large the bill would be once the claims were presented—not only by Jewish former owners but by the much larger number of Polish former owners, many of them no longer living in Poland.

I note from a story in the Jewish Chronicle in summer 2009 that the estimate of the total value of property lost in Poland during the war was around £15.5 billion. It is thought that 80 per cent of it came not from Jews but from Poles who lost land. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, suggested, it is quite clear that such large sums simply could not be restored. There is a conversation to be had with the Polish Government about levels of financial restitution, as well as about moral closure, which is what we are all most interested in.

I was asked what activities Sir Andrew Burns, the UK Government’s special representative, is currently engaged in. I found him extremely helpful on several occasions in briefing me on this. He is actively involved in working with the other parties to the Terezin declaration to ensure that this November’s review conference produces some concrete deliverables. He will participate in two preparatory meetings in Prague before November’s conference, and co-hosted a meeting with his American opposite number in London two weeks ago to discuss the November review conference. He is also active in recruiting a new director for the International Tracing Service, which the noble Baroness spoke about, and will lead the British delegation to the 2012 review conference, which will also include members of NGOs and other UK experts.

The noble Lord, Lord Gold, asked whether Poland still had a programme for the restitution of communal property. It does not have legislation for the restitution of private immovable property, but the draft legislation on private property has not been passed because of the EU’s public debt rule. Again, the issue is how far the Polish Government, under their somewhat constrained circumstances, are willing to take on substantial financial obligations to people who, largely, live outside Poland under their somewhat constrained circumstances. The forecast for economic growth in 2012 is 2.5 per cent, after last year’s satisfactory growth of 4 per cent. If Poland adopted the draft legislation on private property, it would breach current EU rules on financial discipline.

We very much welcome this debate, and we clearly need to continue working on this issue. We will be doing our utmost actively to make sure that the November review conference is a great success. I certainly commit, on behalf of the Government, to report back in the most suitable fashion on the developments at the review conference.

Perhaps I might add briefly that Lodz has often been described to me as the Polish Bradford, that it is very much the same sort of city. When I heard that the city was still derelict in some places, I was thinking about some parts of Bradford, in which I was delivering leaflets on Saturday, which need a little bit of restoration still. All of us who know Poland know there are some very beautiful parts that have escaped the rigours of the war. Warsaw, where I am going on Friday, did not escape the rigours of the war and was largely destroyed. Of course, part of the emotional intensity of this on both sides is that the Poles feel that they suffered a great deal in the war and that the rest of the world does not always understand how much they suffered.

I thank everyone for their participation in this debate and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for the vigour with which she continues to pursue this set of issues. Her Majesty’s Government remain actively engaged in this and we will be taking a very active part in November’s review conference.

House adjourned at 10.21 pm.