Terezin Declaration: Holocaust Era Assets

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill]

My Lords, I will not take that as an invitation to speak for longer than I had originally intended. I want to make the important point that the restitution of wrongfully seized property is in no way a recompense for imprisonment, loss of life or genocide. Like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for tabling this debate and for summarising all that has happened and what it is hoped will happen.

Poland is the only major European country that has no law for the restitution of private property stolen during the Holocaust. Poland was part of the Terezin conference, although it did not sign the declaration. Before the war, there were 3 million Jews in Poland and afterwards only 300,000 were left. My late mother was one of the lucky ones. She and her brother sought sanctuary in Britain, coming here between the two great wars. My mother married a Geordie and was saved by the welcome that she received in this country. However, her mother, my maternal grandmother, and my aunt were never heard of again after 1944. They were part of that tragedy.

The family had been bakers in the town of Szrensk, which is between Warsaw and Gdansk, and I imagine that assets of some sort would have been lost by my family. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, I have no records whatever. To me, that is all ancient history. I along with many others have made my way in this country, which many people here sadly take for granted. I do not look for monetary restitution. In fact, when I look back at those wars, I think more of my late father’s British war service, attached to the Eighth Army, and of my uncle, who was killed while serving with the Middlesex Regiment. However, there are those who rightly believe that they need and are entitled to restitution. Many survivors and their offspring live in straitened circumstances.

There are approximately 90,000 surviving claimants to property in Poland. The majority are non-Jewish, as has been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Boswell and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. In some cases the confiscators were the Nazis, while in others they were the communists. Listening to other noble Lords, I thought that it might be useful to give one example. It is that of the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, who was on the run from the Gestapo. He was sheltered for months on a country estate owned by the Sawa family. Karski was eventually smuggled out of occupied Poland. Sadly, the Sawa family did not get out of the country and Karski later learnt that the entire family had been arrested by the Nazis, tortured and executed. The point of relevance to this debate is that the property of that non-Jewish family was added to the vast horde of loot stolen by the Nazis and never returned.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, mentioned, there are at least 13 occasions when Poland has drafted legislation and then stuck it back on the shelf. The European Parliament, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the US Senate and Congress have all called on Poland to resolve the claims. Now it must be our turn in the UK to urge the Polish Government to ease the onerous conditions imposed on potential claimants who have to go to law, to give them access to records, to allow them to set up a modest central fund to resolve claims for religious and communal property and, lastly, to participate in the 2012 conference on Holocaust-era assets.