Holocaust Survivor Stories In 2015: In Poland, The Fight To Get Their Property Back

Lydia Tomkiw

Carnations are placed on the barbed wire in the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland, April 16, 2015. Remaining Holocaust survivors are seeking restitution for confiscated property from the Polish government. Reuters/Lukasz Krajewski/Agencja Gazeta

During the summer of 1939 in Poland, Miriam Tasini’s grandfather’s flour-making business was thriving. The company, a large mill complex in the heart of her native Krakow, supplied bakeries throughout the southwestern portion of the country. Living in a fancy house that overlooked a river, Tasini said her parents and grandparents were a happy family.

But once September came around, when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime invaded the country, that happy family life abruptly changed forever. Fleeing Poland, they were forced to leave everything behind, including the family business, which the Nazis claimed as their own. Tasini was just 3 years old.

“They were extraordinary, my grandparents,” Tasini, 79, recalled. “They were very successful, and then they had nothing.”

Seventy-five years later, survivors of the Nazi invasion of Poland haven’t forgotten what happened to them and their families. Back then, German authorities established a ghetto in Warsaw, the capital, and placed Jews there, typically a prelude to being shipped off to concentration camps to face a nearly certain death.

As a result, acres of coveted Jewish-owned property nationwide were seized during what came to be known as the Holocaust — the systematic mass murder of Jews by Nazis during World War II. To this day, Poland remains the only post-Communist European Union state that has not passed national legislation on private property restitution following the Holocaust and fall of communism, and those who were forcefully displaced and their relatives have been fighting for the return of real estate they say still belongs to their families. With the Law and Justice Party government that recently came to power in Poland and a greater focus by the EU on making restitution a reality, remaining survivors have continued to push for legislation that would return what was once rightfully theirs.

The 8-foot concrete wall in this December 1940 photo shows the Warsaw ghetto where
the city’s Jewish population was forced to live by German decree. Library of Congress

Read more: Holocaust Survivor Stories In 2015: In Poland, The Fight To Get Their Property Back