{"id":73057,"date":"2019-09-18T17:05:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T15:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73057"},"modified":"2019-09-17T07:12:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T05:12:16","slug":"12-05-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73057","title":{"rendered":"One Holocaust descendant’s fight for justice."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>One Holocaust descendant’s fight for justice: ‘They stole not just our land, but my family’s history’<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Julie Szego<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Ann Drillich, who is in a legal battle in Poland over her inherited family estate. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins \/ The Guardian<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Melbourne doctor Ann Drillich is fighting the might of the Catholic church over family land in Poland, where antisemitism and populism are on the rise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Melbourne doctor Ann Drillich, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, is a rare kind of Jew who owns a Catholic church. The brick structure, Our Lady of the Scapular, stands on Drillich\u2019s ancestral property in the medieval town of Tarn\u00f3w, near Krak\u00f3w. Her late mother, Blanka Drillich n\u00e9e Goldman, inherited the land at the end of the second world war. Aged 18, Blanka was the sole living heir to the Goldman estate, all others perished in the town\u2019s ghetto: she found her mother shot dead in her bed.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Drillich has never been inside her church.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to enter it once,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt was locked.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The reason: in 1987, with the help of a trusted friend of the Drillichs, the Catholic church in Poland effectively stole the land and built the house of worship on the site. The Drillichs didn\u2019t know. Ann Drillich only learned of the theft in 2010 when, as heir, she ordered a public records search about her family\u2019s estate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt first it took a while to settle in, the shock of the betrayal,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd the idea that behind the injustice is a church.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother\u2019s family was one of the most prominent in town. It was like they had stolen not just our land, but my family\u2019s history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And so after the shock settled, she sued.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHow could I not?\u201d she asks.<\/span><\/p>\n

So began an expensive, traumatic and escalating battle that pitched this meticulous woman with a scientific sensibility against a powerful religious institution.<\/span><\/p>\n

The church appealed. Stalled. Obstructed. Counter-sued. The Polish courts, meanwhile, delivered justice to Drillich, again and again. And yet again, in a final ruling in 2016 when three district court judges found the church had acted in \u201cbad faith\u201d when it acquired the \u201cabandoned\u201d land.<\/span><\/p>\n

That should have been where the story ends, with Drillich, a lecturer to medical students, finally clearing the fortress of legal documents from the suburban home she shares with her family and two needy miniature schnauzers. Getting closure on a draining saga that\u2019s stirred up traumatic memories from a childhood blighted by the legacy of the second world war.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in Poland, closure, whether legal or historical, is hard to come by, and now, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Drillich is facing an extraordinary legal challenge in a case that testifies to the nation\u2019s populist zeitgeist under the ironically-named Law and Justice party, and its fraught relationship with the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Goldmans\u2019 roots in Tarn\u00f3w stretched back centuries. Before the war, their sprawling estate in Gumniska Street boasted a tile factory, extensive gardens and a neo-Gothic villa. While the latter, taken by the state in 1985, now houses a public registry and is officially named \u201cthe Wedding Palace\u201d, the building is still known colloquially as \u201cGoldmanowka\u201d, Goldman House, after its former owners.<\/span><\/p>\n

Photographs of Ann Drillich\u2019s mother Blanka Drillich nee Goldman, and her great grandfather Izak Goldman (back image) who left the estate to Blanka after the second world war. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins\/The Guardian<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1941, the Nazis forced Blanka Goldman, her grandfather, aunt and parents into the ghetto. Within months all were murdered, except Blanka. Blanka told of \u201cPolish thugs\u201d rampaging through laneways, leading Nazis to Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

But many Poles resisted the Nazis and saved Jews. Among them, the Drillichs\u2019 friends, the Poetschkes. Catholics with German roots, the Poetschkes had been renting part of the Goldman estate. Their son Jerzy was especially fond of Dr Drillich\u2019s fair-haired mother Blanka, whose beauty had the advantage of not appearing Semitic. Blanka escaped the ghetto. For the rest of the war the Poetschkes hid her in the basement and attic of Goldman house while they lived upstairs.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a poignant display of bravery: had the Nazis discovered the Poetschkes\u2019 subterfuge they would surely have been executed. In the 1990s, thanks to Drillich\u2019s family, Jerzy was honoured as a \u201cRighteous Pole\u201d, a gentile who risked his life to save Jews. His name is listed on the honour roll at Warsaw\u2019s POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nYet in the complex duality of Polish-Jewish relations, Jerzy\u2019s saving Blanka\u2019s life did not stop him conspiring with the church to steal her family\u2019s property.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy father said Jerzy\u2019s betrayal was one of the biggest disappointments of his life,\u201d Drillich says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tarn\u00f3w\u2019s 25,000 Jews accounted for almost half the town\u2019s pre-war population. After liberation only about 700 returned \u2013 and according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum virtually all of them soon left after encountering lingering antisemitism. Such was the case with Blanka. Three years after inheriting her estate, she left Poland, married Henryk Drillich, also a survivor from Tarn\u00f3w and later settled in Australia. She left the Poetschkes to administer the estate under her power of attorney.<\/span><\/p>\n

In following decades, the communist authorities confiscated much of the land.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more painful travesty was to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1986 the Diocese Curia in Tarn\u00f3w, through Bishop Piotr Bednarczyk, wrote to Henryk offering to buy the estate of Blanka, by then deceased. The parties haggled over terms without striking a final agreement. Yet that same October, on the advice of parish lawyers, Jerzy successfully applied to Tarn\u00f3w\u2019s regional court to gain ownership of the \u201cabandoned\u201d land through adverse possession.<\/span><\/p>\n

Asked for the address of Blanka Goldman, he testified \u201cunknown\u201d. He\u2019d sent a condolence card on her death 13 years earlier.<\/span><\/p>\n

He donated half the 8,500 square metres to the church, sold the other half and pocketed the money. It was only in the 1990s that he resumed contact with the Drillichs. When in 1993 Henryk visited Tarn\u00f3w for the first time since the war, Jerzy showed him round the old estate. He said nothing about the plots that went to the church. He has since died.<\/span><\/p>\n

*  *  *<\/strong><\/p>\n

After what seemed like the final legal victory for Drillich in 2016, the church concocted new proceedings about these already-adjudicated matters and dialled up the tone. In November 2017, the parish wrote to the district prosecutor\u2019s office in Tarn\u00f3w alleging \u2013 without evidence \u2013 that Drillich, her notaries and lawyers had used \u201cforged\u201d documents to \u201cunlawfully swindle compensation from the church\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Says Drillich\u2019s lawyer, Tomasz Krawczyk: \u201cIt\u2019s really the most outrageous legal obstruction I\u2019ve seen in my 15-year legal career. And the whole time they were working on the minister of justice to bring the appeal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In May, minister Zbigniew Ziobro \u2013 also, conveniently, the prosecutor general \u2013 enlisted in the church\u2019s crusade by petitioning the politically dependable supreme court judges in the Orwellian-sounding Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs to overturn the earlier rulings in Drillich\u2019s favour. Under controversial 2017 reforms the prosecutor general can bring an \u201cextraordinary appeal\u201d to annul virtually any court ruling over the past 20 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ann Drillich\u2019s documents, who is in a legal battle in Poland over her inherited family estate, papers and research material including images of the church in question (bottom right) and the \u2018wedding house\u2019. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins \/ The Guardian<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, said the remedy \u201callows the natural legal order to be restored in accordance with the principle of social justice\u201d. The European Union sees judicial independence undermined.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you have to ask is why on earth would a relatively inconsequential case in a provincial town like this one be so important for the Polish government?\u201d says Wojciech Sadurski, a law professor at the Universities of Sydney and Warsaw, and author of Poland\u2019s Constitutional Breakdown. He notes the minister\u2019s grounds for bringing the appeal relate to narrow questions of law, \u201ctoo trivial and technical, it seems to me, to qualify as a matter of \u2018social justice\u2019. So the answer is the case is important for the church \u00ba and the politicians need the support of the church to stay in power. I think it\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sadurski can himself testify to the prevailing enthusiasm for politically motivated law suits; he\u2019s fighting a criminal case and two civil suits for defamation for tweets critical of the ruling party and neutered public broadcaster. To be fair, his is a non-exclusive club. Free speech is a fragile thing in contemporary Poland. And that\u2019s especially true when the talk is about its wartime past. Accusing \u201cthe Polish nation\u201d of complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities attracts civil penalties \u2013 and that was a backdown from the government under pressure from the US and Israel. The original 2018 law sought to jail offenders.<\/span><\/p>\n

recommended by Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Six million Poles were murdered during the second world war, three million of them Jews \u2013 nearly half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Scholars see in the laws an attempt to whitewash the role of Poles in the Jewish genocide and substitute a nationalist fairytale in which victims cannot also be perpetrators. Ironically, that proposition is most powerfully and unwittingly debunked in the speech \u2013 conspicuously free \u2013 of nationalists themselves. In the same month the justice minister intervened in Drillich\u2019s case, thousands of nativists rallied in Warsaw against a US law requiring that Congress be informed about the progress of countries including Poland on restitution of Jewish assets seized during the second world war and its aftermath.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ruling party, says Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski, of the University of Ottawa in Canada, \u201chas created a wave of fear, paranoia and anger about the so-called Jewish threat\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDrillich\u2019s is a very intriguing and interesting case that can have much larger ramifications than its immediate vicinity. It is part and parcel of a larger campaign to elevate the myth, the fantasy, of national innocence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

By meddling in Drillich\u2019s case, Grabowski says, the government \u201ccan kill several birds with one stone\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

France 24 reported protestors wearing T-shirts reading \u201cdeath to the enemies of the fatherland\u201d. One man wore a shirt saying, \u201cI will not apologise for Jedwabne\u201d \u2013 a massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours in 1941 under the German occupation.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nPolish nationalists argue that Poland, which did not capitulate to the Nazis \u2013 a fact many Holocaust scholars agree should be better known \u2013 has not been adequately compensated by Germany. In short, restitution is a loaded issue; one the government is keen to weaponise.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Drillich. Through Drillich\u2019s case, says Grabowski, the Holocaust historian, \u201cthe government wants to prove to the Polish nationalist electorate that the Jews are coming back to claim their properties\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drillich, meanwhile, pleads her cause near and far. She has lobbied Australian foreign affairs minister Marise Payne (who said the government wouldn\u2019t intervene in a private legal matter) and treasurer Josh Frydenberg, himself a descendent of Holocaust survivors, to take up her case with Polish authorities. Through intermediaries, she has asked senior Catholics in Australia to intervene with their counterparts in Poland. (\u201cIt\u2019s a matter of canon law,\u201d was one perfunctory response.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Ann Drillich, who is in a legal battle in Poland over her inherited family estate. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins \/ The Guardian<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In July she wrote to the Vatican\u2019s representative in Poland, Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio: \u201cMy family has been defamed in the Polish media and subjected to antisemitic abuse on social media, which includes tropes such as \u2018blood suckers and non-believers\u2019,\u201d Drillich wrote. \u201cThis year in his denunciation of antisemitism, Pope Francis stated that antisemitism in all its forms is \u2018completely contrary to Christian principles and every vision worthy of the human person\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does it mean that faithful parishioners pray on my stolen land and that I receive abuse?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This week she\u2019s pinning her hopes on the extra scrutiny that will fall on Poland as world leaders prepare to descend on Warsaw for the 1 September commemoration.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question of what she\u2019d do if she won her claim seems almost incidental. \u201cIf I won, I\u2019d want an apology, I\u2019d want compensation and genuine reconciliation. I would not be looking to demolish the church.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If she had her time again, would she still pursue justice, given she\u2019s clocked up roughly $100,000 in legal fees? Given everything? Drillich hesitates only briefly. \u201cThe very night my mother\u2019s grandfather was evicted (from the estate) by the Germans he slept on the balcony. He was 80-something. It was November. You can imagine how freezing it was.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As for Blanka, freedom and a new life in Australia did not bring lasting peace. \u201cMy mother had this real spark. Then she developed depression and I watched her go silent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a tragic, distorted echo of what Blanka encountered during the war, when Drillich was 13 she came home from school one day to find her mother had killed herself. \u201cThe Holocaust destroyed my family. I know how much the property meant to my mother. How brave she was to reclaim it after the war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She returns to the original question. \u201cHow could I not?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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One Holocaust descendant’s fight for justice: ‘They stole not just our land, but my family’s history’ Julie Szego Ann Drillich, who is in a legal battle in Poland over her inherited family estate. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins \/ The Guardian Melbourne doctor Ann Drillich is fighting the might of the Catholic church over family land in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73057"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73221,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73057\/revisions\/73221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}