Dear Sir,
Your recent headline "Anger as Poland plans law that will stop Jews reclaiming wartime homes", is misleading and somewhat tunnel visioned. The proposed law change to introduce a 30 year limit on compensation claims for all private property confiscated illegally after World War Two, affects all former private owners, regardless of their ethnic origin, and certainly not just Jews. The Polish Landowners Association has protested vigorously through an open letter to Prime Minister Morawiecki pointing out the inhumanity of this proposal which undermines the honest attempts over many years since 1990 by pre-war owners to have their rights to compensation recognized. The Landowners Association points out that this legislation is not related to wartime reparations for property seized by the Nazis, but that seized by the post-war Communist government, as Nazi crimes were the responsibility of the German government, which never compensated the Polish government directly. It is unfortunate, of course, that the issue of compensation of property by the Communist authorities was never formally resolved by successive Polish democratic governments, and a post-Communist president vetoed a new proposed law on reprivatization in 2001.
Yours faithfully
Wiktor Moszczynski
