Letter to the HR Foreign Affairs Committee Members

Letter to the HR Foreign Affairs Committee Members

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Dear Member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the US House of Representatives,

Please stop Bill H.R. 1226! Do not forward this anti-Polish legislation to the House of Representatives for further consideration! Poland, the strongest ally of the United States in continental Europe, is the primary target of this morally insincere and legally erroneous bill. As a country with the largest pre-war population of Jews, Poland is targeted through this bill for “heirless property” restitution payments for billions of dollars by Jewish organizations.

I urge you to vote against Bill H.R.1226 for the following reasons:

1. In WWII Poland suffered proportionally the greatest human and material losses but was never compensated these losses.

2. Over the years, Poland has resorted to various means to resolve private and communal property claims, including the return of properties to their rightful owners and monetary compensation.

3. According to the 1960 treaty between the government of the U.S. and Poland regarding claims of nationals of the United States, Poland compensated American nationals whose assets had been nationalized or wrongfully seized and the United States provided indemnity to Poland against any further property claims. Therefore, Bill H.R. 1226 violates the terms of the 1960 bilateral treaty.

4. Poland returned Jewish communal property pursuant to the 1997 law on the relationship between the Polish State and Jewish religious organizations. Over 2,500 communal properties, including synagogues, cemeteries and cultural centers, have been either compensated for or returned.

5. All Jewish Holocaust survivors of Polish origin are eligible to receive monthly pension from the Polish Government according to the law on war veterans and victims of war and post-war oppression.  Thus, Holocaust survivors who were Polish citizens during WWII have been receiving financial assistance from the Polish Government regardless of their current place of residence.  So, the claim for heirless property compensation in order to assist Holocaust survivors is duplicative with respect to Poland.

6. Restitution for heirless property is against the law of the United States, Western legal tradition and the Polish law. In all Western countries, the US included, heirless property escheats to the state.

7. According to the Congressional Authority Statement, Bill H.R. 1226 is authorized pursuant to the Commerce Clause of Article 1 Section 8 Clause 3 of the Constitution of the United States. The Commerce Clause has nothing to do with this bill, which is based on legally non-binding Terezin Declaration concerned with the wellbeing of Holocaust survivors.

I urge you to reject Bill H.R. 1226 on moral grounds for the following reasons:

1. With respect to heiress property claims, Bill H.R. 1226 has no basis in law. Therefore it relies on moral justification exclusively.

2. Jewish organizations, Holocaust institutions and scholars have been engaged for years in discrimination of Polish victims and distortion of Holocaust history by diminishing the suffering of Polish victims in WWII, disregarding Polish witnesses to history, marginalizing and suppressing the voice of Polish victims, eliminating ethnic Poles from the definition of Holocaust victims, and sidelining German genocide of ethnic Poles in education of Holocaust.

3. There is no single museum across the USA commemorating millions of Polish victims of the German WWII genocide while there were 75 Holocaust museums worldwide as of 2011.

4. Holocaust scholars and educators have been overemphasizing and widely promoting questionable research and biased education about the Polish co-responsibility for the Holocaust of the Jews, while effectively suppressing the research and education about the Jewish collaboration in killing Jews and Jewish killings of ethnic Poles.

5. Leading Holocaust scholars and educators have never publicly objected or unequivocally condemned the spread of the major Holocaust falsehoods such as “Polish concentration camps” or “Polish death camps.” Such inactions on their part constitute Holocaust distortion in its pure form and amount to Holocaust denial in accordance with paragraph 5 of the definition of Holocaust denial adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

6. The use of the term “Polish concentration camp” represents cruel and inhumane treatment of millions of Polish people, whose relatives were brutally murdered by the German occupying forces in the concentration and death camps set up and operated by the German Third Reich.

7. Instead of supporting efforts of the Polish people to stop the spread of the horrific Holocaust lie about Polish responsibility for German concentration camps, leading Holocaust authorities engage in brutal smear campaign against Poland by accusing the Polish people, in front of the entire world, of Polish co-responsibility for German crimes committed on the Jews.

8. In order to showcase a moral justification for heirless property claims against Poland, a worldwide smear and disinformation campaign has just been launched under the pretense of opposition to the amendment to anti-defamation bill passed by the Polish Parliament.

9. On January 27, 2018, one of the leading Israeli politicians Yair Lapid announced: “these were Polish death camps and no law will change it.” This terrible Holocaust lie did not warrant the condemnation by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

10. Instead, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum expressed “deep concern” over the adopted legislation, falsely interpreting the law in order to accuse Poland of making it illegal “to reference the complicity of some Poles for crimes against the Jews committed during the Nazi occupation.”  Those who resort to such unfair methods have no right to refer to moral justice.

11. According to the Israeli War Crimes Commission less than 0.1% of Poles (frequently Polish Germans) collaborated with Nazi Germany. 99.9% of the Polish people DID NOT!

12. Bill H.R. 1226 is morally offensive because it treats the Polish State and the Polish Nation as perpetrators of the German crimes committed on the Jews rather than the victim of German WWII atrocities. Poland suffered the most of all countries during WWII. Ethnic Poles and ethnic Jews experienced physical destruction like no one else. Through Bill H.R. 1226 one victim frames the other victim as the perpetrator in order to extort compensation in blatant disregard of the historical truth.  That is not moral and that is not just.

I strongly urge you to vote against this legally flawed and immorally insincere Bill H.R. 1226 that causes pain and suffering to people of Polish descent all over the world and aggravates their genocidal trauma.

Sincerely yours,