A plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against the Polish government seeking to win back property seized by the Nazis during World War II and being held by Warsaw said Friday he was confident the trial would go forward.
"We're confident that a trial will go forward," said Theo Garb, the lawsuit's original plaintiff. "We felt our arguments were good, and we're hoping that it will work, that it will go to trial."
A Brooklyn federal court judge is weighing the case, but is not expected to make a ruling on the motion for seven to eight weeks, court sources said.
The suit was filed in June 1999 by Polish Jews who returned to their homeland after World War II only to face a fresh round of violence under the then-communist regime in that country, which froze an estimated 100,000 seized parcels of land.
Only ten percent of Poland's 3.3 million Jews survived the war. Their assets were seized when the Nazis invaded.
Since Poland's communist government fell from power in 1989, the current government has begun selling off the properties to ease difficult economic conditions there.
"We feel it's outright thievery what Poland is doing now," Garb said. "They want people to invest there, but if they're not doing that are moral then what should people think?"
"Look at what's going on with Germany, with France, with Switzwerland and Austria. They are all paying big money to the victims (of the Holocaust). Whay should Poland get away with it?"
For more than two hours on Thursday, lawyers for the survivors and the Polish government argued heatedly before US District Judge Edward Korman over whether a US court has the jurisdiction to sit in judgment of a sovereign nation.
Polish government lawyer Owen Pell argued that Korman's court did not have the jurisdiction to rule on an internal matter in a sovereign nation.
Plaintiff attorney Stephen Winston countered the Polish government "is not entitled to sovereign immunity because it engaged in gross violations of human rights and organized the expulsion of Jews" in the 1940s.
Dozens of Polish Jews gathered on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to call for the Polish government to settle the case and begin negotiations.
New York City comptroller Alan Hevesi and state comptroller Carl McCall -- who played vital roles in coaxing Swiss banks into a settlement with Holocaust survivors who hid assets from the Nazis in the Swiss banks and never saw them again -- echoed the calls for a settlement.
"We're calling for the Polish government to negotiate this out, as other governments have done," said Hevesi.
"Each of these (European) governments, including the Dutch, the Austrians and the French, has created an historical commission to confront the history many of them have ignored."
A Long Island resident, Garb, 69, returned to Poland a few years ago to reclaim a now-lucrative property owned by his family -- killed in a Warsaw ghetto -- which is now under the control of the government.
"I have documentation right here that my family owned this building before it was taken by the Nazis," Garb said, pulling out pictures of his family and pictures of the building in question.
"This is all that's left of my family," he said.
Survivors, most of them elderly, fear they will die before the Polish government's program to trace Holocaust-era assets returns the property to them -- NEW YORK (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
