False premises
Australian-Polish doctor, Ann Drillich, talks to Peter Kohn about her epic struggle with Poland’s authorities to reclaim an extensive family estate stolen in the Holocaust.
Australian-Polish doctor, Ann Drillich, talks to Peter Kohn about her epic struggle with Poland’s authorities to reclaim an extensive family estate stolen in the Holocaust and now in others’ hands.
Dr ANN Drillich is likely to be the only Jew – possibly the only individual – in the world who owns an operational Catholic church. The Melbourne GP is battling Polish authorities over properties appropriated from her family during the Communist era in Poland.
Her orphaned mother Blanka inherited the estate after her family was murdered in the Holocaust in Tarnow, Poland. A large area of the property was later illegally appropriated, including land on which a parish has built a church.
Drillich, who lectures in medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, and is a dual Australian-Polish citizen, has been fighting to reverse the appropriations of the former Communist regime but the present government and City of Tarnow are fighting hard to keep the land.
Gumniska Street, less than a kilometre from the Tarnow old-town centre, is a road along which stretches her family’s appropriated property. At one end, the former Goldman house, renamed the Weding Palace, stands next to a large sports hall. Next door is a towering church and a rectory. In front is a car park and around the corner, a vacant block. These lands, appropriated successively between 1959 and 1986, cover 2.5 hectares.
Blanka Goldman resided with her family on their large Tarnow estate, Goldmanowka, where the Goldmans had lived for centuries. Goldmanowka consisted of the family home — a stately villa with extensive gardens — a tile factory, outhouses and agricultural land.
In November 1941, Blanka, with her grandfather Izak, parents Efraim and Anna Goldman and aunt Emilia Feuerstein, were evicted by the Nazis and eventually forced into the Tarnow ghetto. Her grandfather died three months after their eviction and her parents and aunt were murdered in September 1942. At 18, Blanka was alone, and her experiences scarred her emotionally for life.
Blanka escaped the ghetto and, with the help of Hubert and Hildegard Poetschke and their family, Catholic German “Volksdeutsch” nationals who the German occupation allowed to remain on the estate, Blanka evaded the Nazis, hiding in the basement of her family home.
After the war, Blanka legally inherited her family’s properties. In 1948, she left Poland and later married Holocaust survivor Henry Drillich and they emigrated to Australia in 1950. Before she left, Blanka gave Hubert Poetschke power-of-attorney to administer the Goldman estate on her behalf, with the power later transferred to his son Jerzy.
In 1975, the Poetschkes were evicted from the estate by Polish authorities and later the Goldman home became a registry office, the Wedding Palace of Tarnow. In 1985, State Treasury acquired it under a 1946 decree concerning “abandoned property”, even though it was not abandoned and the law no longer existed.
In 2010, Ann Drillich began legal action to recover the properties. She discovered, to her and her father Henry’s shock, that Jerzy Poetschke, a trusted friend, had betrayed the family.
In 1986, Poetschke and the parish had conspired to claim he owned a parcel of the family land through usucapion or “adverse possession”. They did so in bad faith – that is, they knew he was not entitled to the property, and this knowledge was supported by documents submitted to the courts.
Poetschke donated half of the 8600 square metres of this parcel of land and sold the other half to the parish, Our Lady of the Scapular in Tarnow, which built a church and rectory on the property. Poetschke’s illegal acquisition and subsequent disposal of their property was hidden from the Drillich family.
Unaware of his theft, in 1994 Henry Drillich nominated Poetschke for a Righteous Among The Nations award by Yad Vashem. Now 93, Poetschke is listed as a Righteous Pole at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw.
After an extensive legal battle, in 2013 the decision by which State Treasury illegally acquired the Goldman home in 1985 (now the Wedding Palace) was finally reversed and the property ownership reverted to the family. But Treasury and the City of Tarnow successfully reclaimed the property through usucapion, as no claim by Drillich or her family had been made over 30 years.
In 2014, the parish itself tried to claim the property through usucapion. This was rejected and an appeal also failed in the Tarnow court. This means Drillich remains the owner of the property, but is suing for its return.
Drillich has condemned the illegal appropriation, the adverse-possession law, the court’s refusal to acknowledge she could not make a land claim under the Communists, and failure by the authorities to acknowledge the full story. She plans to continue her legal battle.
“This is not just a fight about land,” she told The AJN. “It’s a fight about history.”
The repercussions of the Holocaust have haunted her. When her brother was 16 and she was 13 and growing up in Melbourne, she came home one day to find her mother Blanka had taken her life.
While Drillich acknowledged that Poles are discovering their lost Jewish heritage and that “apparently it is safe to walk down the street in Warsaw wearing a kippah”, she said claims of a “Polish Jewish renaissance” are sometimes overstated.
Drillich reflected that while some Poles seem eager to engage with Jewish history, their response is far cooler when it comes to questions of property rights stemming from Holocaust and Communist dispossession.
She dreams that one day perhaps the Goldman home will be a museum of Polish–Jewish history or a cultural and educational centre.
Jewish Holocaust Centre CEO Warren Fineberg said reparation for property confiscated or forcibly sold during the Nazi reign of terror is “a moral duty of the European states”.
“The passive response or, in many cases, obstruction of processing claims by European states must, in the name of justice be turned to active prosecution of claims,” he told The AJN.
“The Jewish Holocaust Centre is all too familiar with stories of injustice, obstruction and hindrance experienced by many claimants who seek to have their property restored to rightful owners.”
PETER KOHN
comments