Jim... what an interesting story... adding to that, Ina is a member of
this list and has been for quite some time. And thank you Jim for bringing this to our attention.
Congratulations Ina for your persistence and good fortune in this
successful outcome!
Best,
jerome
On 2015-10-22 16:33, Jim Wald wrote:
> Naftali Herts Kon's Works Wrenched Out of Poland's Clutches
> Paul BergerJuly 21, 2013
>
> On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet
> Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the
> Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be
> different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in
> 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused to give them
> back. Once more, Kon had lost hundreds of pages of poems and letters.
>
> Click to view a slideshow.
>
> Even after prosecutors dropped the trumped-up charges against Kon, a
> Polish court twice refused to return his works. Kon immigrated to
> Israel in 1965, bereft. “I remember him despairing over it,” Kon’s
> daughter, Ina Lancman, 71, told the Forward recently. “He left Poland
> without ever hoping to get [his papers] back.”
>
> Today, Kon’s papers are once again with his family. After a decade of
> persistent questioning of Polish authorities and a two-year battle
> through the Polish courts, they sit in 15 manila folders atop a dining
> table in Lancman’s apartment in Queens. For the family, Lancman said,
> “it’s a little bit of belated justice.”
>
> Tomasz Koncewicz, the Polish lawyer who represented Lancman in the
> fight for her father’s papers, believes his victory may provide hope
> for other Jewish families and institutions that have fought years-long
> campaigns for the return of their collections from Poland.
>
> Koncewicz, a law professor at Gdansk University, said that although
> Lancman’s case was unique, other families could use his arguments as a
> starting point for building a strategy in their own restitution case.
> “It might have huge ramifications,” he said.
>
> Wesley Fisher, a director of research at the Conference on Jewish
> Material Claims Against Germany, said that Lancman’s victory is a coup
> in Poland where belongings usually return only “with tremendous
> difficulty and at great expense.”
>
> Lancman has short, white hair and the air of someone who does not give
> in easily. She said that as a child in the “brainwashed” atmosphere of
> the Soviet Union, she chafed at authority. “Maybe it was my father’s
> genes,” she said, “because he was always very defiant against the
> predominant way of doing things.”
>
> Lancman was born in Kazakhstan during World War II. After the war
> ended, her parents returned to their home in Chernivtsi, a historic
> town framed by the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Western
> Ukraine. When she was 7 years old, her father was arrested as part of
> a crackdown on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a wartime
> organization that Stalin grew to distrust during the late 1940s.
>
> read the rest (includes audio):
>
> http://forward.com/news/180733/naftali-herts-kons-works-wrenched-out-of-polands-c/
>
[Jim Wald]
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Received on 2015-10-22 22:48:39