Here's the original post again:
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/
[Originally posted by Jim Wald]
Best,
jerome
On 2015-10-24 14:52, jlb0410_at_yahoo.com wrote:
> I must have missed the article.. can you repost please
> Jana L. Babuszczak
>
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Received on 2015-10-24 15:39:55