GERMANY: Jewish and Polish organisations have joined forces to lobby the Polish government for a compensation deal for people who lost property before and after the second World War.
Six decades after the war and 17 years after its transition to democracy, Poland is one of the last European countries yet to resolve property ownership issues arising from the Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and four decades of communist rule.
"In terms of morality and law, it's indisputable, it should have been solved a long time ago," said Miroslaw Szypowski, head of the Polish Union of Real Estate Owners.
This morning, representatives of the World Jewish Restitution Organisation will press the settlement issue when they meet Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Warsaw. They are hoping to hear more than just promises but veterans of the compensation campaign, like Mr Szypowski, doubt a deal will result.
"None of the political parties have the political will to sort out the return of property," he said. "Property stolen in the communist years belongs to the state now. It draws profit from it, then argues that the budget couldn't finance a settlement."
Money is the main stumbling block to a property settlement: how much money is involved and where it will come from.
Mr Szypowski's group says the total value of property claims is zloty 60-70 billion (€18 billion). The current drafts of the compensation law would give former owners just 15 per cent of its current value.
With Polish property prices rocketing, the government says it can barely afford to pay even that, but the 15 per cent offer has been dismissed as as unacceptable by the other side.
"The cost of the settlement is not a great sum of money considering the scale of what's involved," said Andrzej Zozula, executive director of the Union of Polish Jewish Communities. "The government can afford to spend billions on F-16 fighter jets."
He said only a small part of the final deal would be a cash payment. A larger part would involve transferring the deeds of what is currently state-owned property, or alternative properties, back to previous owners or their heirs.
Other inventive solutions are possible: in Romania, authorities issued as compensation shares in the newly privatised state-owned companies.
There is also disagreement over just who should be compensated: current Polish citizens or all who were Polish citizens in September 1939 at the start of the war? Overshadowing the compensation issue is a misconception - widespread in the Polish media in recent days - that this is an exclusively Jewish settlement.
The confusion arises partly because of the scale of the destruction of Poland's pre-war Jewish population: more than 90 per cent of the 3.3 million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis, leaving behind much ownerless property which joined property nationalised in the subsequent communist era.
"In fact, most of the claimants of a compensation deal won't be Jewish at all; over 80 per cent will be local Christian Poles," said Dublin-born Gideon Taylor, executive vice-president of the World Jewish Restitution Organisation.
"But time is not on our side. These people are old and sick in their 80s. For them this is symbolic, they are looking for recognition before they die that they had something taken from them."
The question of Jewish property is particularly controversial in Poland where anti-Semitic views are part of the mainstream. Just last week, a leading Polish MEP issued a booklet claiming Jews are "biologically separate" and "create their own ghettos".
President Lech Kaczynski denounced the booklet after strong protests from Israel.
Mr Szypowski said: "There's no Jewish property, there's only property of people who were Polish citizens on September 1st, 1939, who lost their property as a result of war. Justice should be done to them and their heirs. It doesn't matter what nationality they are now or their origins then."