Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz*
DEALING WITH JEWISH CULTURAL PROPERTY IN POST-WAR POLAND† Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz* INTRODUCTION In December 1998, 44 countries signed the Washington Principles under which they agreed to examine public museums, libraries and archives and to conduct a thorough search for objects looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. The agreement contained in the Washington Principles stated that those assets of public collections, whose wartime provenance was doubtful and possession of which could have been a result of Nazi persecution, should be published and their pre-war owners or their heirs should be sought. The agreement also obliged the institutions to seek a ‘just and fair’ settlement with owners or heirs who were known or could be found. Over the last decade, the Washington Principles have been put, more or less successfully, into practice in the United States and several western European countries, and also in the Czech Republic. The chosen methods and activities, as well as the results of this process, are specific to each country and cultural institution, and as a result have been differently evaluated in the various international scientific and popular publications that have dealt with these matters over the years. Apart from the moral, political and legal importance of provenance research and restitution practices, one notable consequence of the Washington Principles is that, in all of the countries involved, the research inevitably led to revelations about forgotten or supressed chapters of the history of the Second World War in general and of the Holocaust in particular. In this respect, there is a noteworthy absence of historical and provenance research concerning Jewish movable cultural property looted during the Second World War in the eastern European countries, where Jews suffered the most severe oppression: Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Russia.
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