Show caption Dilapidated housing, with a modern apartment block. Many buildings in Warsaw stand empty because of uncertainty over their ownership. Photograph: nikitje/Getty Images/iStockphoto Cities ‘They stole the soul of the city’: how Warsaw’s reprivatisation is causing chaos The Polish capital’s policy of handing back property to its pre-communist owners has benefited some – while unleashing widespread dispossession, fraud and social cleansing. Are new injustices being piled on top of old? Christian Davies in Warsaw @crsdavies Mon 18 Dec 2017 02.00 EST Share on Facebook

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On a cold day in January 2013, Marta Pyzel came back from a trip to the shops to find that she was unable to enter her apartment building in the eastern Warsaw suburb of Grochów. “I rang the doorbell and was told by the building’s owners that I wouldn’t be allowed in,” she says. “I never entered my apartment again.”

It turned out that Pyzel’s apartment building had just been “reprivatised”, meaning that the heirs to the building’s prewar owners had successfully claimed it back from the city authorities after it had been nationalised under the communist government of the 1940s-80s.

The new landlords were determined that the existing tenants should leave immediately. Although her disabled husband and 11-year-old son were allowed back in occasionally, Pyzel was consistently refused entry, forcing her to move between her parents’ home and the spare rooms and sofas of various friends.

Six months later, the building was sold to a developer with plans to demolish it and build a smart new development in its place. Passing by on the day the demolition was due to begin, Pyzel watched as her possessions were thrown out of the window on to the snow below. “They put some of my things in a nearby garage, but nearly everything was ruined by the damp and the mould – my jewellery and kitchen utensils disappeared.”

Decades of communist rule in Poland means that a lot of people believe that public ownership must always be bad​

The building is one of more than 4,000 formerly city-owned properties or plots of land in Warsaw that have been transferred back into private hands since the end of communism. But although it is a process that has been going on for decades, it is only recently that a light has been shone on this dark side of Warsaw’s post-communist transformation, revealing grisly details of fraud, corruption, social cleansing and murder.

When the Red Army entered Warsaw in January 1945, it found a smoking ruin. Five years of Nazi German occupation and two uprisings had left more than 700,000 people dead – more than half the city’s prewar population. Hundreds of thousands more had been evacuated, deported or held in Nazi or Soviet prisons and camps. The war had also taken an epic toll on the city’s physical infrastructure, with some 10,000 buildings – over 90% of the city’s dwellings – destroyed.

Warsaw in ruins at the end of world war two. Faced with rampant homelessness, in 1945 Poland’s new communist authorities transferred ownership of all land within the city’s pre-war borders to the municipal authorities. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Faced with rampant homelessness, and uncertain as to who might still be around to reclaim their property, in October 1945 Poland’s new communist authorities issued the so-called Bierut Decree to facilitate the city’s reconstruction. Named after communist leader Bolesław Bierut, the decree transferred ownership of all land within the city’s prewar borders to the municipal authorities. In theory, property owners could claim restitution or compensation under certain conditions. In practice, the vast majority of claims were ignored or refused.

Although the Polish People’s Republic was abolished in 1989, the Bierut Decree remains in legal force. This means that ever since the fall of communism, the Warsaw city authorities have been flooded with thousands of claims – both bogus and legitimate – for the restitution of property and plots of land throughout the city. Warsaw’s City Hall estimates that, between 2007 and 2016, 447 properties consisting of 4,479 occupied dwellings were returned as a result of the decree. The decision of Polish courts and successive city administrations to honour these claims has had profound consequences for Warsaw’s social and physical landscape.

For some in Poland, the reprivatisation process constitutes historical justice for widespread communist expropriations. “Should I give up on the return of my family’s property because the courts and local authorities took over 60 years to make a decision?” asks Henryk Grocholski, a lawyer representing the heirs to prewar owners, and whose family also has outstanding property claims. “If we believe in private ownership and we believe in the rule of law, then these are things that have to be respected.”

A ruined house on Poznańska Street in Warsaw. Photograph: Hans Winke/Alamy

But others accuse city authorities of colluding with property developers and vested interests to exploit loopholes in the system, and in so doing to undo the collective achievements of the city’s postwar reconstruction.

“They stole the soul of the city,” says Jan Śpiewak, a local councillor and leading campaigner against reprivatisation. “The identity of Warsaw is built on two things: resistance during the war and rebuilding after the war. Warsaw was supposed to be the phoenix from the ashes, but they took it from us, they privatised it, and they told us this effort was worth nothing.”

The new landlords do everything to get people out … turn off water and electricity, remove windows … even take the roof

Reprivatisation claims are based on delineations of plots of land as they existed in prewar Warsaw, which often have very little connection to the the city as it is today. This means that plots of land within areas that are now used as public spaces, such as parks or public squares, can be subject to multiple reprivatisation claims because numerous properties used to stand in that area.

The results can be found all over the city: school playgrounds that have been reprivatised and turned into weed-laden car parks; requisitioned green spaces in the middle of the city that now lie untended, characterised by litter and patches of wild grass; buildings that stand empty and decrepit due to uncertainty over their ownership.

Stanisław “Agaton” Jankowski park in the riverside district of Powiśle serves as a neat illustration of the absurdities that can arise as a result. A modest space dotted with trees named after a participant in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (“Agaton” was Jankowski’s nom de guerre), earlier this year it made headlines when the owners of a small parcel of land in the park cut down all the trees and built a six-foot concrete wall around their plot.

The owners had taken advantage of a new law that allowed property owners to fell trees on their land without applying for permission from local authorities. Although planning restrictions mean the owners are not allowed to build any permanent structures, the concrete wall and mass of weeds and bushes ensure that the public cannot use the space either – unless, of course, the city authorities agree to buy the plot back at a price far higher than the market rate.

“A lot of people defend the owners’ right to do this,” says campaigner Jan Mencwel, noting the irony that Jankowski was also an architect who had played a prominent role in the city’s reconstruction. “Decades of communist rule in Poland means that a lot of people believe that public ownership must always be bad. This is the result of that pathology.”

A large car and coach park in front of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. This vast space in the heart of the city has been plagued by reprivatisation issues. Photograph: Krystian Dobuszyński/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Similar issues have plagued the development of Plac Defilad (Parade Square), a vast space at the heart of the city in the middle of which stands the Stalinist-era Palace of Culture and Science. Densely populated before the war – during which it was flattened – the communists rebuilt the area with vast boulevards and empty spaces designed for parading troops and military hardware. But because numerous plots have either been reprivatised or could be subject to the reprivatisation process, it remains a wasteland, used as a coach park and dotted with shabby temporary structures.

“Aside from being illegal, reprivatisation crippled the city’s growth, because it is hard to invest somewhere where the legal status of the land is not certain – so people invest in the outskirts of the city rather than the centre of Warsaw,” says Śpiewak.

In one corner of the square, next to fast food stands held up off the ground by metal girding, stands a Douglas DC-3 Dakota – a former military transport plane that has been converted into a restaurant. Like the owners of the plot in Agaton park, the plot’s owner, an aristocrat descended from the prewar owners, is engaged in a standoff with the city authorities, portraying himself as a defender of what is known in Poland as the “sacred right to ownership”. Because the fast-food stands are held up off the ground and the plane is on wheels, they are not considered “permanent structures”, so the city authorities cannot remove them.

As Pyzel’s experiences in Grochów attest, however, those most drastically affected by the reprivatisation process have been the approximately 17,000 tenants of city-owned buildings that were transferred into private hands. Suddenly, thousands of people living in rent-controlled properties would find themselves with new private landlords that had little incentive or desire to keep them there. In many cases, tenants were given no prior notification of the fact that a claim on their building was even being considered.

“The new landlords would do everything they could to get people out,” says Beata Siemieniako, a lawyer and activist with the Committee for Protection of the Rights of Tenants. “They would turn off the hot water and electricity, remove the windows or even take the roof of a building that still had people living inside. In one case, the new owner even installed a giant pigeon house in the attic and refused to clean it, trying to drive people out with the smell.”

A Soviet-era prefabricated high-rise in the centre of Warsaw. Photograph: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy

The problem is especially acute in central Warsaw, where the communist authorities concentrated social housing but which has since become a hotbed of gentrification. Not only could the new landlords dramatically raise rents, but through control of building management boards, they could impose costs on tenants by charging exorbitant fees for extravagant “renovations”, often sending very poor and elderly tenants deep into debt. One new landlord justified a sharp increase in the renovation fund with a highly improbable plan to build a helicopter pad on the roof; tenants left, but the helicopter pad was never built.

Standing outside her apartment building on Poznańska Street – part of what used to be a rundown central Warsaw neighbourhood, but which is now dotted with trendy bars and restaurants popular with foreign visitors – one resident who asked to remain anonymous recalled that most of her neighbours left after their building was reprivatised in 2014, with many leaving Warsaw altogether.

My middle-class friends close their eyes to what’s happening because they like the luxury stores, bars and restaurants

“My rent went up from eight złoty per square metre to 59 złoty per square metre in two years,” she said, explaining how she had suddenly found herself heavily in debt after the new owners took control of the renovation fund. Tenants were told they would be spared from paying their debts if they volunteered to leave; some were subjected to intimidation and abuse.

Noting that the number of city-owned dwellings has fallen from 139,746 in 1997 to 81,563 in 2016, campaigners argue that successive city administrations have turned a blind eye to the effects of reprivatisation because of the convenience of offloading tenants to private landlords, and a conspiracy of silence among middle-class Poles who preferred to see previously rundown areas in central Warsaw transformed into well-heeled neighbourhoods.

“A lot of people decided to sacrifice honesty and the law for the sake of going forward, being modern and being rich,” says Ola Jaworska-Surma, an activist who joined the anti-reprivatisation campaign after a developer tried to build apartments in her local park. “A lot of my middle-class friends prefer to close their eyes to what’s happening because they like the luxury stores, bars and restaurants that come at the end of it. They think by building skyscrapers we can turn Warsaw into Manhattan.”

The city authorities strongly deny this. Speaking to the Guardian, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of Warsaw and deputy leader of the opposition Civic Platform party, argued that because of the failure of successive governments since 1989 to pass legislation to regulate the restitution process, city hall has little choice but to operate within the legal framework it inherited, noting that since her tenure began in 2006 the city has had to pay almost 2bn złoty (about £400m) in fines for prevaricating over restitution decisions.

An old tenement building, with a modern apartment block behind. Photograph: ewg3D/Getty Images/iStockphoto

The authorities remain under intense pressure, however, because of the emergence last year of press reports detailing so-called “wild reprivatisation” – a process by which lawyers and property developers colluded with city officials to exploit weaknesses in the legal system so as to obtain valuable properties for a fraction of their true cost.



Nearly 80 years after the outbreak of the second world war, the genesis of many claims are murky, with some derived from acts of fraud, blackmail or theft committed as long ago as the 1940s or 50s. The picture is complicated further by the fact that claims to properties can be bought and sold on the open market, and that whole properties can be obtained as the result of possession of a fraction of the total claim, as long as no other claimants can be identified.

In one instance, a businessman obtained a building in central Warsaw by paying an elderly resident just over 500 złoty (about £100) for her claim. He then proceeded to sue the city – successfully - for 5 million złoty ( £1m) for compensation in lost rental income for the period during which it was owned by the city.

In another, a series of highly questionable decisions by the city authorities led to the closure of one of Warsaw’s leading secondary schools, paving the way for a businessman – now in prison facing criminal charges – to obtain the property, which had an estimated market value of over 120 million złoty (£24m), for just over 1 million złoty, despite only holding less than a seventh of the total claim.

A number of figures involved in “wild reprivatisation” specialised in obtaining claims to buildings whose Jewish prewar owners had died during the war. Some obtained properties on the basis of dubious claims about absent claimants – in one case, a court accepted testimony arguing that an absent 130-year-old owner was alive but could not be located. Others specialised in buying claims from heirs who had grown tired of waiting for a decision from city hall.

Graffiti commemorates tenenats’ rights activist Jolanta Brzeska, who was found dead in woodland on the edge of the city in 2011. Photograph: Mateusz Opasiński

In 2011, the burnt body of Jolanta Brzeska, a prominent tenants’ rights activist who was fighting evictions from her own building, was found dead in woodland on the outskirts of Warsaw, exacerbating suspicions about the involvement of organised crime in the reprivatisation business. Fellow activists who knew Brzeska, who has become an icon of the tenants’ rights movement, are scornful of the official verdict of suicide, noting that she had been investigating the criminal associations of certain developers, and that it was highly unlikely that she had decided to go to the woods and set herself on fire.

Many blame the country’s judiciary for the abuses and injustices associated with wild reprivatisation. “In the absence of legislation passed by parliament, it was the judiciary who shaped the legal framework for reprivatisation,” says Tomasz Luterek, an academic and specialist in the reprivatisation issue. “Whether out of corruption, laziness, lack of knowledge or unprofessionalism, they carry a lot of responsibility for what has happened.”

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has seized upon the issue as part of its campaign to take control of the appointments of Polish judges, setting up a verification commission that is examining irregularities in the reprivatisation process, and which has been given the power to overturn legal decisions.

To its supporters, the commission is welcomed as an example of the government’s willingness to grasp the nettle and administer some rough justice, while critics describe it as a political circus designed to drip-feed lurid details of abuses to the media in its bid to assert political control over a justice system that is widely seen as flawed.

“A lot of people are building their careers on this issue,” says Gronkiewicz-Waltz, arguing that the commission has no legal basis to overturn decisions.

Whatever its merits, the verification commission, which is focused on past abuses, will not resolve the legal and moral quagmire created by over 70 years of reprivatisation. In October, however, the government announced plans for a comprehensive restitution law that will effectively end the reprivatisation process by restricting the direct descendants of former owners or their heirs to claiming compensation worth 20% of the value of a property at the time it was confiscated by the state.

“It is the first comprehensive draft bill after 1989 which shall regulate definitively the reprivatisation of goods seized by the communist authorities after 1944,” said Patryk Jaki, deputy justice minister and the head of the verification commission. “This draft means the end of buying and selling claims for the restitution of the property, and finally – a key issue – the end of returning property containing tenants.”

The proposed restrictions have been received with dismay by many heirs to prewar owners, including organisations representing Holocaust survivors and their heirs, who argue that they should not be held responsible for the crimes and unethical practices of a minority of claimants. “This focus on ‘wild reprivatisation’ is threatening the legal, normal restitution processes of people who constitute the majority of claims and had nothing to do with this illegal behaviour,” says Grocholski, the lawyer representing heirs to prewar owners.

But campaigners insist that, in Warsaw at least, the restitution process has simply piled new injustices on top of old, arguing it isn’t right that only the heirs to prewar owners should receive compensation for wartime losses, given the scale of death and destruction inflicted by Nazi and Soviet occupation on the whole country.