The American Bar Association (ABA) is the most numerous voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, founded in 1878.

The lawyers of KIELTYKA GLADKOWSKI are in the process of consulting with the editor of legal affairs of ABA Journal who expressed interest in the recent cases handled by our law firm within the private client desk, in particular regarding citizenship procedure and immigration.

In one case our law firm advised American citizen on particularly difficult evidentiary issues related to the regulation of family status related to Polish jurisdiction and citizenship. The difficulty lies in evidentiary problems, where naturalization documents must be reinforced with documents obtained and retrieved from Poland from third parties, witnesses or archives. Their difficulty is directly proportional to the complicated legal status of people with a Polish passport in the 20th century, because Poland before World War II had a very diverse social structure, including a very large percentage of people with a Polish passport but from an indigenous culture, for example Jewish, Belarusian or Ukrainian.

In the case at hand our law firm assisted an American businessman from Texas whose parents of Jewish origin emigrated to America before World War II. The client's mother came from the town of Płońsk near Warsaw, home to such great world figures as David Ben-Gurion - the founder of the modern state of Israel.

The problem in this case was that Płońsk belonged to Tsarist Russia before World War I, and the city directory of Płońsk contains the client's mother's details. Unfortunately, the address book was in poor condition because there was destroyed a fragment of the book related to the departure date which caused considerable evidentiary problems in administrative procedure.

This is a key fact in the case because proving the mother's Polish citizenship involves determining whether the client's mother left Poland after World War I, i.e. only after the formal establishment of the Polish state.

The second example of the recent case handled by our lawyers relating to immigration and citizenship concerned a client who was sent by his family to America as a child for economic reasons just before World War II. The client's family comes from the city of Stryj (now Western Ukraine), near Borysław, the city with which the famous diplomat and head of the Knesset Shevach Weiss was associated.

The end of World War II found the client informed that the entire Jewish community of his city had died in the gas chamber. Therefore, at the end of the war, the client enlisted in the American army and took part in the last bloody battle of American troops with the army of the Third Reich, namely the offensive in the Ardennes (France), which took place at the end of 1944 and was particularly bloody.

Our client received a very high decoration for exceptional bravery in direct contact with the enemy. Our lawyers also had major evidentiary problems in this case, because it is always the applicant who must prove that his family had a Polish passport.