Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

do her thing. It felt a little strange, a little uncomfortable—​a little unromantic?—​how this had so quickly assumed a bureaucratic shape. But that’s how it works, was what I was told. Your motivations can be personal and sentimental and on fire but the process is bureaucratic and cold and procedural. There was no person or persons to appeal to, no one I could implore, or demand, to sign the deed back to my family. There was no one who could sign the deed back to my family. This story doesn’t have an antagonist (is “history” an antagonist?). The building was ownerless, lost, and the apparatus to be used to try and force recovery was a legal one.

3

In the months after sending off the power of attorney forms I didn’t give the matter much thought. This was an easy story to slip into: I was the grandchild embarking on a mission of memory, I was reclaiming an ancestral building and doing so for the sake of or in the name of or in order to be connected to or something having to do with my grandfather; what else was there to consider, who else was there to consider?

Obviously: the people who actually live in the building, for whom my claim would be an out-of-nowhere hurricane. It took some time for this to sink in but more and more it felt . . . not wrong but irresponsible to proceed with the reclamation without at least knowing, knowing of, knowing about the residents. The Killer was against the idea. Don’t make trouble, she said. You could cause a panic. You could mess everything up.

I ignored her advice and returned to Sosnowiec. I brought my friend Jason, a photographer who can be, especially when he’s photographing (and he’s always photographing), relentless and a little shameless—​his company makes me bolder—​and Larysa, an understated, whip-smart museum curator, as an interpreter. We agreed that if we were to have any hope of having a meaningful conversation with a resident, we’d have to go in soft. “Soft”—​I’m making this sound like a practical decision. Which it was, but it was also a cowardly decision. I was going to obscure the truth: we’d say we were interested in researching and writing a history of the building, which, while not inaccurate, we were interested, nonetheless suffered from a grave omission. At the time it seemed honest enough—​I wasn’t scoping the place out, I was genuinely just trying to meet the residents. But in retrospect this is a weak justification.

We got inside without incident. Jason and Larysa took in the dull green walls, the sterile stairwell. “This doesn’t look like it’s from before the war,” Larysa said. “This looks like a building from Communist times.” I shrugged. Who knows what the story was. Maybe it’d been renovated. Anyway, I said, here’s a plan? Let’s be methodical? We can start at the top, knock on doors, work our way down?

It was mid-morning on a weekday, and very quiet. The only sign of life was a middle-aged man entering his second-floor apartment, which, as we could see even from the hall, was under renovation.

Top floor. We chose a door at random and Larysa knocked. Jason and I stood a few feet back, far enough that we seemed (we hoped) unscary but close enough to indicate that we were of the same party. No answer. Larysa knocked on the next door; again no answer. We tried a third door. This time the door opened, but only a couple of inches, only as far as the chain would allow. Peering out at us through the gap was an old, thin, unsmiling woman. Larysa said the bit we’d prepared in the car. But the woman was having none of it. I didn’t have to understand the conversation to see that it wasn’t going well. Nie, nie, nie. She was unpersuaded, unconvinced, untrusting. The pretext we’d crafted—​that we were American researchers interested in learning about the history of the building, etc.—​was useless. Our presence was threatening, Jason’s camera was threatening, our interest (in her life, in her home) was threatening.

We tried the other doors on the floor; no one answered, which was disappointing, but also, given how tense it had gotten with the old woman, somewhat of a relief.

We held a whispered meeting and decided to abandon the plan of trying each door and instead to walk down two flights to the apartment being renovated, because, one, we knew someone was home, and because, two, that someone, as we’d seen on our way up, was young, in his late thirties or early forties and therefore, we figured, much less likely to be spooked.

The man was standing in his doorway as we came down. We (that is, Larysa) introduced ourselves and offered our undercooked spiel. He agreed to be interviewed without hesitation. His name was Bartek. He was friendly, amenable, forthright. He had a wide noble forehead, made wider and nobler by his receding hairline. Dark hair with matching thin goatee and sharp-angled eyebrows. He looked like a pudgier, kinder Lenin. His t-shirt and sweatpants were covered in home improvement splatter, caulk and paint and white dust.

Bartek apologized for the state of his apartment and suggested it might be easier if we talked in the hallway. He brought out a chair for me and a chair for Larysa and a toolbox for himself, which he stood on its side and used as a stool. Jason stayed standing and took photos. It was tight; the four of us took up all the space in the stairwell.

Bartek asked us how he could help, what it was we wanted to know. He was so welcoming and unsuspicious—​it made it that much harder to deceive myself that what we were doing wasn’t deception. On some level I wanted Bartek to be wary, or at least to be a little warier—​wary enough so that my lies felt not so heavy but not too wary that he didn’t want to speak to us. Perhaps it