Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

subjects—​turned to Jason asking Bartek if he could take a portrait shot inside the apartment; Bartek was happy to oblige. Then Larysa and Bartek had a conversation, in Polish, I don’t know what about, and while they were talking Jason pulled me aside. He said he thought I had to come clean with Bartek, tell him the real reason we were here. Given how raw and honest Bartek had been with me, it would be, Jason said, unpardonable to let this deception deepen. I said to Jason, You’re right.

The interview resumed. I said, “I want to say thank you.”

“It was no problem,” Bartek said. “It was very nice to meet.”

“The truth is,” I said, nervously, awkwardly, “my family was from Sosnowiec. My family was actually from this building. Before the war my grandfather lived in one of these apartments.”

I said it like a confession—​a partial confession, I know, I know: still I was omitting the hardest part—​but it didn’t have any noticeable effect on Bartek, who simply asked me for the name. I said “Kajzer” and he said he didn’t recognize it; he called his aunt, who didn’t recognize it either.

We went inside the apartment to take the portrait of Bartek. Bartek’s wife, also in sweats, watched us, tickled by our interest in her husband and their apartment. A huge shaggy dog followed Bartek around. I didn’t even try and imagine this as anything but Bartek’s apartment, as the apartment he’d inherited from his grandparents. That this may once have been where my family lived didn’t register, didn’t matter.

Of the dozen or so photographs Jason took inside the apartment that day, my favorite shows Bartek standing behind a small folding table in his living room, red t-shirt tucked into his gray pants, drawstrings a-dangling. The dog is kneeling beside him. On a small folding table is lunch. A couple of covered pots; a bottle of fruit drink, colored an unnatural red; and a loaf of sliced bread in a clear plastic bag.

Bartek offered to introduce us to other residents. Thinking aloud, he ran through who in the building would be good to speak to, who’d be available, who’d be amenable. Touchingly, not only did Bartek know all the other residents in the building, he knew them, was close to them. This woman would be good but had the flu. This man was out of town. That neighbor was also renovating so it might be too hectic. Ah, Bartek held up a finger—​the best person to talk to would be, no question, Hanna.

Bartek escorted us down the stairs to the first floor and knocked on apartment number 2. He introduced us to Hanna, who looked to be in her late sixties, short gray hair, friendly, trusting, very shy, but happy to speak with us.

Hanna’s apartment had all the markers of a space lived in a very long time; it was extremely tidy but you could see, feel the accumulation. The apartment was full of put-away boxes and books—​shelf after shelf dedicated to philosophy, criticism, architecture. The four of us sat at a small square folding table in the living room. On the wall and on the side tables were many framed photographs, nearly all of which were of the same cute blond boy, Hanna’s grandson.

We opened the conversation—​it felt much less formal than it had with Bartek, maybe because we’d eased into it by now, maybe because Hanna was so approachable—​with a recitation (sounding stupider and stupider) of why we were here, how she could help, etc. Hanna lit up. She wasn’t the type to get overly excited but even so you could tell that our interest in the building delighted her. Where should I start, she asked. (She didn’t speak any English; all of our conversation went through Larysa.)

Why not start with when you moved here?

“I moved into the building right after it was built,” Hanna said, “in 1955. I was ten years old. I’ve lived here ever since, through my marriage, through my divorce.”

I thought: That can’t be right.

Jason, catching my eye, confirmed: “Nineteen fifty-five?”

Hanna nodded. Tak, tak. She was sure of the date because she was sure she was ten years old when her family moved in. Her family hadn’t lived far away, just a few blocks over, and she remembered the construction, remembered anticipating the move.

I thought: If the building was built in 1955 then the building did not exist before 1955; and if the building did not exist before 1955 then what had my great-grandfather owned before the war? Where had he lived if not here? What had my grandfather tried to reclaim for twenty years? What was I trying to reclaim now?

I asked Hanna if she knew what had been on this plot before this building was built. Maybe, I thought, there’d been a building here before the war but at some point between 1940 and 1955 it was knocked down and in 1955 this building, the building Hanna said she’d moved into when she was ten, was built.

Nothing, Hanna said. There was nothing here before.

Nothing? An empty lot?

“Just a small wooden house, where an old lady lived. There was an apple tree in the yard. The kids in the neighborhood used to steal apples from her.”

It was clear that one of the histories here—​either Hanna’s or, much more likely, mine—​was wrong. But I didn’t know how to raise this point with Hanna; I did my best to keep the conversation on track. I asked Hanna why her family had moved to this building in particular, if her family had anything to do with the theater.

Hanna said that her father was, like her, an architect, and though he did some work for the theater, the reason they had moved here was that the conditions were better. Hanna pointed out a couple of framed photographs of her father, who looked like you’d expect a prewar Polish architect to look: dignified, hat, glasses, mustache. (We’d find out later that he was more than just an architect—​he