Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

I asked Hanna, as I had asked Bartek, if she could share childhood memories of the building. With a kind of sheepish glee, she told us about the theater parties. Everyone would get very drunk, she said, laughing. Very rambunctious. The police had to come often. Once the police came to break up a party but were subsequently called away, to a more urgent emergency, but they left their attack dog at the door of one of the apartments, to make sure the party didn’t restart, but then they, the officers, didn’t come back, so the dog stayed there all night, and in the morning an actor, trapped inside his own apartment, had to scream out of his window for help: he was late, he had to get to the theater. And once on Christmas Eve Bartek’s grandmother came over and asked Hanna’s parents if they’d had Christmas dinner; they said yes; she said, Good, because there are some actors here who haven’t had Christmas dinner and we’ll do it here, your apartment is bigger, and she threw open the doors to reveal a dozen hungry actors waiting in the hall. And back in the fifties and sixties, Hanna said, her parents had the only television in the building, and every once in a while all the residents would cram inside and watch a broadcast of the National Theater. Those were great parties, she said. She looked down at the table, looked up, offered a weak, wistful smile.

Then she said she wanted to show us something, and got up and retrieved from a shelf a bunch of rolled-up papers, which she proceeded to spread out over the table. They were maps. But not everyday tourist maps. These were large, historical, precise, like official city surveys, which was what in fact some of them appeared to be. At least half a dozen maps, covering the whole table, hanging off the edge like stacked tablecloths.

Hanna thumbed through the pile of maps and extracted one from the middle and put it on top. It was a city map, drawn, she said, in 1936. She pointed out the landmarks—​train station, City Hall—​and explained the legend: if a lot is striped it means there is a building; no stripes means the lot is empty, or contains an “unofficial” structure (such as a small wooden house with an apple tree). Where on the map were we? With her finger Hanna followed Małachowskiego until it intersected with Targowa and stopped on a stripeless lot. There was no building here in 1936.

Hanna gestured for us to be patient and got up to fetch something from the next room. As soon as she turned the corner the three of us, with sitcom timing, began to whisper-argue. Larysa said, “I told you this building looked new.”

“It doesn’t make sense!” I hissed.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Larysa said. “The building was built in nineteen fifty-five.”

“But how?”

“Do you think she’s lying?” Jason said. “She seems to really know what she’s talking about.”

“I don’t think she’s lying,” I said, “I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense. I’ve got records of a mortgage on this building from nineteen thirty-two!”

Hanna returned to the room with another large, official-looking map, this one from 1966. But before we began examining it I, flustered, confused, came clean, told her that my family had lived at Małachowskiego 12 before the war.

Okay, Hanna said. She was unperturbed. She wasn’t challenging my narrative, nor did she see me as challenging hers, even as our respective narratives could not, it seemed, both be true.

I asked: “This building definitely did not exist before the war?”

“This building did not exist before the war,” she said.

“Did the numbers change? Is that possible?”

Hanna said she didn’t know. When she moved in in 1955 this was definitely number 12 and it definitely stayed number 12 ever since. I’m very confused, I said. I explained to Hanna that I had a document from 1967 that referenced a 1932 mortgage on this address, so whatever building was Małachowskiego 12 in 1932 was still Małachowskiego 12 in 1967.

Hanna shrugged apologetically, then stood up and brought out yet more maps. At this point stacked on the square table were at least a dozen extremely detailed, professional-grade maps. In this small, full, tidy apartment was more and better cartographic information regarding Sosnowiec than, I’d be willing to bet, anywhere else—​maybe even including City Hall. (Later we asked Hanna how she’d gotten these maps; she said that years ago she had helped her brother with his master’s thesis, which examined the history of Sosnowiec’s cityscape, and they had borrowed copies of these maps from City Hall and no one had ever asked for them back.) How bizarre, unexpected, moving, to encounter such prodigious expertise on Sosnowiec real estate—​from the daughter of the city planner!—​in the very building I was trying to reclaim (or maybe it wasn’t the building I was trying to reclaim, by then I had no idea).

We were all standing, leaning over, elbows on tables, plotting the city out. We looked at the map from 1966, compared, analyzed; we looked at a German wartime map; we looked at a pre–World War I imperial map. In a book celebrating the city’s 110th anniversary was a photograph of City Hall from before the war, with open space on either side, no apartment blocks in sight. It wasn’t photographic evidence that the building didn’t then exist—​this plot was outside the frame—​but the photograph made it even easier to imagine this building not being here.

We tried but couldn’t make sense of how this building could exist and also not exist. I showed Hanna all my documents, including the mortgage, told her that my great-grandfather had not only lived in but also owned Małachowskiego 12—​which may or may not have been this building—​and that I was trying to reclaim it. Which meant that—​if this was in fact the correct building—​I was trying to reclaim her home. But Hanna seemed unfazed, seemed to see this