Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

a reason to. We’d pulled the significant information (birth dates; the name of my grandfather’s sister, which was Tamara) and noted the information that was absent (any dates of death; any record that my grandfather had had more than two siblings). But otherwise the spreadsheets hadn’t seemed that relevant.

But that night in Wrocław, Jason’s snores floating into the living room, I studied the spreadsheets, tried to trace the bloodline.

I found a 1912 marriage notice for Moshe and Sura-Hena, my great-grandparents, that included the names of Moshe’s parents: Dovid and Ester Kajzer. My great-great-grandparents. Hello, I said to their ghosts.

Then I searched for other marriage notices where Dovid and Ester Kajzer were the listed parents. I found four. Necha, who married Marek; Shia, who married Gitla (the minority owners of the building); Maier, who married Blima; and Fyvush, who married Udla, and who were the parents of Abraham. My great-great-uncles and -aunts. Hello, I said to their ghosts.

So how were Abraham and I related? Abraham’s father, Fyvush, born 1886, was the older brother of Moshe, born 1888, my great-grandfather. Which meant that Abraham and my grandfather were first cousins. Or put another way: Abraham was my grandfather’s closest relative to have survived the war; it seems Abraham and my grandfather were the only two, in fact, from all the children and grandchildren of Dovid and Ester to have come out of the camps alive. The preface mentioned also that two of Abraham’s siblings had gotten out of Poland before the war—​his brother Chaskiel had moved to Argentina (as a stowaway, I’d later learn) in 1927, and his sister Necha had gotten married and moved to Palestine in 1939. I read all this and thought: here was an entire new branch of the family. Just like that the family went from extinct to not-extinct.

Abraham and his two siblings were also heirs to the building: they have just as much a claim on their uncle Shia’s 33 percent stake as my grandfather does. But this wasn’t simply about new relatives, more heirs. This was also a new legacy, a wartime story I was able to enter. My grandfather was a blank, past-less, but Abraham was a celebrity.

5

It would come up in conversation that I was reclaiming my great-grandfather’s property in Poland. Most people were into it. They thought it was an interesting and meaningful thing I was doing. Particularly enthusiastic were those with parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who’d fled eastern Europe, or really anywhere, or those who were themselves refugees—​in other words, those who had in their family a narrative of flight. These people tended to see the reclamation as a kind of crusade, they believed I was righting a wrong, taking up the cause of my survivor grandfather, exacting a tiny but nonetheless significant act of Holocaust justice.

But not everyone was into it. I encountered plenty of ambivalence, skepticism, criticism. This was especially the case in Poland, where the cost and consequences of the war are so much more immediate, the narratives so much messier. Friends and friends of friends, Jews and non-Jews, locals and expats, raised their eyebrows and wondered, more or less accusingly, more or less confrontationally, if what I was doing in Sosnowiec was in fact, beneath the sentimental surface, beneath this lovely little story of taking up my dead survivor grandfather’s cause, an act of appropriation, or something like appropriation, or even if it wasn’t really appropriation it nonetheless smelled like appropriation, it had the same ugly goal and result. People live in this building? they asked. I said, Yes, it’s an apartment building, people live there. Okay, they said, so correct me if I’m wrong but at the end of the day you’re taking away their homes?

These rebukes, these gentle or not-so-gentle pokes at the ethical underpinnings of the reclamation, really rankled. Even if I didn’t subscribe to the crusade narrative—​I didn’t claim that what I was doing was in any way heroic, or about justice, or amounted to any sort of moral declaration—​I refused to accept that what I was doing was wrong. To posit otherwise demonstrated, I felt, an outrageous myopia. As if this were a case of an evil landowner abusing the legal system in order to displace helpless tenants. As if this were happening in a vacuum, all history melted away. As if World War II never happened. As if the world reset in 1945 and nothing before counted.

As you can probably tell, I would get very defensive.

I’d say: How is this in any way appropriation? We aren’t taking anything. The building was my great-grandfather’s. He was murdered so it passed to his son, and then his son died so it passed to his children. Where exactly is the moral snag here?

You have nothing to do with this building. You never even knew about this building until a few years ago. And now you’re coming out of nowhere to claim it.

Maybe the root of our misunderstanding is semantic. Let’s use a different terminology—​let’s drop “reclaiming.” “Reclaiming” implies a transfer of ownership, a seizure, and I can understand how that might make some people uneasy. So let’s drop “reclaiming” and instead use “asserting.” So not “reclaiming the building” but “asserting ownership of the building.”

Call it what you want, but the fact of the matter is that you don’t live here, your family doesn’t live here, no one in your family has lived in Sosnowiec for decades, and you don’t plan on living here, ever. You come to Poland for a couple of months a year, you’re really not much more than a glorified tourist, and you saw an opportunity to take—​I’m sorry—​to “assert ownership” of this building.

It’s true, I don’t live here, my family doesn’t live here, and hasn’t lived here for a long time; it has been a seventy-year absence. However, there are very good reasons for that absence. The delay to the process has no bearing on the ethics of it.

It certainly does have