Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

I was a Jew coming back for his family property—​this is a veritable trope in Poland. Consider for a second how much property had, before the war, belonged to Jews: hundreds or even thousands of towns and villages were mostly or wholly Jewish; many of the largest cities had been 40, 50, 60 percent Jewish. Three million Jews, dead. A few hundred thousand more who’d fled. In the wake of the war there were a lot of vacant homes and properties.

Since the 1990s, since Poland became a democracy and allowed, at least in principle, claims concerning private property to be put forward, reclamation has been a sticky political and cultural issue. (There are no restitution laws: if a property was nationalized, there are no mechanisms to get it back or receive compensation; my claim was, in contrast, an inheritance claim.) I don’t speak or read Polish, I’m not really qualified to properly parse public opinion—​those pockets of support, scorn, compassion, fear—​but I have hung around long enough to understand how threatening reclamation, real or imagined, can seem. In Sosnowiec, pretty much the entire downtown core was Jewish. Kraków, Warsaw, Łodź, Wrocław—​huge swaths of these cities, and very central swaths, were Jewish. Reclamation is an issue with monumental demographic, political, and social stakes; it has been a central issue in more than one national election. Sometimes the conversation can take on a regrettable tone: occasionally the greedy foreign Jew will show up in cartoons or political sloganeering, hungry to take advantage of his historical “windfall.” But there are legitimate questions of costs, responsibility (Is this Poland’s problem? Why shouldn’t Germany be responsible? What about Jewish property that had been nationalized by the Soviets?) and of logistics (How best to enable lawful reclamation? Avoid abuse and fraud? What about statutes of limitations?).

Again—​I can’t really parse this. To try and plumb the psyche of a nation that isn’t mine and whose language I don’t know—​how useful or meaningful would my contribution be? My scope here is narrower. Let’s imagine just one building, one home, and let’s imagine you and your family have lived for fifty, sixty, seventy years in this building, with a prewar history that is, let’s say, murky, and, as far as you’re concerned, better left unexamined, you don’t think about it, best not to, this is your home, you’ve lived here your entire life, and yet you never feel entirely secure, entirely at home, because you worry that one day there’ll be a knock on your door and the former owner, or the former owner’s grandson, will thrust papers in your face and say: This building? This building is mine.

That Jew is mostly myth—​the fear of the phenomenon is massively disproportionate to the phenomenon itself—​but, yeah, occasionally it does actually happen.

It can be difficult, in the face of this much tragedy, instability, displacement, to keep everyone in the frame. From a distance reclamation can seem straightforward: what was ours remains ours, intervening years be damned. Up close it’s so much more complex. How to approach it humanely and compassionately? Develop an ethics? How to listen, receive, integrate (or reject?) narratives that clash?

There are cases that are cut and dried. The Poles who were complicit in the deportation or murder of their Jewish neighbors and/or who knowingly took advantage of Jews’ extreme vulnerability—​their claims are easy to dismiss. But what about their children? Grandchildren? Great-grandchildren? Does the fact that they have no idea of the deeds of their progenitors matter? And of all the cases where Jewish property became Polish property during and after the war, I imagine the ones featuring evil, murderous, plotting Poles to be a small fraction (which isn’t to say it’s not sizable; rather, it’s a small fraction of a massive number). What about the situations where the property was taken unknowingly? Or half-knowingly? When suddenly there was a vacancy and a family didn’t ask questions and moved in? Or were compelled to move in? Does their belief that they own the property matter? I don’t mean legally. I am uninterested in a debate about squatters’ rights. I am interested in the moral calculus, that is, how we receive the descendants’ narrative. Does the calculus change in ten generations? Fifty?

The story of any given property is made up of multiple stories that split, stop, restart, that are layered, fragmented, winding.

All this moral waffling, I’ll be honest, runs counter to how I was raised, to the tenet I received if not explicitly (but often explicitly) then by osmosis: the Poles were (are) our enemies. The Poles who saved Jews were the exception but your average Pole was—​at best—​perfectly content to see Jewish neighbors carted off to the ovens. If you want to split hairs you might say the Poles were not the killers (but still sometimes the killers) but the abettors of the killers. My father tells me that my grandparents hated the Poles more than the Germans. That they routinely referred to the country as a country of filth and murder, to its citizens as brutes and scum. Does this sound extreme? Unfair? Unnuanced? Guilty of painting with too wide a brush? I don’t know what to tell you. This was a received truth among my relatives. My own sympathies, my openness, are suspect to them. That I routinely travel to Poland, drink Polish beer in Polish bars, socialize with Poles, swim in Polish quarries, and go to Polish concerts and give readings in Polish bookshops—​if my grandparents were alive I imagine they’d be furious; I imagine they would be heartbroken. But I can’t address their pain. It’s too big, and too removed, and was never articulated to me; I won’t pretend to be able to speak to it.

Regardless of rights, my rights, the residents’ rights, our stories were now entangled, and it would amount to a kind of emotional fraud to pretend otherwise. I wanted the story to fragment, those cracks to emerge. And oh did the story fragment—​the story broke clean in two: