Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

ideology. But here? These were literally buried artifacts. They stood for what was dead and gone.

7

It took more than a year but finally, toward the end of 2016, our papers were in order, and The Killer filed with the court in Sosnowiec. The first order of business was to validate the deaths of my dead relatives. We had to make it official, in other words. At present they were in limbo. My great-grandfather and his brother and their wives, the owners of the building, and my great-uncle and great-aunt, the other two heirs, had died during the war, but no details were known, they’d died in the great unrecorded void, and so legally speaking these citizens weren’t yet dead. “Death,” as far as government is concerned, isn’t something automatically conferred just because you happen to no longer be alive: it is a status that must be applied for, approved, granted.

It was a bizarre if metaphorically rich undertaking. Bureaucratic reality forked from regular reality. Because these people were dead: it was an incontestable truth that these people were dead. I knew this because my grandfather knew this and my grandfather knew this because the war happened and he never saw them again. Which doesn’t constitute incontrovertible proof, I know, but it’s much more than supposition. Of the eighty thousand or so Jews who lived in the region before the war, maybe a thousand survived. That one or more members of my grandfather’s immediate family survived is unlikely; that he/she/they survived yet somehow remained unknown to my grandfather for thirty-plus years is just about impossible. But even then, even if they had survived the war and somehow remained unknown to my grandfather, they’d still be dead—​otherwise my great-grandparents would be closing in on 140. (My great-uncle and -aunt, granted, would be only 108 and 106, respectively.) So they were definitely dead, if not definitively dead.

Most people I mentioned this to were of the opinion that what the court was asking was unjust, perverse, insensitive, borderline anti-Semitic. They saw it as an affront, however judicially wrapped, to my family’s Holocaust narrative. It’s an understandable reaction. This is a fraught arena. We guard our histories very zealously. But the truth was that I didn’t see the process as particularly unfair. Absurd, sure, and very annoying, but absurdity and inconvenience are features of bureaucracies everywhere. In our case the absurdity and inconvenience were more pronounced than usual, but still—​death requires paperwork. The process was clunky and frustrating, but nothing about it—​at least at the outset—​struck me as pernicious.

The argument The Killer prepared for the court was one of common sense: that what was plainly real should be acknowledged as bureaucratically real. The only relevant document we had was a 1967 affidavit from Rabbi A. J. Englard, friend of my grandfather’s, stating that he had known the Kaisers in Sosnowiec and that only my grandfather had survived. Which was something, but, in terms of evidence, not much, because Englard doesn’t say how he knows they died; he could be and in all likelihood was repeating hearsay (or whatever you’d call the undetailed knowledge of the deaths of Holocaust victims). We had no concentration camp lists, no testimony that they were in this camp or that they died there. Extensive searches of databases of Holocaust victims and survivors turned up nothing.

Step one in having someone declared officially dead is a public pronouncement. The Killer took out an ad in the Gazeta Prawna newspaper asking for anyone with information regarding the deaths of Moshe, Sura-Hena, Shia, Gitla, Michoel Aaron, and/or Tamara Kajzer—​or, for that matter, anyone who may have seen them recently—​to come forward within sixty days. No one came forward.

We were then informed by the court that, on the basis of the last known addresses of the persons whose deaths we were asserting, our case had been split into two cases and would be administered in two jurisdictions. The death status of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and their two children (my grandfather’s immediate family) would be decided in Sosnowiec; and the death status of my great-grandfather’s brother and his wife would be decided in Będzin, as they showed up on a 1939 Będzin census.

The judge in Będzin, understanding that this was a matter of acknowledging the obvious, was quick, professional, courteous; I never even had to make an appearance. He made it official: Shia and Gitla Kajzer were dead. Mazel tov, I said to my father.

The judge in Sosnowiec, however, requested I testify, or, rather, requested Michael Kaiser and Leah Feld testify; I’d go as their proxy. Our trial was set for July 26, 2017. The Killer wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried. My dead relatives’ deaths were extremely apparent. The confirmation thereof would be, The Killer and I assured each other, a formality.

One week before the trial—​as if the gods were warning me not to take anything for granted, not even the basic independence, integrity, and functionality of the Polish judiciary—​the government passed a series of laws that threatened to undermine the basic independence, integrity, and functionality of the Polish judiciary.

This hadn’t come out of nowhere; this was but the latest escalation of a political crisis cooking for two years, since 2015, when PiS (Law and Justice) had won both the presidential and parliamentary elections, marking the first time since the fall of Communism that a single party held unified control of the government. PiS’s platform was nationalist, Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant, Catholic, right-wing, populist. Its leaders were openly contemptuous of democratic limitations, particularly those imposed by the courts, the only branch of the government not under their control. Their opening act was a brazen takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s highest court, tasked with deciding matters of constitutionality and settling disputes between government branches.

The country’s turn inward, its closing-off, was readily apparent. In 2016 PiS attempted to make some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe more restrictive. Not long after, the government made it a crime, punishable by up to three years in prison, to