Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

numbers on the buildings farther down the street were bumped up in order to make room. Małachowskiego 12 became Małachowskiego 34. Such a straightforward explanation; yes, in retrospect it always seems straightforward. The reason it had taken me so long to figure out was that in his 1967 letter to my grandfather the trusty building manager Konrad Moszczeński had put down the old, incorrect address, number 12, and not the new, correct address, number 34. An oversight. He’d made a mistake. (What if it was not a mistake? What if Moszczeński had for some reason deliberately misled my grandfather? It’s unlikely but not impossible but I refuse even to consider it: this is too deep a hole to jump into.) On the one hand I suppose it was an understandable error—​his entire life it had been number 12 and now suddenly it was number 34—​though on the other hand it had been twelve years already; but in any case this two-digit typo sent me down the wrong path, had me knocking on the wrong doors, for two years.

Eventually the address change was confirmed, first over email and then in person, by Sosnowiec’s director of maps, something like the city’s official surveyor. I sat in his office and—​in a manner so straightforward it made me realize all over again how needlessly difficult and wearying these bureaucratic missions usually were—​I gave him the info, he entered it into the computer, got the results, then fetched a large yellowed book and turned to the page and there it was, in exquisitely neat penciled script: plot number 1304, on Małachowskiego Street, with “12” crossed out and “34” penciled in, owned by Kaiser, Moshe and Sura-Hena, and Kaiser, Shia and Gitla.

It had an effect, seeing up close this official inscription. 34 12. A half-centimeter-long pencil mark. All that confusion rendered moot by this tiny stroke. A literal sliver of clarity and simplicity within an otherwise increasingly exasperating and confounding undertaking. More than that—​this entry in the yellowed book was the first corroboration that the building was in fact owned by my family. Not that I had ever really doubted, but still—​I was working within an opaque past, with no one alive to back me up or contradict or correct me; working against a foreign bureaucracy, in foreign languages, under seemingly increasingly antagonistic laws. Knowledge can start to feel slippery. My truth can be true and at the same time go unrecognized. I say: My great-grandparents are dead; the state says: Not so fast. Again and again you learn that you do not understand what you thought you understood, that you had it incomplete, or skewed, or that it’s all irrelevant anyway. So it was affirming to see these names and numbers written in the ledger in the office of the director of maps. As if the city were saying to me: Okay, everything checks out, that’s what we’ve got here too. It’s our story too.

From a legal point of view the 12 34 revelation didn’t actually matter all that much. This was a bureaucratic, paper-based reality; the reclamation would proceed (or wouldn’t) within courthouses and archives, would happen (or not) via documents, records, petitions, judgments; no one cared which building I thought it was. This knot would have gotten disentangled eventually.

But beyond the legal implications—? Did it matter? That I’d made such a fuss over the wrong building? Sunk all that time and energy? Barged into the wrong building and knocked on the wrong doors and harassed the wrong people? Yes and no. No, because this is part of it, this is how it goes, these stories will always have interesting and meaningful detours. Look what had turned up, look who I got to meet. If the treasure hunters had taught me anything it was that who knows what you’ll find but it will be something. It’s about the searching and not about, etc.

And a wrong address makes for great slapstick, sure. In a way it was perfect. Of course I was going to get the building wrong, of course all my ponderous moralizing was going to misfire and splatter.

But also yes, it did matter, of course it did. I felt terrible. I’d caused, I assumed, no small amount of distress among the residents, and for what? I’d done all these mental gymnastics in order to qualify and justify what I was doing, to make my intrusion less of an intrusion, turn it into something a little noble, even. But it was, it turned out, just an intrusion.

Remember Bartek? Bartek who lived on the second floor, who’d been so gracious, who’d so readily opened up, who’d told me about meeting his mother for the first time in thirty-five years, who’d introduced me to Hanna? A few weeks after we first met—​by which point the inhabitants of Małachowskiego 12 understood what I was up to, what I was after, recognized the threat I represented, but before they or I knew that I had my addresses wrong—​Bartek sent me an email:

Regardless of how this turns out, keep in mind that for many of us, this building is our whole life (for me it is my family home, which I never really had). Teresa has been living here since 1957, Pani Hanna since I can remember. Some of the neighbors have already died (I do not remember some of them), some have moved out. Forty-two years in one place is a long time. I would say this is a kind of status quo—​one cannot replant old trees.

Unfailingly generous, even as he was appealing to me to not upend his life and the lives of his neighbors, Bartek went on to write that he believed that it was fate that we had met, and wished me good luck on my journey into my family history. It was something, he wrote, he could relate to. I am sorry everything is so hard, he wrote.

Bartek, Hanna, Teresa, the other residents of Małachowskiego 12—​I’m sorry. I’m sorry for