Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

stairs were wide and wooden and run-down. It was shabbier than number 12, it was more despondent, it seemed poorer, but that might just have been the stairwell, for all I knew the apartments were newly renovated and expensively furnished. We walked to the top floor. A woman hurried past us and into her apartment, shutting and locking the door behind her. I stared at the closed door. An antagonism was creeping in. It felt different than it had in number 12, or rather I felt different—​I felt hardened, ground down, ungenerous. Who were these people and what were they doing here and did they even know and how dare they? They didn’t own their apartments; my family did; they were squatters or if they weren’t squatters then they certainly weren’t here with permission. The people who lived here had, even if indirectly and unwittingly, benefited from the wholesale murder of my family, were continuing to benefit from the wholesale murder of my family. I had never really faced that fact before; I’m not saying it’s not more complicated; but it is the truth, or part of the truth, or one of the truths.

Larysa asked if I wanted to knock on any of the doors and I said, No, not today, I’m not feeling up to it right now.

We visited the pharmacy, which, to put together what Hanna had told us and what my grandfather had written on his Foreign Claims Settlement Commission application, apparently has been operating continuously since at least the 1930s. Inside it was, like many Polish pharmacies, quaint, fusty, inefficiently designed, with a tiny waiting area for customers and an expansive but barely used space behind the counter, where most of the items for sale were out of reach and out of sight. The walls had wooden paneling and I could see, in the back room, mortars and scales. I imagine it looked much the same in the 1930s, when my great-grandfather came to collect the rent. This was probably the most open portal to my grandfather, the best opportunity for my imagination and sentimentalism to worm their way in, but it felt only like a pharmacy, hardly more than that, something to which I had a personal connection but not that personal. We asked the woman behind the counter if we could speak with the owner. The woman said the owner wasn’t in, but was happy to pass on her contact info; later I wrote to the owner to ask if I might interview her about the history of the pharmacy. She was open and forthcoming until she learned that my family had owned the building before the war, and promptly shut down the conversation. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she wrote. “There is nothing to discuss.” I felt strangely satisfied. Let everyone be intransigent and suspicious; good, let everyone play their roles, let’s embrace the stereotypes, I’ll be the Jew coming back for his property and you be the fearful Pole.

You have every right to expect that I attempted to seek out the residents of Małachowskiego 34 the same way I’d sought out the residents of Małachowskiego 12. That I sought out their stories, that I tried to make this reclamation more human, less distant, less abstract. All of those arguments regarding empathy and responsibility still applied, right? At the end of the day this was the building whose inhabitants would be affected; this had always been the building.

I did nothing. I didn’t knock, I didn’t interview, I didn’t engage, I didn’t meet anyone, I didn’t get rebuffed by anyone, I heard no one’s stories, I heard none of the building’s history. I left it abstract, unintruded-upon. I clung to, insisted on, number 34’s real estate–ness.

I don’t have an excuse. I was exhausted, which isn’t an excuse. I didn’t have it in me. The thought of knocking on more doors; of having to once again contort the truth of who I was and why I was there or risk being seen as a threat; of being seen as a threat in the long run no matter what I did—​I just didn’t have it in me.

I think in these stories of return and reclamation, of zany eastern European adventures, of trekking back to the alte heim and stacking myths and confronting ghosts, the emotional strain is too often tamped down, smoothed out. I don’t mean the trauma, the psychical cost of delving into exceedingly dark family histories—​that is often very movingly explored. I mean the much more banal truth of how tiring it is. How draining it is to keep pushing into spaces that really push back. The lies add up. The errors, oversights, unknowns. The posturing. The absorption of stories. The communicating via a translator. The dead ends. The traveling, the intrusions, the retreats, the deceptions. Stories like this are often presented and received as missions, and the protagonists, consciously or otherwise, as heroes. We like our heroes to be indefatigable. The unromantic truth is that it is very, very taxing.

A few days later The Killer sent me a message that the Sosnowiec District Court had come to a decision. It had not gone our way. Judge Wioleta Grabowska had ruled that my dead relatives could not be declared dead.

To understand why the judge had ruled the way she had we’d have to wait for the written decision, but at that point I wasn’t even all that curious, I was resigned, I’d surrendered to the absurdity. The Killer told me the news and I blinked, sighed, said yes, of course, why should anything be rational or simple. Of course the court would refuse to acknowledge the deaths of my dead relatives.

That night I listened to the recording I’d secretly made of my court testimony. I listened to the judge’s absurd questions, her demands, her brusqueness, her references to the building, and I began to suspect—​I had a hard time not suspecting, I hated that I was thinking like this