Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

$40 million to those with eligible claims; my grandfather undoubtedly heard the news, undoubtedly imagined his form was being processed, his claim being investigated.

But he heard nothing, no confirmation, no rejection even. Nine years after he’d submitted his application he wrote to a lawyer in New York named Alberti and asked him to look into it.

Alberti informed my grandfather that he hadn’t submitted his claim properly, in fact hadn’t submitted a claim at all: there was another form, not available until 1961, that the FCSC required. My grandfather was apparently unaware. I don’t understand how he missed the news—​the FCSC had publicized this requirement extensively, even setting up an office in New York City to process the claims. By the time he wrote to Alberti it was too late. No claims filed after January 31, 1965, were accepted.

How disappointed my grandfather must have been. For years he had tried to navigate these faraway bureaucracies, had tried in vain to enlist the help of friends, strangers, lawyers. And then the US government had forced open an opportunity, had delivered a chance to be at least partially compensated for what had been taken from his family. But he had misunderstood the instructions. He’d blown it.

In 1967 my grandfather had many of the documents translated into German, and asked two former Sosnowiec residents to write affidavits stating that the Kajzer family owned Małachowskiego 12; it seems he was preparing to file a claim in German court. He also had the building manager, Konrad Moszczeński, with whom he’d been in very sporadic contact, send him a notarized copy of the mortgage register. This was by far the most legally relevant document in the pile. It was a short piece of paper, only four or so inches long, with a large Sosnowiec County Court seal at the bottom, stating that “on the basis of a 22 April 1936 decision of the Mortgage Department of the City of Sosnowiec, the deed of the property at Małachowskiego 12, Land and Mortgage Register number 1304, was transferred to Moshe and Sura-Hena Kajzer, a married couple, 68%, and Shia and Gitla Kajzer, 32%.” For some reason my grandfather never filed, or at least we have no evidence that he did; this is the end of the paper trail.

I was unexpectedly moved, reading these documents, tracing this story. To some extent this was due to the fact that I was reading words my grandfather himself had written. Words, even words laced up inside a letter to an attorney or a US government form, are like footprints. But aside from stating his parents’ names and revealing the fact that they had owned a textile business, the file revealed little biographical information. This wasn’t a journal, there was none of that kind of overt intimacy.

And yet.

I could imagine my grandfather’s desperation, his disappointment. I pictured him in his white and pink kitchen ripping open the letters, taking in the words with quickening breath and growing anger. Anger not at the lawyers or Rabbi Brandys or the commission, but at all of them, at everyone who stood in his way, at everyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t help, at everyone who did this and allowed it to happen, at those who allowed it to go unpunished, at the city of Sosnowiec, the country of Poland, the Germans, the Americans, maybe at God, too. How could he not connect the relatively minor injustice of being unable to secure his inheritance with the unspeakable tragedy that had left him as the only heir? He was very persistent. My grandfather asked and asked and asked: the New York lawyer, the Sosnowiec lawyer, the Sosnowiec rabbi, the Polish government, the American government—​everyone was kind and solicitous (aside from the rabbi), but the response was always no.

Throughout the file my grandfather comes across as businesslike, detached. But you cannot help but wonder what’s roiling beneath. What did the building mean to him? Was his interminable bureaucratic struggle a stand-in for a deeper, more personal, less articulable struggle? Did my grandfather see this as his only chance at extracting even a little bit of justice? Later my father told me that when his family moved to Toronto in 1963, his father had brought with him savings of $50,000, worth about half a million dollars today. I was surprised. I had assumed, having spent time with the version of my grandfather that had emerged in the file, that he had been severely cash-strapped. “If Zaidy had that much money,” I asked my father, “why all the agmas nefesh over four hundred dollars?” My father said he didn’t know.

Pursuing a seventy-year-old claim on a drab building in Sosnowiec was sentimental and unpragmatic. My father—​exceedingly unsentimental and pragmatic, a real cost-benefit kind of guy—​had made an effort to look into it on behalf of his mother, but once she passed, that was it; Sosnowiec and everything in it became faraway and forgotten history. It was assumed, to the extent it was considered at all, that some property in some Polish town would be worth very little money—​certainly not enough to justify the time and resources necessary to perform who knows what legal maneuvers in a country no one understood or trusted. This had been my stance too.

Although I don’t know anything about my grandfather’s time in the war, or his history from before the war, it isn’t an uneasy ignorance, by which I mean it has never felt to me like a secret, doesn’t have a valence of shame or trauma, I’ve never sensed in this gap the throb of repression, though of course on some level it’s there—​my grandfather went through what he went through and never told his children—​but it has never felt like forbidden knowledge, only lost knowledge, like he died before he could tell anyone, or before anyone asked him. I don’t know why my grandfather didn’t tell his children about what he’d lost—​he was protecting them, or protecting himself, he was creating a new life, I don’t know.