Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

but I could not help it—​that this wasn’t about the deaths at all, this was about the reclamation, this was about property, this was about Jewish property: the deaths were a technicality, an excuse, a fig leaf, something the judge had seized upon in order to justify torpedoing the reclamation. Judge Grabowska could have affirmed the deaths—​the judge in Będzin, presented with the same (lack of) documentation, had affirmed the deaths of Shia and Gitla Kajzer. But Grabowska had chosen not to. What could it be but sabotage? How deep did it go? Did the judge’s agenda in fact reflect the government’s agenda? Was Judge Grabowska torpedoing my reclamation because the new nationalist, revisionist, judiciary-undermining government wanted her to, had directed or compelled her to? Or even if no one had said anything aloud she understood which decision her higher-ups would be happy with, she didn’t want to step on any toes, hundreds of judges across the country had just been fired, better play it safe . . . ? I was paranoid. I had had the goodwill knocked out of me and now I was paranoid, I was being yanked back to my family’s default attitude toward Poles—​suspicion, mistrust, resentment. My father wasn’t the least bit surprised at the ruling; disgusted, but not surprised. Antisemitn, he said. What did you expect.

A few weeks later we got the decision in writing and my suspicions weren’t allayed in the slightest. As best I could tell—​this was a translation, of uncertain quality, of a legal document—​Judge Grabowska’s reasoning seemed to be that since there were other Jews who’d been in similar circumstances who had survived (including, I suppose, my grandfather), it therefore could not be conclusively determined that my relatives had not survived. The judge was not saying, to be clear, that my relatives could not be declared dead because they might be alive—​the judge did not believe that my relatives might be alive, because the judge was not an idiot. Her reasoning was more procedural: these deaths did not qualify, did not meet the state’s standard of “death.” The judge even went so far as to offer counterexamples, circumstances where death could be declared—​such as a natural disaster—​but not here, not in this instance, because, apparently, the Holocaust wasn’t deadly enough . . . ?

If only there’d been a flood, I said to my father. Then they’d be dead.

In her decision Judge Grabowska cited a law, the Act of 23 April 1964, that seemed intended for exactly this kind of situation—​i.e., those who went missing during a time of war can be declared dead one year after the war ends. But according to Judge Grabowska the act did not apply in our case because there were some Jewish survivors. It was an infuriating argument. If the existence of any survivors means the law does not apply, then it’s a hollow and meaningless piece of legislation. A 99 percent mortality rate was, apparently, insufficiently deadly.

The arbitrariness was further underscored by the fact that the Act of 23 April 1964 had been invoked by the Będzin judge: Shia and Gitla Kajzer’s deaths were dated May 9, 1946, one year after World War II ended. Indeed, the final paragraph of the decision of the Będzin judge reads like a direct rebuke to Judge Grabowska, outlining why the lack of hard evidence of deaths isn’t, in this instance, meaningful: Undoubtedly . . . the legislators had also, or even mainly, in mind the many legions of people who died in labor camps and Jewish ghettos. With very few exceptions there are no eyewitnesses, because these eyewitnesses themselves were victims and died together with those for whom recognition of death is being sought. In this respect, the applicants’ claims, given the historical circumstances, constitute sufficient substantiation.

The generosity I’d come to the process with, that spirit of what can you do, bureaucracies will be bureaucratic, now seemed so misplaced, so naïve. Because all I was asking for here, really, was an acknowledgment of a supremely banal fact, that they’re dead, that my relatives who died in the Holocaust are dead. What could be an easier-to-acknowledge truth? That the dead are dead? That those who died in the Holocaust died in the Holocaust? Yet the powers that be were saying: No. It was risible, it was outrageous. I had thought my story did not have an antagonist, but I was wrong, it does, I found my antagonist. Here it was. It didn’t have a name, it was amorphous, it went beyond one judge in Sosnowiec—​it was the system, the bureaucracy, the courts. Maybe it was even “Poland.” The country, the history, the idea, I don’t know.

What did this mean for the case? It was of course an annoying and dispiriting setback, now we’d have to appeal, and who knew how long that might take. But so what, who cared about the added cost and time, there were more disturbing implications—​namely, the ugly abstraction of something so manifestly true, a truth that should be considered sacred: the deaths of Shoah victims! They were denying the deaths of Shoah victims! Even if “denying” is not the most precise verb here that’s what I’ll use, because that’s what it felt like and, really, amounted to. For a minute I thought—​kind of grandiloquently—​that my frustration had something to do with closure, that the court’s refusal to recognize these deaths was keeping something in limbo or whatever, but then I realized no, of course not, it had nothing to do with closure, I never knew these people, I wasn’t in mourning or in any kind of psychic pain. Rather it was like I was being told that the truth doesn’t matter. Yes they’re dead but unfortunately that doesn’t mean they’re dead. Like I was being told: You have your story, we have ours. Your story isn’t more true than ours. Your knowledge isn’t actually the right kind of knowledge. People aren’t dead just because you believe they are dead, just because you know they are dead, just because they are in fact