Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

Jews hiding treasure in walls—​including one about my own great-grandfather, hiding treasure in walls. I have not heard many stories of people finding treasure in walls.

I know Będzin a little, I said—​what’s the address? Steve smiled and said, not unkindly, I can’t tell you that. I was charmed that he wouldn’t tell me, that he felt possessive of his myth.

Of course, I said, I understand. Are you planning to go to the house?

I don’t know, he said. I’d like to. It would mean a lot to see the apartment. It would be really something to search for the eggs. I know exactly where they are. But we’ll see. Steve was nervous about going in cold, just showing up and knocking on the door. He preferred something more official, more intermediate. He had contacted lawyers, tried to determine if he had any legal recourse. But his father-in-law, long since deceased, hadn’t owned the house, so reclamation was out. (Consider yourself lucky, I said.) And it’s not as if there’s a law that permits you to enter a property that isn’t yours in order to retrieve an item that belonged to your dead relative, especially an item whose provenance can’t be verified and to which the current residents would almost certainly not readily relinquish their claim. Steve had even considered holding a press conference—​rustle up some publicity, make it a cause, try and work out a deal with the authorities and the residents. But he didn’t know anyone in Poland. He didn’t know whom he could trust. And he was here for just five days. His only option was to knock on the door and see what happened. He wasn’t bullish on his prospects. I doubt whoever lives there will talk to me, he said, let alone let me in, let alone let me search their attic. So we’ll see. I recognized Steve’s hesitancy. The sentimental obligation bumping up against decorum, this reluctance to trespass, this wish to not disturb others’ lives, to avoid confrontation (and no matter how polite you are, it is a confrontation). You should do it, I said. I told Steve about my own experience knocking on unknown doors, how uncomfortable it had been initially. But I guarantee you’ll have an experience.

Yeah, he said. He seemed to take this to heart. We’ll see, he said.

The truth was that I was less interested in Steve’s father-in-law’s golden eggs than I was in these 250 people with roots in Sosnowiec and Będzin who’d come to Poland to do their memory-work. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It felt a little like they were crashing my party. Like 250 strangers had suddenly joined my solo hike. Steve invited me to the hotel for the kickoff dinner that night; I readily agreed.

The dining room was full of fressing Jews, plus a handful of fressing non-Jews. That nervous energy of individuals congealing into a group. Everyone had just arrived, everyone was just meeting everyone. It was a mostly middle-aged crowd, a few seniors, including at least two survivors. Everywhere family stories were being swapped. My father, my mother, my grandmother, from there, survived like this, moved here. People propped up little placards at their place at the table, listing not their name and hometown but the name and hometown of the family member they were there representing. Reunions were erupting all over the place. Siblings, cousins, relatives figuring out they were related. Most had never been to Poland, and would likely never come again; for them this was a pilgrimage. Poland was less a destination than something to be overcome, an obligation to be fulfilled.

The organizers gave me a schedule and invited me to tag along to anything I wanted.

A couple of days later I took a bus to Sosnowiec and easily found the group—​250 wandering tourists are not an everyday sight in Sosnowiec—​and stood with them in front of the train station, in an awful heat, as the mayor unveiled a plaque commemorating the city’s Holocaust victims. Memorials are good and important—​it is good and important that memory be imprinted onto space; otherwise it’s abstracted, memory seeps out, the space is allowed to forget. A plaque, though, is the least intrusive sort of memorial; it almost immediately becomes invisible. I don’t know. It was fine. Certainly better than nothing. I should stop being cranky about stuff like this. I spent most of the ceremony chatting with Steve, for whom I’d become a sort of guide, a helpful insider.

In the afternoon there was a piano concert in a performance hall not far from the city center, featuring a renowned Polish pianist. The renowned pianist was very good but I left after twenty minutes. I had had my fill. Events like this feel like a charm offensive. Two hundred fifty relatively wealthy foreigners were visiting the city and it was pulling out all the stops, dedicating plaques and organizing concerts and crafting the message these foreigners want to hear, namely: We take your history seriously. But how seriously, really, did they take it? Look at all the trouble I had to go through for them to recognize the deaths of my dead relatives. I don’t know. Maybe I should stop being cranky about stuff like this, too. Many in the audience seemed to be moved, or at least to be enjoying themselves.

In the evening there was a banquet. A few local politicians spoke, as did the head of the Warsaw Jewish community. The theme was unity.

The next morning there was a ceremony at the ghetto memorial in Będzin. It is an impressive memorial, very much not a plaque—​a few meters of oversized train tracks that start abruptly and end abruptly in a square in the middle of what used to be the ghetto and is now a run-down section of the city. It’s a poignancy coupled with irrelevancy. It disturbs the cityscape, sure, but the only people who ever see this memorial are the residents, and who knows how they view it,