Plunder by Menachem Kaiser *** (of 4)

 

The author's grandfather was the only member of his Polish family to survive the Nazi's death camps. Grandpa died before the author was born, but according to the author's father, after the war ended, the grandfather spent 20 unsuccessful years tilting against Polish and German bureaucracies in an attempt to reclaim his apartment building in Sosniewicz, Poland. 

Menachem Kaiser reengages the struggle for restitution in part to see if he can find an attachment to the grandfather he never met. With a jaundiced eye at other so-called Holocaust tourists - Jewish descendants just like himself searching for some abstract kind of connection to lost family or closure - Kaiser learns the building is worth $400 and cannot fathom why his grandfather suffered such anguish to get it back. 

What makes the book interesting is Kaiser's musings on the nature of homelands, the meaning of forcible loss of property, and then as he gets closer to potential acquisition of his grandfather's apartment building, his introspection on what it might mean for the building's current dwellers. Will he displace them? Kaiser takes it without question, as well he should, that the elimination of three million Polish Jews and the taking of their property and worldly goods was an act of unfathomable evil. Do future generations of Poles have to repay by forfeiting property they acquired unknowingly (or without asking)? (The question of any parallel to Jewish displacement of indigenous Palestinians and Palestinian children seeking to get back their parents apartments and farms never arises.) What does come up at great length, however, is the extensive system of Nazi tunnels constructed throughout this part of Poland; tunnels for which there is no reliable explanation. Hundreds of Poles search the tunnel complexes for lost treasure, marvel at Nazi feats of engineering, and never consider the enslaved Jews that were marched from camps every day to dig the tunnels until they died.

Nazi tunnel, Riese Complex, Poland.