Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure

Written by Meir Menachem Kaiser

Narrated by Meir Menachem Kaiser

A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography

From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows 

Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.”  A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780358449904

Meir Menachem Kaiser

MENACHEM KAISER holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, New York, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews for Plunder

[bostonbibliophile · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this is a wild ride through several different aspects of the holocaust, post-holocaust and modern life. I really enjoyed the different strains Kaiser brings together as well as his engaging and thoughtful writing. i felt like maybe the story of the building was a little thin so he needed to pad it out with these additional stories- Abraham Kaiser, the treasure hunters- but those are *great* stories and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I don't know if he's going to write anything else but I would read it.

[booklovers2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 The journey of a grandson named after a grandfather he never knew tries to continue the fight to reclaim his family property taken from them when they were forced to leave and sent to the concentration camps. A journey hoping to connect to a grandfather who died before he was born. More questions than answers along the way. Meeting of Treasure hunters, a remnant of the war torn country seekers of the Nazi Treasure hidden in the tunnels of the country side - Although the ending is not written for the journey sought - the writer did find the story and family of this grandfather's brother, a survivor whose journal has given clues to the Nazi treasure hunters quests. I hope a sequel is soon to come!

[susan0316 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After World War II many survivors emigrated to the United States and started new lives. They never talked about their history or the loss of family members. Menachem never knew his grandfather, who died before he was born and he could find out very little about him from his father because stories of the war weren't shared in their household. When Menachem is in Europe, he decides to go to Poland to find out where his grandfather grew up. His visit turns into a quest to get reparations for the apartment building that his grandfather had owned. Along the way, he learns more about his grandfather's life and even spends some time with Nazi treasure hunters. The trip that he took into one of the Nazi tunnels, was difficult to read especially by someone as claustrophobic as I am. His writing was very introspective and he didn't just talk about the adventure but also the ramifications of the Nazi regime and how they changed the lives of so many people.

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Menachem Kaiser is a young Jewish man whose family, as part of the Holocaust, was forcibly moved from their home in Poland. Kaiser lives in the USA and carefully begins to describe a process of reclaiming his family's physical property, which some call *former* property.> [...] for twenty years my grandfather had tried to reclaim or at least be compensated for his family’s property, and for twenty years he’d gotten nowhere.Kaiser is able to describe a delicate ethical journey throughout this book: how do you pursue a seventy-year-old claim on a building in a town that you've never set foot in, a building in which strangers now live?A few paragraphs put this in perspective:> It would come up in conversation that I was reclaiming my great-grandfather’s property in Poland. Most people were into it. They thought it was an interesting and meaningful thing I was doing. Particularly enthusiastic were those with parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who’d fled eastern Europe, or really anywhere, or those who were themselves refugees — in other words, those who had in their family a narrative of flight. These people tended to see the reclamation as a kind of crusade, they believed I was righting a wrong, taking up the cause of my survivor grandfather, exacting a tiny but nonetheless significant act of Holocaust justice.> > But not everyone was into it. I encountered plenty of ambivalence, skepticism, criticism. This was especially the case in Poland, where the cost and consequences of the war are so much more immediate, the narratives so much messier. Friends and friends of friends, Jews and non-Jews, locals and expats raised their eyebrows and wondered, more or less accusingly, more or less confrontationally, if what I was doing in Sosnowiec was in fact, beneath the sentimental surface, beneath this lovely little story of taking up my dead survivor grandfather’s cause, an act of appropriation, or something like appropriation, or even if it wasn’t really appropriation it nonetheless smelled like appropriation, it had the same ugly goal and result. People live in this building? they asked. I said, Yes, it’s an apartment building, people live there. Okay, they said, so correct me if I’m wrong but at the end of the day you’re taking away their homes?> > You have nothing to do with this building. You never even knew about this building until a few years ago. And now you’re coming out of nowhere to claim it.> > Maybe the root of our misunderstanding is semantic. Let’s use a different terminology — let’s drop “reclaiming.” “Reclaiming” implies a transfer of ownership, a seizure, and I can understand how that might make some people uneasy. So let’s drop “reclaiming” and instead use “asserting.” So not “reclaiming the building” but “asserting ownership of the building.”The above is deeply understood and argumented elegantly by Kaiser. He also asserts his family's right to the building as they were murdered by the Nazis, not without its internal problems; Jews in Poland experienced problems with non-jews in Poland. Add to this the paranoid experience that Nazism brings (for example, how the Nazis loved how reporting on each other brought benefits and fear on every level), and things are made even more complex.We follow Kaiser's journey into a country where his family were murdered and followed, through actually knocking on doors of houses where he believed the building was - only to discover he's been mistaken, but not before having some very uncomfortable discussions with the current residents.> Whence the confusion? The addresses had shifted. When this block of apartment buildings, Małachowskiego 10–18, was constructed, the numbers on the buildings farther down the street were bumped up in order to make room. Małachowskiego 12 became Małachowskiego 34.There's also pan-Atlantic and legal proceedings to take into account: Kaiser hires a lawyer who's called The Killer, who handles his court case in Poland, where most people who make ownership claims have to leap through hoops and fire to make it somewhere, legally speaking, without their case being dismissed.It's interesting to read of Kaiser's travels in Poland. He even meets up with people who blend WW2 paraphernalia and love for UFOs:> We went inside and sat down at a large oak table in a wood-paneled room. The sanctuary had a clubhouse kind of feel. On the wall were framed maps, a large metal ornamental Reichsadler, a spoked steering wheel of a ship. An antique typewriter was on display in the corner. Lots of very fine woodwork. The table’s centerpiece was a three-foot model of the Eiffel Tower. Next to it was a heap of explorer-related documents — maps, permits, applications, sketches of Nazi UFOs.He also meets a WW2 survivor:> Spiranski said that he liked Jews a lot. His father had rented their home from a Jew named Mortke, and had worked in a beverage company for a Jew named Rensky. Mortke was a very good person, Spiranski said, then began to weep. All the Jewish people and all the Polish people remember Mortke. I don’t know what happened to him. As far as I know, all the Jews were gathered by the Germans, and probably killed.The stories about the people he meet are both interesting on a personal and moral level. Here's a telling paragraph:> I remembered how startled and confused I had been by the Nazi paraphernalia in Andrzej’s Land Rover. Even if a Reichsadler dangling from your rearview mirror doesn’t necessarily mean you identify as a Nazi, surely you must be aware that some people might in fact make that assumption, right? The fact that Andrzej apparently did not care, that he had no problem flaunting his swastikas, was worrisome. Where I come from you do your absolute best to put to bed even the slightest suspicion that you are into the Third Reich.I won't detail the interesting and frustrating details in the legal aspects of Kaiser's claims, but it's safe to say the Polish court made it extremely difficult for him to try and pursue any results. One simple example of this is how he tried to define what he'd done to ascertain his family had been murdered in the Holocaust: upon presenting the databases he'd fruitlessly searched to see whether he could find any traces of his family, he's then asked by the court to present a list of the databases he *hadn't* searched (or his case would risk being dismissed).Also:> The judge in Sosnowiec, Judge Grabowska, had considered only whether or not my relatives could be “declared dead,” and ruled they could not, because the conditions were not met. When did they die? Where did they die? How did they die? It was all blank. There were no eyewitnesses; they didn’t show up on any concentration camp lists; their location during the war was unknown. Judge Grabowska had not malevolently twisted the law; she’d offered a technical argument regarding a technical requirement. (A perhaps troubling corollary is that Poland/1939–1945/Holocaust is too abstract/loose to qualify as place/time/method of death, which on the one hand, sure, that is abstract and loose, but on the other hand, one might contend that the Holocaust should be considered at least as “deadly” and “specific” as a natural disaster.)All in all, this book is both a work of introspection, morals, ethics, and legal matters, yet I feel Kaiser never veers off from the human aspects of it all: he seems to care about the people who are currently living in the building that he claims legal ownership of, and doesn't want to evict them. There is also the deeply unsettling aspects of how Jews who try to assert ownership of physical objects - e.g. buildings and art - are basically dismissed, much like troublesome flies.Through his journeys, Kaiser puts his thumb on how Jews have been persecuted and still are; He does this while skillfully navigating personal stories, looking through old family films, visiting cultures and different peoples in Poland, and trying to understand the Polish legal system, which changes during his court case.All in all, this is a very interesting book that reads simply and poses a few very interesting questions to the reader: what would *you* do in Kaiser's shoes?*'Plunder' is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on 2021-03-16.*