PLUNDER

In a literate, constantly surprising quest, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor returns to Poland to lay claim to the things of the past.

Early on, Kaiser writes of the “pit stops in the obituary” of his late paternal grandfather, who died in 1977. The author knew that he was born in Poland, survived the Holocaust, and was the sole member of his family to have lived through the terror. Kaiser traveled to Sosnowiec, in south-central Poland, not just to search out family history, but also to explore his grandfather’s claim to family property seized by Nazis. The latter journey took him deep inside the workings of the Polish legal system, with numerous false leads and misinformation throwing him off the trail. It didn’t help that the Kraków lawyer he hired, nicknamed “The Killer,” wasn’t exactly deft with the requisite paperwork. When the author located what he thought was the family property, he encountered a longtime resident who told him, “This is my family’s house.” Kaiser thought to himself, “it wasn’t said defensively or threateningly, he only meant to show off his English,” but it became clear to him that a successful claim would displace others, presenting one of many moral quandaries. Along his path, the author learned about his grandfather’s cousin, who also survived the Nazi occupation, working as a slave laborer in a mysterious tunnel complex that the Nazis had built even as World War II was turning against them. Kaiser’s parallel quest then took him into the concentration camps, sometimes accompanied by treasure hunters who used his relative’s memoir as a guidebook to hidden Nazi loot. Of a piece with Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold (2012), Kaiser’s story approaches the conclusion on an unsettled note that, he laments, would be simpler to resolve if he were writing a novel and not nonfiction—though it does end on a cliffhanger worthy of a thriller.

An exemplary contribution to the recent literature on the fraught history of the Shoah.