Holocaust Education Week speaker discusses quest to reclaim ancestral property

Menachem Kaiser never knew his paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew for whom he was named.

His grandad was the only one in his family to have survived Nazi Germany’s invasion of their homeland and the genocide that followed.

Kaiser, the grandchild of this man – a Holocaust survivor who died before the expatriate Torontonian was born – went on a years-long pursuit to try to reclaim an apartment building in Poland his grandfather owned prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

His saga turned into a self-described weird story of family history, self-reflection, government bureaucracy, Nazi treasure hunters, legal-system navigation and changing expectations along the twisty road through his reclamation project.

Kaiser’s tale sparked a well-received book, published last year, called Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure.

At a public talk in Halifax Tuesday, he said his story was not written by someone who grew up in a Jewish household steeped in Holocaust tutelage. Being the grandchild of survivors wasn’t an active part of his identity growing up.

“On some level, my grandparents chose to put (their wartime ordeal) behind them,” Kaiser said, at a Holocaust Education Week event at the Central Library on Spring Garden Road. The 19th annual week is being put on by the Atlantic Jewish Council.

Kaiser said his dad has no memory of his parents discussing what they went through in order to survive.

The writer’s appearance was presented in a question-and-answer format with interviewer Olga Milosevich, a retired CBC broadcaster. Asked by an audience member what his goals were, with respect to getting his grandfather’s building back in the family, Kaiser said they’re complicated.

He acknowledged working on his book ended up becoming a primary factor, a memoir he said that was “kind of a love letter” to his family. (Kaiser described the story he tells in Plunder as essentially a series of setbacks.)

“It was really a gift in disguise,” he said, of writing the book. “It forced me to interrogate my own motivation.”

When the Nazis occupied Poland, in 1939, about 3.3 million Jews lived there. By the end of the Second World War, Holocaust experts have said, some 380,000 had survived in Poland or other parts of Europe.

Kaiser, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., first visited his grandfather’s old building about 11 years ago.

It was not some neglected relic from the war – there were tenants living there, “good people with real lives,” says a 2021 book review in The New York Times.

Later, following his visit, Kaiser’s father faxed him many documents connected to the property.

What he read showed his grandfather attempting over decades, and failing, to get it back.

After he reviewed the material, a sudden realization took hold of the young man.

“I really felt really for the first time in my life a sentimental connection with my grandfather,” Kaiser said in a Boston radio interview in 2021. “I saw that he had failed for 30 years trying to get back his building, and I was in this unique position to resume his quest.”

When Kaiser started his reclamation task, “he thought it would take him 18 months at most,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an international news service, reported last year. That was an underestimation.

At the library talk, Kaiser said his claim regarding the property in Poland remains unresolved.

With respect to learning about Nazi bloodletting involving Jewish people, he said he’s read a lot of Holocaust-related books and other material.

Kaiser said his personal interest in Holocaust education is hooked more to academic/intellectual elements than emotional or psychological ones, and has heard from readers who felt his book was disrespectful to victims and survivors.

Nazi rule under Adolf Hitler began in 1933; the Second World War took place between 1939 and 1945.

During the war, Nazi control on the European continent was extensive and the Germans’ ruthlessness extended beyond mass imprisonment, slave labour and murder.

The Nazi regime carried out an organized, ambitious looting of European art, cultural artifacts and property. (In 1938, a Nazi law had already forced Jewish owners of property and assets in Germany and Austria to register holdings worth more than 5,000 Reichmarks.)

“Following the . . . property registry, Jewish citizens faced an increasing number of economic laws that chipped away at their livelihood,” the Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2018.

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, about 35,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors and their dependents resettled in Canada between 1947 and 1955. Many arrived in Halifax, on ships from postwar Europe.

In 2011, officials at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, in the city’s south end, unveiled a memorial to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in 1939 who were on a ship denied entry to Canada.

Designed by Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors, the Wheel of Conscience was inspired by the story of the MS St. Louis and is a sobering reminder of a notorious chapter in this country’s history.

Between 1933 and 1948, fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees were permitted into Canada. That was “the smallest number of any Allied nation,” says the Canadian Museum for Human rights, in Winnipeg.

For more information about Holocaust Education Week (Nov. 1-7), go here.

Michael Lightstone is a freelance reporter living in Dartmouth