Plunder: A Family's Journey to Reclaim Property Stolen by Nazis and the Search for Lost Treasure

Amazon Customer: "I don't know how to summarize a book like this...in certain ways this is a very notable, strange book." These are the author Menachem Kaiser's own words, describing a long deceased Polish relative's memoir,"Za Drutami Smierci" (Behind the Wires of Death") which can just as well describe his own work, "Plunder."

It begins as an frustrating and ultimately inconclusive effort to reclaim a property once owned by his grandfather in the Polish town of Sosnowiec but becomes a prolonged account of his wanderings in Silesia for nearly a decade. There he meets treasure hunters who seek buried and hidden relics and underground structures of the Nazi era and learns that "Za Drumati Smierci" , written by his grandfather's cousin, is revered as their Bible. What "Plunder" starts out to be is not what it becomes.

The book is particularly relevant today as the Polish government has just passed a highly controversial law which essentially denies further claims for restoring ownership to properties lost or taken during the Holocaust or the Soviet regime which followed. One cannot fail to see this as another attempt to absolve Poland from any complicity in the Holocaust and indeed, an...

United States on Aug 18, 2021

A. Caras: This book was OK. While I really admire the author’s willingness to share the less pleasant parts of himself, he eventually started coming off as a bit of a jerk. And I personally have a hard time reading a book where I don’t really like the main character. The parts of the book that didn’t involve the author were really interesting, and his interactions with the “explorers” was also interesting. I would have liked more of that.

I suppose it’s not fair to ask him to consider everything from everyone’s point of view, but his willingness to destroy the lives of the tenants, or to wreck people’s property, in what he saw as a service to the over-arching “right thing” was sad, especially considering his position as a privileged white male American (Canadian?), and their positions as just-scraping-by residents of a barely first-world country. It was also disappointing, if not surprising, that he was willing to upend their lives to stake a claim on what he considered his family property, but he then went to Israel to visit people connected to the story and didn’t seem at all concerned about who used to own the property where those people now...

United States on May 11, 2021

Yonah Krakowsky: A beautiful book that I couldn’t put down. At the same time meaningful and hysterical. Highly recommend.

Canada on Apr 12, 2021

gammyjill: “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure”, by Menachem Kaiser, is a bit of a mishmash of family history and Polish history. Kaiser, who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, was raised in Canada and currently lives in New York City.

The number of Holocaust survivors is diminishing as time takes its toll. For many years we had the survivors telling their own stories; then their children took over, and now we’re reading the third generation. Many of these authors never met their grandparents who suffered, instead using photographs, written materials, and official documents, they put together a narrative of their ancestors’ lives and experiences.

Menachem Kaiser becomes interested in his grandfather’s story and was determined to “find out more”. This involved research in both mainly Poland and Israel. There’s also - supposedly - a building owned by the Kajer family in the town of Sosnowiec, Poland. Kaiser visits and picks up a crew of lawyers and historians to help him, first, to find the building, and second, to declare the owners dead, so Menachem and his family could take over the building. But, where IS the building, supposedly...

United States on Mar 19, 2021