Reparation Spoken Here?
Excerpt from the short piece appearing in Tin House Magazine
By Rachel Kadish
This is how I thought it would be to travel in Poland: My image of myself, of my mother and the other family members I would meet there, was strangely irradiated. I pictured us as figures on a photographic negative our dark hair white, our faces darkened, all of us staring with white eyes out onto a world that would not recognize us. On the sidewalks of Krakow we would weave mute and unseen, ghostly figures superimposed on a city oblivious to our presence.
I have yet to hear a discussion of Holocaust reparations that does not make me queasy. Terms like 'justice' taste bitter; the money and property involved seem dangerous, inviting misinterpretation by those who would believe my great-aunts and others like them are just out for gain. Certainly the most important losses are irreparable. At times I think of my mother's family as having been scattered at the detonation of an explosion. Even now, sixty years after the Holocaust and dispersed across several continents, our windows rattle hard at the slightest tremor of anti-Semitism. Rent, my grandparents urged my parents when I was a child. Don't buy. The possibility of flight was a staple of my upbringing. Despite my American passport and secure suburban childhood, I grew up knowing all I had could be swept away. Discovering as a child that I wanted to be a writer, I was irrationally uncomfortable to realize my career would be language-bound: What if I had to move to another country, another culture? Shouldn't I be developing skills more easily transplantable?
This trip to Poland was a trip I'd wanted to take all my life. And so when, a month before my twenty-ninth birthday, my mother and I coordinated travel plans with seven other relatives from Israel and England, when my relatives arranged July meetings with the Krakow-based lawyer handling the family's reparation claim ,I refused to be deterred by what felt like a surreal scheduling coincidence: that very week would cap off years of work. I had eight days to check over the galleys for my first novel. Resolved not to allow this obligation to eclipse the journey, I bundled up the neat uncut pages and a handful of red pencils; I packed my bag and boarded a plane to ground zero.
I had no intention of falling in love with Krakow a city where more than 60,000 Jews lived before World War II and where, as of the week I arrived, there remained only 150. I had no intention of falling in love with a single thing about Poland. I was there to see a world I'd heard about all my life; to keep my mother company; to see a building. My great-grandparents owned a hotel in Krynica, a small spa town on what was then the Polish/Czechoslovakian border. In 1939, as a small knot of my family members escaped to the east, the Germans were rumored to have made the hotel into barracks for Nazi soldiers. In 1949, at the start of the communist era, the Polish government turned the building into a high school. And in 1990, my great-aunts filed a claim on that property, as well as on the family's homes in Krakow: a claim that, by the time eight of us converged on Krakow this June, seemed to have been buffeted by every legal obstacle the Polish courts could muster.
To read more of this piece, check out Tin House Magazine at www.barnesandnoble.com
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