Let us pretend, for a second, that my great-grandfather lived out his life in Sosnowiec, as did his son, as did his son, and that I was born and raised not in Toronto but here, in Poland, and you and I, in this parallel universe, where World War II never happened, or happened on a significantly smaller scale, where history continued unbroken, were having this same conversation about my family’s property. You wouldn’t dream of saying to me, That building your family owns in Sosnowiec, it’s just not right, it’s immoral, how could you do such a thing. The reason my family is no longer in Sosnowiec is that they were all murdered. It is baffling and frustrating to me why you seem to believe that this fact should undermine our claim.
Do you have any idea how many people lost their property during the war, during Communist times?
Many people, I know. But the claim we have on the building isn’t competing against any other claim; the building is, currently, technically ownerless. This isn’t a zero-sum game. The fact that many people suffered an injustice shouldn’t mean that justice is denied to all. Why shouldn’t our claim be honored?
You have to consider the massive upheaval the country went through. The trauma. The displacement and death.
You’re speaking to me as if I’m out to destroy something. I don’t represent a movement, and I don’t represent a philosophy. I represent only my family. All we want is the return of something that is rightfully ours.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s all as innocent as you’re making it out to be. That you had to hire a lawyer speaks volumes about the nature of your little quest.
This isn’t being done via any illegal or semi-legal mechanisms, nor are we taking advantage of any loopholes or arcane Polish laws. There is no abuse of power here. We’re forced to do this via the court because, thanks to historical circumstances and the wholesale erasure of my family, the extremely prosaic laws of inheritance haven’t been applied. We’re not using the courts to gain an edge or to manipulate the system; we’re using the courts to return the state of things to their normal course, viz., property that belongs to you is passed on, after you die, to your kin. It is such a boring, everyday occurrence. Someone dies and their children inherit. Nothing remarkable here. So unless you’re arguing against the very concept of private ownership, I don’t see why my family should be denied its rights.
The fact of the matter is that the concept of private ownership was suspended, or at least severely eroded, in this country for nearly fifty years.
Is the argument here that the property should belong to no one? That post-Communist Poland is entirely detached from pre-Communist Poland? But that’s simply not the case. Communism ended, the country reverted to a democracy, property laws were upheld. Prewar claims are valid. There is, even if fractured and glued together, a continuity in this country, historically, legally. And I am pursuing the rights granted to me according to the law of the land.
It’s not a legal issue. It’s an ethical issue. People live in those apartments. What about those people?
What about them? No one is taking away their property—they do not own the apartments they live in. Not legally, not technically, not in spirit. They do not own those apartments because they never bought those apartments. They never bought those apartments because they never had a chance to buy those apartments because the only people who could sell those apartments were murdered.
So this is about the money.
You can question my motivations, which may be more pecuniary than I’m willing to admit, especially in light of how much the building is apparently worth; it isn’t easy to demarcate motivations, to disentangle something like respect from something like greed. But in any case my motivations are one thing; my legal and moral rights are another.
You are remarkably callous. I keep asking you about people and you keep answering me about property. The people who live in those apartments have rights.
No one is planning to deny the residents of Małachowskiego 12 their rights.
Those apartments are people’s homes.
I am not planning to raze a residential Sosnowiec block in order to build a mall. I am not planning on evicting anyone.
You know as well as I do that if you do get that building back, and sell it, or manage it, or whatever, then rents are almost certainly going to rise.
That is a separate issue. You want to argue that I have an ethical obligation to not sell the building because it’ll have an adverse effect on the tenants? Maybe. That strikes me as an important conversation. But right now we are not talking about selling, and we are not talking about evicting, we are not talking about rents. We are talking about the simple fact of ownership.
You still don’t get it. You’re not thinking, at all, about the residents. Put aside the question of their rights, your rights. Forget for a minute about the legality, the morality, forget all that. Just think about them as people, who live in those apartments, their homes, who have in all likelihood lived in those homes their entire lives.
A hundred times I had this conversation, a version of this conversation, with others, with myself, until it finally sank in, this embarrassingly banal truth: that the residents of Małachowskiego 12 were more than the abstract, incidental inhabitants of the building my great-grandfather owned and lived in before the war. Did I have any compunctions regarding the legality or morality of the reclamation? No. See above. But the least I could do was acknowledge that I was messing with people’s sense of security. They would be fearful, of course they
