Glance at Culture - Author Menachem Kaiser on His Book Plunder, His Research and Property Claim in Poland, the Vilna Ghetto and the Frustrating Design of Judicial Systems

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Cover photo of Menachem Kaiser by Beowulf Sheehan.

To learn more, please visit the website for Menacham Kaiser and Plunder.

Show Notes:

2:00 genesis of Plunder: A Memoir of family property and Nazi treasure

4:00 the memoir by Abraham Kajser

6:45 Kajser’s experience as a forced laborer during WWII in underground camp structures in Poland that were given the code name Project Riese 

7:30 Polish version and Hebrew version of Kajser’s memoir

8:45 political decisions in what stories are given attention

10:30 the writer’s mandate to create work that’s honest

11:20 he went on a Fulbright to Lithuania

11:50 his unexpected research on the Vilna Ghetto

12:30 lessons missed in Holocaust education

13:00 his revelation of how morally and historically complicated and interesting the Holocaust is

14:00 Jews’ self-governance in ghettos included trials and hangings

15:00 How the ‘politics memory’ differs in countries like Lithuania and Poland

17:00 The arc of his thoughts on the moral and ethical questions raised by his inheritance claim for his grandfather’s building

21:00 status of his inheritance claim for his grandfather’s building

22:00 move by mayor of Sosnowiec to claim his grandfather’s building

25:30 Nationalist shift in Poland, resulting in failed/dismissed property claims

27:00 response to Plunder in Poland

28:30 KARTA publisher of Plunder in Poland 

30:00 the challenges he dealt with in researching the book 

31:50 research into forced displacement of Germans after WWII

34:30 myth-soaked Silesia became a character in the book

36:30 archive from Vilnius, Lithuania

38:00 David Fishman’s The Book Smugglers

40:00 value of archives in digitized form versus physical form

41:00 Vilnius archive re-surfaced in the late 1980s/early 1990s 

43:00 arts programs in the Vilna ghetto during WWII

43:30 Artist Samuel Bak

44:00 Poet Abraham Sutzkever

44:15 Protest songs by poet, musician, writer and activist Szmerke Kaczerginski

44:40 civil war rumblings in Vilna ghetto

46:50 Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna ghetto government

47:45 death of Itzik Wittenberg, Hero of the Vilna Ghetto / leader of the Resistance

49:30 anti-Semitism in Poland

50:30 his thoughts on how the justice system is designed to frustrate efforts 

52:15 his thoughts on how his legacy is being shaped as a writer

57:00 his current project related to an ongoing story in Montreal that involves allegations of hiding 4B in Nazi gold.

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Music by Toulme.

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