'I Want My House Back': Holocaust Survivor Fights To Evict Tenant Overstaying Welcome

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Genya Markon sat on the beach at Road K, watching a storm starting to roll in over the ocean.

Normally, she could pack up her belongings and drive the 4 miles back to her family home on Bay Avenue in Hampton Bays. But this summer, she can’t get inside.

Ms. Markon, a 78-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives most of the year in Israel, has spent nearly a month displaced from her three-bedroom, two-bathroom Cape that she rented to a seasonal tenant who now refuses to leave — and has trashed some of her belongings.

“I want my house back, please,” she said. “I have no sympathy left for her. I’ve been too nice to her the whole time. She has no right, she has absolutely no right to do this.”

The tenant — who is a Century 21 real estate broker and declined comment — submitted a “hardship declaration” to stay in the home, where she has lived under two separate leases starting in September 2019. The first was a seasonal rental through June 2020, which Ms. Markon said she chose to renew from July 1, 2020, through June 18, 2021, after the pandemic canceled her annual trip to the East End.

“It’s a seasonal rental, it’s not a year. She keeps saying she has an annual rental,” Ms. Markon said of the tenant. “She applied for the pandemic moratorium protection, and she insists she has an annual rental, even though it’s totally clear she doesn’t. I told her in January, ‘Your lease is up June 18, I’m returning the next day.’”

And when Ms. Markon did as she said, flying thousands of miles from Israel to spend the summer in Hampton Bays, she had nowhere to live.

On Ms. Markon’s behalf, attorney Anthony Cummings filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Supreme Court, which seeks the tenant’s eviction as well as damages, calling the dispute a “brazen attempt to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse for failing to perform under the contract at issue,” considering the pandemic-related eviction moratorium was never meant to cover seasonal rentals.

“[The tenant is] conducting herself in a bad faith, dishonest and manipulative way to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass confusion and gridlock in the lower courts all in an effort to block surrendering possession of the Premises,” the suit states.

In an email to Mr. Cummings last month, the tenant wrote, “Yes, I am aware of the seasonal rental provisions. However, the lease that I signed last year was for a yearly rental. The lease agreement that I had with Genya prior to last June’s lease was a seasonal rental for 9 months.

“It is not my intention to put Genya in a difficult situation; the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on housing,” the email continues. “I am continuing to look for another living accommodation, but at this time, there is nothing available … Again, my sincerest apologies are to Genya.”

Ms. Markon has called the East End her second home since 1967, when her Lithuanian-born parents bought the 1,260-square-foot getaway brand new after emigrating from Nazi-occupied France to Baltimore in November 1942. She was born two months later.

“We moved to New York and the few times my parents could afford a vacation, they would come here,” she said. “My mother never liked the Catskills. She adored this area. It reminded her of her hometown in Vilna.”

In 2008, after Ms. Markon retired from her role as a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and moved abroad, she decided she would escape the heat in Israel and continue the family tradition by visiting their East End home from mid-June through Labor Day — until now.

“This woman is lethal. I’ve come from Israel — 6,000 miles away to my home — and this woman has given me grief all along, not paying me what she should be, making up stories, finding excuses, complaining about this and that, and trashing my home,” Ms. Markon said. “I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what I found.”

While Ms. Markon does not believe there is any damage to the interior of her house, many of her belongings were moved out to the garage — including her couch, paintings that included a treasured family portrait and a Danish chair that she found destroyed, all interspersed with garbage piled inside and around the house.

“The last two months in Israel, when I started to envision really what I was facing, I wasn’t functioning. I truly wasn’t,” Ms. Markon said. “I saw psychologists twice, I tried cannabis, I tried Xanax. Nothing worked. I was a basket case. I am much calmer now that I’m here and that I’m feeling that I’m dealing with it. And that I’m gonna get her out somehow.”