Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

only as an interesting research question. I asked her if she recognized the name “Kajzer.” She did not.

We stayed another couple of hours. We talked about the city, its history, its architecture. Hanna’s love for Sosnowiec was abundant and heartwarming, in the way that a learned, earned love of a place always is. Hanna asked if my family was Jewish. I said yes (relieved that it was not assumed), and Hanna pointed out on the maps the synagogues and Jewish-owned factories from before the war. I tried a few times to ask Hanna about her life, about her own history, but she’d demur, steer the topic back to Sosnowiec, to the theater, to the building, her home.

Part II

Riese

Silesia

4

The historical region of Silesia lies in the basin of the Oder River, which begins in the Czech Republic and flows north-northwest through Poland and marks, along with the Neisse River, the Polish-German border. Most of Silesia lies within Poland, with bits in Germany and the Czech Republic: it is a borderland if there ever was one. Silesia is both Poland and not-Poland, and the seams show—​it has a different feel, a different look, a different mood from the rest of the country. There is no continuous national narrative here. To skate over a lot of turbulent history, Silesia has belonged to Moravia, Bohemia, the hyperfragmented Piast dynasty, the Bohemian Crown Lands, the Austrian Empire, the Prussian Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Germany, and, finally, contemporary Poland. Pre–AD 500 populations include Corded Warers, Jordanovians, Lusatians, Bylanians, Celts, Venedians, Przeworskers, Scythians, Sarmatians, Marcomanni, Vandals, Goths, Huns, Gepids, and Heruli. So whose land is this, historically? Depends on who you ask. There’s a Polish narrative that lines up contemporary Poland with the Piast dynasty and the Lusatians (1300 BC ​– ​500 BC), who are positioned as a kind of proto-Slav population. There’s a Czech narrative that spotlights the Moravian/Bohemian empires. The German narrative runs from the Goths and Vandals (100 BC ​– ​AD 500) through the Prussian Empire and the unification and the Weimar Republic and ends abruptly with the Potsdam Conference, in 1945, at which point the border was pushed westward to the Oder-Neisse line.

Silesian identity, then, can be a slippery thing. It’s a layer cake of nationalities, loyalties, allegiances, languages. Today it’s pretty indisputably Polish, at least in the everyday sense (though with lots of visible if subdued Germanic elements: architecture, cityscapes, cemeteries; there’s even a Polish word for this—​ponimiecki, or “post-German”), but this is a recent and largely engineered development. In the years after the war, millions of ethnic Germans in Silesia—​which had very suddenly become Poland—​were expelled. And more than a million Poles from the Kresy—​the eastern part of the interwar Polish state that had been annexed by the Soviet Union—​emigrated, or were forced to emigrate, to Silesia, which was part of what the Polish Communist government officially called the “Recovered Territories.” And the considerable Jewish population of Silesia had been wiped out.

It is a land of displacement. A population removed; a population deleted; a population installed. There is a sense of rootlessness, strangeness, unfamiliarity that, once you know what to look for—​once you learn how to read the ruins—​is everywhere. There is an entire genre of Silesian stories about people finding valuable and unexpected things in their literal backyards: imperial crowns, Austrian silverware, Jewish corpses, Wehrmacht helmets. There is an identity of the land that is independent of the identity of its people.

The displacement, the turnover, the roiling demographics—​it’s fertile ground for myth. There are so many lost, terminated, extinguished, transplanted cultures and peoples. I don’t believe in ghosts but I feel totally comfortable asserting that Silesia is haunted. (Out of all the things that can haunt, ghosts are probably the least interesting.) The residue, the shards of history, will find their form in narrative, in stories often implausible and unverifiable—​but plausibility and verification aren’t really the point. It’s myth, mystery. It’s a narrative form of the question What happened here?

At the center of this Silesian culture of mystery is something called Project Riese, a series of seven underground complexes dug by the Nazis, or, rather, by Jewish slave laborers, in the Owl Mountains, about seventy kilometers southwest of Wrocław. The complexes are in various states of completion and range massively in size—​the largest contain kilometers of tunnel, with multiple stories and cavernous ten-meter-high rooms. Exactly why the Germans built Riese, at enormous expenditure and up until the last days of the war, has never been conclusively determined; there are essentially no primary documents. Riese is a genuine enigma; it is Silesian mystery on a grand, indisputable scale.

I first heard about Riese in 2015, when Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, referred to in the media as “explorers” and “treasure hunters,” announced to the world that, using radar technology, they had discovered the location of the so-called Golden Train, a legendary train full of looted gold that the Nazis had hidden inside a mountain near the city of Wałbrzych. Koper and Richter’s claim was taken extremely seriously. Treasure hunters from across Poland and beyond flocked to the site. Government representatives from Israel, Germany, and Poland held meetings to determine to whom the gold rightfully belonged. The military got involved. Press from around the world, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, and National Geographic, descended on Wałbrzych. But as the Golden Train offered little in the way of visuals—​What was there to see? The ground the Golden Train might be under?—​the stories tended to focus on the treasure hunters and the enigma that did exist: Riese. The photographs—​brooding underground complexes in the lush Silesian countryside, with secret entrances and underwater rivers and beefy red-faced Polish treasure hunters—​were spectacular.

Despite having been to Poland a dozen or more times, and despite the fact that I’d been engaged in World War II–related research for years, I had never come across anything about Riese, secret Nazi tunnels, treasure, the Golden Train . . . It was as if I’d stumbled