Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

I sat back and waited until we could ask Joanna what it was that she and Andrzej were getting so worked up over; we were patient, we were accustomed to delays in comprehension. Andrzej and Joanna’s conversation in Polish would have washed right over me but I kept catching something inside Andrzej’s otherwise impenetrable speech—​I kept hearing my last name (which Andrzej, as far as I knew, did not know). Polish Polish Polish Kaiser Polish Polish. The first time I assumed I misheard. The second time I asked Maia and Jason if they’d heard what I heard—​they said they thought so but weren’t sure. The third time they confirmed they had.

I interrupted to ask Joanna: Is Andrzej saying “Kaiser”? Because I keep hearing “Kaiser.”

Yes, Joanna said, Andrzej is saying “Kaiser”—​he is referring to Abraham Kajzer, a concentration camp prisoner, extremely famous among the treasure hunters. Kajzer, she explained, had managed somehow to keep a diary while working on many of the Riese sites, and this diary was published in Poland in the early sixties and, owing to the Riese-relevant details recorded therein—​campsites, worksites, construction material, digging methods, layout, etc.—​had become required reading for the treasure hunters. They’d all read it. Apparently they’d all studied it. Kajzer’s diary was, I was made to understand, pretty much the only primary source on Riese. You want to learn about Riese you start with Kajzer. Silesian Treasure Hunting 101. Okay, interesting, I said. But why’d he come up just now? What was Andrzej saying about him? Joanna explained that Kajzer had come up because Andrzej was talking about the slave laborers—​the Riese victims—​the Jews—​and Kajzer was the go-to example, even a kind of stand-in. A conversation about Riese’s Jewish slave laborers is a conversation about Abraham Kajzer.

Leaving Maia’s question unanswered, we pivoted to the subject of Abraham Kajzer. This was much safer territory for Andrzej. He could be effusive instead of defensive. He and Janek heaped praise on Kajzer’s book, on Kajzer’s person, on his bravery, on his attention to detail, on his literary talent, on his historical contributions. They waxed rhapsodic about how significant Kajzer was to the explorers, the honor he’s accorded, the esteem in which he’s held. “A great, great man,” they said. “One of the most important men who went through the war, Jew or Pole.”

This was very strange, encountering this sort of mythos, on the part of Andrzej and Janek and apparently all of the treasure hunters, regarding a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Aside from a handful of heroes and writers, like Mordechai Anielewicz or Jerzy Kosinski, exceedingly few individual Holocaust survivors or victims have made a mark on Polish collective memory. The Shoah is almost always told and taught and remembered as a large-scale tragedy—​not names but numbers, not persons but populations. Yet these two middle-aged Polish electricians, both of whom had lived their whole lives in small rural Polish towns, who evinced no special affinity for Jewish memory, who were very interested in history but only insofar as it pertained to treasure hunting, were obsessed with this Abraham Kajzer and his book.

You know, I said, my last name is Kaiser.

Ha ha! Wouldn’t that be something, Andrzej said, sipping his beer, if it turned out that the two of you were related.

That would be something. What city was he from?

Janek said Kajzer was from Łodź, a city disappointingly far from Sosnowiec, which meant that Abraham was probably not related, or at best distantly related, and that this Kaiser-Kajzer thing seemed destined to remain little more than a cute coincidence.

The second Riese complex we visited was Osówka. Osówka has an entirely different flavor from Sobon, and the difference is clear from the get-go. This is a family-friendly tourist attraction. There are signs directing you from the highway, paved roads all the way through, plenty of parking. There’s still mystery here—​it’s still a subterranean Nazi complex—​but with institutional, if tasteful, packaging. The guides had neat haircuts and wore branded polo shirts. A couple of dozen tourists, mostly families, with excited kids (and equally excited dads), ambled about, eating ice cream cones, getting ready for their excursion inside the tunnel or, if they’d just exited, blinking under the bright sun.

Inside the large and extremely unhidden entrance it was, like Sobon, cold, dark, dank. But, unlike Sobon, it was enormous—​the complex is more than 6,700 square meters. About 7 percent of the complex is concrete-reinforced—​and in these harshly angled concrete corridors and dead-gray rooms it feels positively nefarious, sinister, downright villainous—​but most of the complex is unfinished rock; it looks and feels extremely industrial, like a state-sponsored infrastructure project (which is in fact what it is). There are rooms and passageways more than eight meters high. There are open spaces more than fifty meters long.

The place was dumbfounding, though in a different sense from Sobon. At Sobon what assaults the imagination is the mystery, the strangeness; at Osówka it’s the ambition. Sobon had you wondering; Osówka had you marveling. The intended purpose might not be clear but the scope and scale certainly are. It’s an entire cave neighborhood. It’s so preposterously outsized, so ludicrous, so cartoonish. It’s a full-on underground Nazi lair/headquarters/factory/whatever.

And to get a sense of the ambition of Project Riese in its entirety, multiply Osówka by seven. As best we can tell, Riese was meant to cover more than thirty-five square kilometers; the Nazis were going to hollow out a mountain. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, mentions in an endnote in his memoir that 150 million marks—​equivalent to more than $1 billion today—​were spent on Riese (which doesn’t factor in the unpaid labor), and that in 1944 the project consumed more concrete than the entire German population had at its disposal for air-raid shelters. Add to that all the necessary infrastructure work: roads, pipes, bridges, railways, massive earthworks, etc.

All of which really adds fuel to the conspiracy fire. Riese’s bizarreness and grandiosity tweak your imagination. Erode your reality checks. Suddenly the myth of the Golden Train seemed just