Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

it was no longer even clear when or where the building existed. Though it was maddening, not knowing if the building was the building, this is what I had sought: I’d declined the easy comfortable linear myth in favor of narrative incompatibility.

I reread my grandfather’s documents (which, now that I had Abraham’s memoir—​which I was having translated—​felt like a relatively puny source text for a legacy). Maybe I’d missed something, maybe there was something in there that could help explain how my great-grandfather had owned a building that wasn’t. But I couldn’t find anything that clarified. Number 12 was still number 12 and so therefore could not be number 12.

I did find something, though: Małachowskiego 12, though certainly owned by my great-grandfather, had not been his childhood home. It had been an investment property. Home, as written plainly on one of my grandfather’s letters, was on Targowa Street, just around the corner.

The mistake can be traced to the first time I’d visited Sosnowiec, before I’d ever seen those documents, before I’d ever entertained the idea of trying to reclaim the building. I had had a single address regarding my grandfather, Małachowskiego 12, which was where, my father said, his father had grown up. This is what I wrote in chapter 1, that my father said that, and I think that’s true, I think he did say that, but I’m not certain, I wasn’t taking notes. So maybe my father said that this was my grandfather’s home or maybe he said it was maybe his home or maybe it made so much narrative sense that I jumped to that conclusion on my own. I went to my grandfather’s hometown to see an address associated with my grandfather, so of course this was his home.

Four years later, when I finally read the documents, I missed that detail, that this was an investment property. I don’t know how I missed it. I suppose on some level I refused to see it. The story I was telling was that I was reclaiming the building my grandfather had grown up in: the narrative had gotten stuck in a kind of sentimental default. Visiting an ancestral home is more meaningful than visiting an ancestral investment property, no? Reclaiming an ancestral home is a better story, or at least feels like a better story, than reclaiming an ancestral investment property. I’d gotten caught in a myth of my own making.

Did it matter that I’d gotten it wrong?

On the one hand, though it was a jarring correction, it was also somewhat beside the point. This had never really been about my grandfather’s home (investment property). It was about my grandfather’s decades-long futile attempt to recover his home (investment property). The verb, not the noun. The building itself—​even while I’d been under the impression that it had been my grandfather’s childhood home—​didn’t promise any sort of access to my grandfather or the memory of my grandfather or the meaning of the memory of my grandfather; as a physical structure it was spiritually sterile. But with respect to the reclamation—​here I did feel I was or at least could be in some kind of conversation with my grandfather or the memory of my grandfather or the meaning of the memory of my grandfather. The reclamation was something I could restart, build upon, improve upon, fulfill, or even fail at as he did.

On the other hand, yes, of course it mattered. You get something so basic so wrong and the whole mission starts to feel shaky. Where the building was, when the building was, if the building was, what my grandfather’s relationship to the building had been: the mounting uncertainties—​not to mention the lies I’d been peddling—​have an effect. You begin to question what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it; the sentimental underpinning begins to erode.

6

Joanna spread the word among the treasure hunters that I was Abraham Kajzer’s kin and very quickly the story became that I was his grandson, because that story makes more sense, because that story is the better story. It was as if he’d become a kind of alternate grandfather, one whose legacy was celebrated and mythologized, unlike my own grandfather, who was mythless, whose legacy was obscure, hazy, hidden at the center of a bureaucratic and legal maze.

The explorers wanted to meet me, wanted to show me the mines, crypts, tunnels, abandoned castles, ancient pagan sites, medieval battlefields, bunkers; show off their maps, secret documents, aerial photographs, georadar scans, exploration equipment; tell me their theories, hunches, accomplishments, grievances. They wanted to know if maybe I had some heretofore unknown Kajzer-related information. They wanted to be interviewed. They wanted to be written about. I said yes to everything.

I learned quickly that the treasure hunters are not easily lumped together, are not easily categorized. You’ve got organized and sometimes even sponsored exploration groups employing lidar, georadar, magnetometers, advanced mapping software, satellite imagery; and you’ve got guys walking around with third-hand metal detectors and divining rods. The “treasure” being hunted might be wartime artifacts, undergrounds, adits, artwork, mines, secret Nazi technology, mass graves, but usually it’s nothing that grand, usually the explorers are just, well, exploring—​the catchall term for what they’re after is “mystery.” There are those whose mission is plainly preposterous, like the self-identified count who claims to know the location of a Nazi/alien underground city, and there are those engaged in meaningful historical research. Jerzy Cera, a doyen of the explorers, and one of the first to explore Riese in the early 1970s, publishes high-quality maps and brochures of the Riese complexes, used by museums and researchers all over Poland and beyond. An explorer named Krzysztof brought me to a regular-seeming field outside Świdnica, where, he said, there had been a concentration camp, now gone and forgotten, wiped off the map. Krzysztof had spent years researching the camp, tracking down documents, interviewing locals, surveying the land, figuring out where exactly the camp had been. He led me through a sea of tall grass,