Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

it was dusk, it was stupidly picturesque, and in the middle of the field Krzysztof showed me a line of cemented-in bricks, mostly buried and nearly invisible, the remnant of the foundation of what had, Krzysztof said, likely been a prisoners’ barracks. Sometimes the explorers find something truly remarkable or bizarre (if there is something to be found, they will, eventually, find it). A crane operator named Janek took me to the site of the Sienawka concentration camp—​converted after the war into a mental hospital, later abandoned—​and showed me, in the basement, in a small square white brick room, a sort of Nazi laboratory, with two parallel cement basins, too large and too deep to be an operating table or an autopsy table but still pretty clearly medical-related: they had that semi-ritualistic, ceremonial, altar-ish feel about them; these were tables upon which bodies or parts of bodies were set, displayed, stored, drained, something. None of us, not Janek, not Joanna, had any idea what the answer to this mystery was, only that it wasn’t a happy one. (Months later, in a photograph taken at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, in France, I saw a similar basin—​and it was filled with severed arms. The mystery wasn’t entirely solved—​we could not find documentation as to what the arms had been used for, or why they’d been severed—​but the function of the basin was now clear.)

There is a monthly trade magazine of sorts, Odkrywca (Explorer). Circulation is more than fourteen thousand, and the website hosts an active online forum (though in recent years the explorers have moved en masse to Facebook, the perfect platform on which to boast, organize, complain, bad-mouth, float conspiracy theories, get nastily factional). I visited Odkrywca’s office, which looked like the office of any small magazine—​four flights up, dusty wooden floors, harried editors, everywhere stacks of loose papers—​if with more military-themed tchotchkes lying about, including a couple of antique guns the editors assured me were decommissioned. On the wall was a huge display of recent Odkrywca covers, a panoplied dreamscape of explorer images: castles, mines, tanks, bombs, various swastika-ed stuff, soldiers, tunnels, trains. The most recent issue included a feature about the German engineer who’d sabotaged Hitler’s secret nuclear program; an essay about a fortress museum; an account of a recent discovery of a mine; and reviews of various exploring equipment, in particular metal detectors. The editor in chief and I had an interesting discussion about newsworthiness. Discovery is always news, he said. Like a new tunnel entrance, for example, or a new adit, but in his opinion there hasn’t been a truly significant discovery in decades. This work is very gradual. Explorers are like historians, he said, except more active and more curious and more brave and also much crazier.

Exploring in Poland is a regulated activity. You may not explore—​can’t even scan the ground with a metal detector—​without a government-issued permit. This law is widely flouted, however. Marek Kowalski, the bureaucrat in charge of issuing exploring permits in the greater Wałbrzych area, probably the most explorer-concentrated region in the country (there are more than 1,600 applications a year), estimated that only about 5 percent of those exploring are doing so legally; though when it comes to more intensive explorations, those that include excavations or rely on high-end equipment, then, Marek said, about 90 percent are legal. Violators face up to five years in jail (though that very rarely happens) and/or fines of thousands of złoty.

There are regulations regarding the treasure itself, too—​you can’t just keep whatever you find. Anything classified as a heritage item belongs by law to the state and must be relinquished; an object is considered “heritage” (1) if it was discovered underground and (2) if it makes historical sense that it’s there. Anything found in an attic, for example, would not be a heritage item. A Chinese coin in the ground would also not be a heritage item. A gold filling found in the ground, however, would be a heritage item. Upon relinquishment, the explorer receives a reward of 10 percent of the value of the discovery. I asked Marek how often that happens, that someone turns in a treasure and gets the 10 percent. All the time, he said. Usually it’s old coins, he said, which occasionally can be very valuable. So those guys who said they found the Golden Train, I asked, if it turned out they were right, that there was in fact a train full of gold, they’d get 10 percent? It is complicated, Marek said, because they had not gotten the proper permits to explore in the first place. But I can tell you that there were discussions very high up in the ministry whether they should get a reward.

There are a handful of profiteers (and plenty more hapless wannabe profiteers), largely in the business of digging up and smuggling and selling antiquities and World War I/World War II artifacts, as well as opportunists. One of the largest Riese sites, Włodarz, is operated by an explorer named Krzysztof who, having somehow finagled a long-term lease with startlingly few restrictions, has turned the site into a kind of bizarro military theme park: artillery and tanks are strewn about like lawn ornaments; the employees, in army pants, boots, and fleece pullovers, look like an out-of-shape paramilitary unit. When I visited, Krzysztof was in the final stages of installing his latest attraction inside one of the tunnels: a replica Golden Train. It was about the size of the locomotive that snakes through theme parks and zoos, and was of a heavy solid metal painted a deep black with gold accents and lots of gold Nazi insignia: gold swastikas, gold Reichsadlers. In large gold capital letters ZłOTY POçIAG (GOLDEN TRAIN) was emblazoned on the side. Krzysztof explained that the route will be 160 meters and feature ten points of interest; along the way riders will see mannequins wearing stripes who are “digging,” and mannequins in German uniforms who are “overseeing” the mannequins in stripes.

But the