Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

blazer with what looked like a small war medal pinned to the chest. He was a little hazy, a little hard of hearing, but overall very present, if docile, displaying the sort of bottomless patience you see in the elderly who have nowhere else to be. Spiranski has very interesting things to say, Joanna said, and he promptly introduced himself (Joanna translated throughout) and swore emphatically that everything he had to say was one hundred percent true. Using his one good arm he brought out some documents from his bag: a letter he’d recently written to the veterans’ office, asking for help with medical costs; a photograph, dated 1951, of himself and two friends in undershirts and military caps sitting by a river playing guitar.

Why had Andrzej brought Edward Spiranski here? To talk to me about his time in the war, of course—​Spiranski was nine years old when the war broke out, had spent its duration on a German farm where his parents and siblings were forced laborers. (The setup of our meeting—​that is, the way Spiranski talked and the way I listened—​in fact felt very familiar, reminded me of any number of interviews I’ve conducted with elderly Holocaust survivors. They speak; it’s often scattershot, nonlinear; it’s the recall of a nightmare, though not without nostalgia; it’s sometimes banal, you’ve heard stories like this before, you remind yourself what it means that stories like this are banal; you listen and you listen; you receive.) But it was also true that on some level Andrzej was exhibiting Edward Spiranski. He was a prop, a talking relic that Andrzej (whose life was largely devoted to collecting relics) had literally picked up and carried inside in order to display his explorer’s bona fides. (If that sounds cynical it’s only because you don’t yet know what’s in the next room.) But it was also true that Andrzej was devoted to Spiranski—​who was alone, impoverished, in poor health—​in a way that no one else in the world was. Andrzej cared. Maybe Andrzej cared for reasons not purely altruistic—​because Spiranski had potentially useful information; because via Spiranski, Andrzej could get a little bit closer to a time and events that he clearly fetishized—​but still, he cared. The explorers would teach me this lesson a hundred times over: a motivated love can still be love.

Spiranski said that he liked Jews a lot. His father had rented their home from a Jew named Mortke, and had worked in a beverage company for a Jew named Rensky. Mortke was a very good person, Spiranski said, then began to weep. All the Jewish people and all the Polish people remember Mortke. I don’t know what happened to him. As far as I know, all the Jews were gathered by the Germans, and probably killed.

Joanna comforted Spiranski, and, once he regained his composure, he turned back to me and said he had two stories about encountering Jews in the war, both of which took place in Furstenstein, a Gross-Rosen subcamp (where Abraham Kajzer had been interned for a couple of months). During the war young Edward would walk past Furstenstein all the time—​the camp was located between the farm his family lived on and the village his mother sent him to with ration cards to buy bread. The bread was black, Spiranski said. White bread was only for wounded soldiers, and there were a lot of wounded soldiers. (As Spiranski talked and Joanna translated, Andrzej, like an impatient child showing off his toys, kept bringing Nazi paraphernalia to the table, ostensibly for Spiranski to inspect and authenticate but in reality to show me. He took down the ornamental Reichsadler, as long as my arm and just as heavy, and put it on the table. For the rest of the conversation it lay there like a taunt.) One day, Spiranski said, he saw Jewish prisoners building a road, and another group of Jewish prisoners—​“people wearing stripes and as many people as elves”—​building a small railway station. Edward was eleven years old and some of the prisoners, he said, were no older. (Andrzej laid out his colorful collection of Hitler Jugend badges.) He was walking in his wooden shoes, nibbling on a piece of black bread, when he came face-to-face with a very young Jew; he stopped in his tracks; he and the young Jew stared at each other. The guard was looking in the opposite direction. Edward extended his piece of black bread to this young Jew but just then the guard turned his head and spotted them; he cocked his rifle and took aim. (Andrzej opened a binder full of plastic sheaths containing Nazi currency; he flipped through and extracted some choice examples and passed them around.) The Jewish boy began to cry and Edward turned and ran home in his wooden shoes. Another time, Edward saw two trucks full of Jews surrounded by some smaller vehicles filled with SS officers. The Jews were singing; Edward could hear them singing. One of his friends corrected him—​the Jews weren’t singing, they were praying. One of the Jews jumped from the truck, as if to escape, but broke his leg. (Andrzej put a Nazi-era five-mark silver coin on the table and asked Spiranski, What could you get with this during the war? Spiranski replied that the wooden shoes had cost nine marks.) One of the German officers said, Kill him; another officer shot and killed him.

Spiranski had some questions for me—​this was the first time he’d met a Jew since the war, he said. The last Jews he had known were Mortke and Rensky. There were many things he was curious about.

What kind of factories do you have in Israel?

In Israel? There are all kinds of factories. Electronics, furniture . . .

Are women working in the factories?

Sure.

Are those factories private?

Sure.

Do you need coal to heat the house?

I don’t understand . . . ?

If you want to heat the house, do you need to have your own coal?

Oh, I see. No—​most houses in Israel are modern construction, just like here.

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