Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

THE COURT: What would you like to add?

THE CLAIMANT: All the major databases of concentration camps have been checked already.

THE COURT: Which ones specifically?

THE CLAIMANT: Yad Vashem, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is one run by the German government. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the museum in Auschwitz, Museum of Gross-Rosen, and something called JewishGen, which is a collection of many databases. To name a few.

THE COURT: Anything else?

THE CLAIMANT: Individual ghettos, whatever is available.

THE COURT: Anything else?

THE CLAIMANT: This was an exhaustive search in English, Polish, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Every available database has been searched.

THE COURT: Anything else?

THE CLAIMANT: My point is that they were not found on any list.

THE KILLER: Are there any sources that you neglected to check?

THE CLAIMANT: No. I’m very familiar with the available resources.

THE KILLER: And the results of the searches?

THE CLAIMANT: No details of any deaths were found.

THE COURT: Anything else?

THE CLAIMANT: We also checked US and German refugee aid organizations that helped after the war, and there were no results. Again, this was an extensive search.

THE COURT: So you should enclose all those documents.

THE CLAIMANT: What documents?

THE COURT: Of all the registries you have checked.

THE CLAIMANT: But how—​

THE COURT: Here there is only one list. What is this list?

(The Claimant approaches the bench to inspect a list that had been submitted as evidence.)

THE CLAIMANT: That is the census of the Będzin ghetto. Where some of the Kajzers were, as you can see.

THE COURT: But this is the only list you submitted. What about the other lists?

THE CLAIMANT: What other lists?

THE COURT: All the other lists. The databases you searched.

THE CLAIMAINT: But they don’t show up on the other lists.

THE COURT: But you said you searched the other lists.

THE CLAIMANT: I did.

THE COURT: But you didn’t submit the lists to the Court.

THE CLAIMANT: Because there was nothing to submit. They weren’t on the lists.

THE COURT: You should submit all the lists you searched.

THE CLAIMANT: You’re saying I should submit the lists and databases they don’t show up on?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE CLAIMANT: But how do I show a non-entry?

THE COURT: You said you checked the lists?

THE CLAIMANT: I did.

THE COURT: So you should submit those lists.

THE CLAIMAINT: I should submit those lists? In their entirety?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE CLAIMANT: But there would be hundreds of thousands of entries, maybe millions.

THE COURT: Understood. Anything else?

We debriefed in the hallway. The Killer and Grazyna were annoyed that the judge had asked about the property: our claim concerned only the deaths of my relatives; matters of property/inheritance should not have been relevant. The Killer was already talking about an appeal. I asked Małgorzata how she thought it had gone. She said that the judge had seemed a little stern, and that some of the questioning had been a little ridiculous, but all in all nothing about the proceeding had struck her as overly unusual. This was reassuring to me. So we’ll wait and see, I said to The Killer and Grazyna. Maybe the judge will rule in our favor. We will appeal to the court in Katowice, Grazyna said. But maybe we won’t have to, I said. Yes, she said, we can appeal to the court in Katowice.

The court reporter exited the courtroom, carrying a tall stack of folders that she secured with her chin, followed by the judge, who had changed out of her robe into a floral print dress. They avoided making eye contact with us, or at least it seemed that way. The Killer changed out of her robe and back into her pink velour jumpsuit and we got ready to head back to Kraków. On the way out, Małgorzata asked me whether I believed in the Bible. It’s the Bible, I said. Are you happy? she asked. That’s a big question, I said. She nodded sympathetically, and slipped me some pamphlets urging me to embrace Jesus.

8

Not far from the Riese sites there is a so-called technical military museum that has as its main attraction an enormous and enormously strange cement structure—​picture a cement ring 150 feet in diameter held aloft by a dozen fifty-foot-high cement columns, like a gargantuan abstract sculpture of a coliseum. This, the museum claims, was a testing rig for Haunebu III, a flying saucer built by the Nazis, and which was not only built, but operational: the aircraft recorded nineteen flights, according to the display, and its propulsion system was based on antigravity technology that gave it a top speed of Mach 10, about 12,000 km/hr. “The drive of this ship probably consisted of electro-gravity generators: powerful electromagnets of Van de Graaff generator and type of Marconi spherical dynamos containing a sphere of rotating mercury.”

Among the exploring community there is a pronounced, shall we say, lack of skepticism regarding Riese. It would come up all the time. I’d ask, Why did the Germans build Riese? and I’d be told: nuclear weapons, underground cities, antigravity, time travel, telekinesis. There is a very pronounced para-history here.

Riese was meant to have been a bunker system and/or a factory. Despite the weird dearth of conclusive evidence in any direction, the argument that it was a bunker/factory is nonetheless a persuasive one—​because this is what the Nazis did with their undergrounds, they used them as bunkers and factories. In other words this is an extremely strong default explanation, and any assertion to the contrary demands extremely compelling evidence, especially if what’s being asserted is generally known not to exist. (Though there is one alternative theory that I really like, it makes a kind of delicious sense, though as far as I know there is no evidence to support it: that Riese served no purpose other than to divert massive amounts of Nazi cash—​German officials who understood that the war was all but lost funneled money out of Berlin via this quixotic mountain-hollowing infrastructure project.)

For a while my instinct was not necessarily to ignore but certainly not to engage, to not hurt my head trying to understand