Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

one talked to me, though heads turned when I ordered in English, people noticed. I drank alone and in silence. I was miserable and bored, and I couldn’t even decide if my misery and boredom were useful or interesting, or if I was simply bored and miserable on the first night of what I’d planned as a five-day stay in a city where I didn’t know anyone and to which I was no longer sure why I’d come at all.

It got truly late and still I walked the streets. Now I was miserable and drunk. No one else was out. I walked past Małachowskiego 12 and ignored it, didn’t even turn my head. How naïve to think I’d encounter my grandfather here. Could I have forced it? I suppose I could have, I could have forced myself to imagine my grandfather as a child walking these streets, going to school, playing, I don’t know, but what would that be worth? Then there was a man walking behind me. Where had he come from? Was he following me? It seemed he was. He kept a steady pace forty feet behind me. I sped up and it seemed he did too. I tried to get a good look at him—​I didn’t want to do anything too overt—​but could only make out that he was slight and bald. I turned the corner and he turned the corner. I considered breaking into a run, screaming for help, charging him, taking him by surprise. I was afraid, but also, I admit, excited: getting attacked in Sosnowiec, now that’d be something. Then I turned a corner and entered the hotel and watched through the glass as he walked past. I had a very particular dream that night. It’s so on the nose I’m reluctant to tell you but obviously I have to tell you: I am walking the streets of Sosnowiec, for hours, exactly as I’d done in real life. I have the distinct sensation of trying to avoid someone. I don’t know who they are or why they are trying to find me or why I’m hoping they don’t. But then all of a sudden someone is behind me, following me. I peek over my shoulder, but their face is shrouded. And yet I know with certainty who it is: it’s Bartek, it’s Hanna, it’s any or maybe all the residents of Małachowskiego 12. I stop walking. I decide I won’t be chased, and turn around, but as soon as I pivot, so does my pursuer, and flees from me. And as I give chase, I realize it’s my grandfather, and I am filled with this terrible knowledge I’ll never catch him.

When I woke up I had a bunch of messages from Joanna, inviting me to what she called a major exploration on top of Osówka. Many treasure hunters will be there, she’d written, and Andrzej asked me to make sure you come. He says you must do it for your grandfather. Not my grandfather, I thought, but at this point what difference does it make? When? I wrote back. She wrote back a few seconds later: Tonight! Immediately I packed up and checked out and headed to the train station.

It was an impressive, well-equipped campsite. A large tarp sunblocked a folding table laden with food and drink. There was an electric generator, water cooler, floodlights. An enormous cast-iron pot dangled from a fancy special-purpose tripod over a low steady fire. Off to the side were a couple of oversized hammocks. Pots, pans, mugs, sausages, vegetables hung from strung-up wires. A dozen or so explorers lazed around on collapsible chairs, sipping beer and snacking on pickles and salami.

It was a lovely spot; from most angles you could not see any mysterious cement structures, it was calm cool Nazi-less forest all around. “The view from this place is beautiful,” Abraham Kajzer wrote about one of the Riese worksites. “We are surrounded by forests and mountains. There is no trace of any buildings and the impression is that we are in the uninhabited wilderness.”

Andrzej, his usual alpha self, greeted me as if we were long-lost fraternity brothers, big hugs, big yelps. He handed me a bottle of beer but then took it back in order to open it, which he did with a rusty machete, a hundred-year-old relic he’d found on a battlefield and which he apparently brought with him to the forest for the express purpose of opening bottles of beer.

Andrzej looked me up and down and grimaced. “Co to jest?!” What is this?! He was referring to my clothes—​I was wearing jeans and a hoodie. He shook his head like my mother used to shake her head when she didn’t approve of what I was planning to wear to shul. From the trunk of his Land Rover he grabbed a t-shirt and tossed it at me. Not unlike how a maître d’ might lend a no-goodnik the house blazer. The shirt was army green and had on it the emblem of Andrzej’s exploration group—​a snarling wolf wearing an army helmet marked HUNTER above an intersecting coat-of-arms-style metal detector and shovel. In a triangle at the bottom was the motto, in English, STRONG TEAM. Everyone else was in fatigues, even the toddler (there was a toddler), and many of them head-to-toe, cap, shirt, jacket, pants. No one matched, each wore different combinations, different styles; but still it was, clearly, a uniform of sorts.

I took off my hoodie and put on the HUNTER shirt and Andrzej hollered his approval.

By dark there were twenty or so explorers, mostly middle-aged men, a few wives and girlfriends. I counted among them a retired army lieutenant, two retired miners, two electricians, a software engineer. Everyone settled in for a night of drinking around the fire. They teased and toasted one another, ate, drank, reminisced, drank, roughhoused; they laughed so hard so frequently it was difficult to carry on a conversation.

This was new, I hadn’t yet seen this side of the