Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

And why that book? Jacek shrugged. I have no idea, he said. But that’s very strange, I said. Jacek shrugged. It is strange but not so strange, he said. This is Silesia.

An hour after we’d arrived we went inside the house. It was refreshingly domestic—​no exploring equipment, no Nazi memorabilia, no pseudo-military interior design. Jacek asked that we take off our shoes. The kitchen was a very nice kitchen and also a makeshift film studio, with fancy lighting equipment, softboxes, microphone, a high-end video camera on a tripod. Jacek explained that his wife, Dorota, produced and starred in a popular cooking show on YouTube, Menu Dorotki.

The house was enormous. You can’t tell how big it is from the outside, Jacek said—​thirty-seven rooms, 850 square meters (about nine thousand square feet). Jacek showed us what he called the least renovated room in the house; it looked like and was the size of the inside of a barn: 220 square meters, thirty-foot-high ceilings. It was cavernous, and, aside from some scattered junk—​an orange plastic chair, an inflatable pool still in the package—​entirely empty. Joanna and I gaped—​to see a room this size inside a house felt surreal, like a violation of physics—​and Jacek grinned.

We went across the hall and into the master bedroom. It was nice, modern, understated. Jacek stood against the wall. “Right here there was an enormous wooden cabinet,” he said, “that had come with the house. My wife hated it so we decided to get rid of it. It took six men to move. And behind it, right here”—​Jacek gestured toward the middle of the blank wall—​“there was a small door.”

Jacek said he opened this small secret door he’d just discovered in his bedroom and took a step inside—​and fell or almost fell (I had some trouble understanding) a full story down. There was a gap between the walls; it was a false wall. Jacek, uninjured (so I guess he only almost fell, or was very lucky), examined the gap. There was a ladder. The ladder led down to the secret room, which we would go to now.

We exited the bedroom and went down a short flight of stairs and entered the room that had been the secret room and which was now a laundry room. Washer, dryer, hamper, cleaning supplies, everywhere piles of clothes. There were no windows, only the one (recently installed) door. The ceiling sloped so that I could stand upright only along one edge of the room; it was maybe twenty feet by ten feet, which made for a very nice-sized laundry room but impossibly tight living quarters for fifteen people. Jacek pushed aside laundry and toys and household detritus as he gave us a tour, told us what it’d looked like when he’d stumbled down here for the first time—​he’d found some shoes, some loose pages torn from a book. I admit I had some trouble holding on to the significance of the site. It felt to me like a laundry room with interesting trivia. There is a site and there is its memory and these two things often don’t align. It’d be, I bet, very illuminating to study Polish history through the lens of home renovation.

I had some questions for Jacek regarding the chronology of these discoveries: “So you found this room right after you moved in?”

“Tak.”

“So before the German father and son had shown up?”

“Tak.”

“So before you’d read Kajzer’s book?”

“Tak.”

“So when you first discovered this room you didn’t know anything about Jews hiding here during the war?”

“That is correct.”

“So what did you think this room was?”

Jacek shrugged, rolled his eyes. A secret room, not such a big deal, not exactly major news. “This is Silesia,” Joanna said, also shrugging. “Tak,” Jacek said. “This is Silesia, there are secrets everywhere.”

Indeed there were: Jacek’s tour was far from over. We went downstairs, put our shoes back on, followed Jacek outside. The property was a couple of acres in size, and unfenced, so it bled right into the surroundings—​overgrown grass and rolling fields stretching to the mountains. We came to a small lake. This lake, Jacek proclaimed, makes no sense. For a long time we could not figure out the source of the lake, he said, the water seemed to come from nowhere. And then—​Jacek had a huge grin on his face—​we found a pipe, and below the pipe—​at this point Jacek was basically cackling from excitement—​there were underground railroad tracks.

Jacek lifted a makeshift wooden grating and illuminated the hole with the light on his cell phone. Below, five or six feet deep, there were, unmistakably, rail tracks. You can scoff all you want at these treasure hunters but occasionally they show you something really amazing. Who knows if they had anything to do with Nazis but still—​there were underground railroad tracks on this man’s property.

What was Jacek’s theory? Jacek’s theory had everything to do with Nazis. He said that he and Jerzy Cera, something of an elder statesman among the treasure hunters, believe that the lake hides a secret entrance to Sobon complex. They had also found a valve, which they believe controls the lake’s water level. “Cera is very suspicious, so don’t tell anyone about this,” said Jacek, who, for all his talk of not being a treasure hunter, was clearly very much in cahoots with some of them; he then told us that Cera and other explorers stayed here, in fact, in rooms he rented out as a side business. This struck me as an astonishing coincidence—​the house Abraham Kajzer had hidden in also happened to be the treasure hunters’ lodging of choice?—​though Joanna was unfazed. This is Silesia, she said.

Jacek brought us around the back of the house to a small staircase that led to the cellar. He turned to us, solemn. A speech before we descended. When we moved in, he said, this room was full of coal. We didn’t think anything of it, we thought it was just storage, junk, whatever. But when