Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

the old German man entered the cellar he burst into tears and ran out. When we asked him why he was crying, what he remembered, he refused to talk about it. He would only say, It’s too painful, I don’t want to talk about it. Jacek shrugged his big innocent shrug. So I don’t know.

Jacek warned us to watch our heads and led us down the stairs and through a narrow sooted corridor to a section of gray stone wall maybe three feet across and five feet high. “There is something behind this wall,” he said. “We know absolutely there is something behind this wall. The layout of the house strongly suggests there’s a room there.” He pointed out a rusty remnant of what might once have been a door hinge.

Joanna got very excited—​which I hadn’t really seen before: this was new mystery—​and she and Jacek began speaking excitedly in Polish. I couldn’t follow, but after a minute I butted in and asked Jacek, “Have you considered taking the wall down?” I was so tired of all this inaccessible invisible mystery.

“That’s what we are talking about,” Joanna said.

“He doesn’t want to do it?”

“I will do it,” Joanna said. “He wants me to do it.”

“We’re going to do it now?”

“No, we don’t have the equipment,” Joanna said. “We’ll come back and do it.”

Afterwards we sat in the kitchen—​where the previous owner’s lifeless body had been found by his wife and daughter—​with Dorota, Jacek’s wife, who had taken notes when the Germans had visited.

The Germans’ name was Kammler and the story was, naturally, a little thicker, a little more complicated, a little more heartbreaking than what Jacek had sketched.

The Kammlers were not in fact the original owners of the house. The original owners were the Kreins, who employed Mr. and Mrs. Kammler—​the parents of the old man who’d shown up one day—​as groundskeeper and maidservant. The Kammler family, mother, father, child, lived in a single room upstairs. When the Kreins’ son, their only child, died in combat in World War I, they bequeathed the estate to Mr. and Mrs. Kammler.

In Dorota’s notes there was a heading marked JEWS: 200–300 people walked by every day, on their way to work at Sobon; 15 people hid here during the war.

Under the heading 1.05.1946: 3 A.M.: The Poles came suddenly and told [the Kammlers] to pack their things. They planted a grenade in the house, accused them of being terrorists, and said they had to leave immediately. They were put into Polish trains and deported—​the entire street of residents was deported . . . The Poles treated them very badly after the war. Russians were much better.

We stayed and talked a while; the conversation turned to lighter subjects. Dorota told us about her cooking show, invited me to appear as a special guest. Jacek showed us UFO/Riese videos he’d posted to YouTube, and brought out his copy of Kajzer’s book for me to autograph. At some point Jacek and Dorota’s twelve-year-old daughter joined us. Her attitude to all this mystery was refreshingly teenage. Like her dad, she believed the house was haunted by a murdered former Communist secret police officer. But she was wonderfully blasé about it. Whatever, the house is haunted, who cares, what’s the big deal, nothing to freak out over. I pushed: But what is that like, living in a house that’s haunted? You must have some feelings about it. Whatever, she said. You get used to it. Okay but what about your friends, I asked, what do they think about the ghost? She shrugged and rolled her eyes, as if I’d asked her to describe what toast tasted like. I asked: What do you think about this mystery in your cellar? She said she found it interesting, but by “interesting” she clearly meant “the most boring thing in the universe,” and the only reason she’d said “interesting” was that she felt she had to be polite in front of her dad and his ridiculous guests with their ridiculous obsessions.

It was the wrong house. A few months later I finally received the translation of Abraham’s diary and it was immediately clear that the house Abraham Kajzer hid in had not been this house, was not Jacek’s mysterious house. It is plain to see in the text. Abraham hid not in a secret room with fourteen other Jews but in a potato box, in the cellar, by himself. The German woman who hides him is unnamed but there are enough identifiers—​she tells Abraham this is her father’s house, and that she is there with her children—​to rule out Kammler or Krein.

So the house wasn’t the house, and the building wasn’t the building, and Abraham wasn’t my grandfather, and my dead relatives aren’t dead, and myths are stubborn, and truths unravel, and fictions fit snugly.

Part IV

Forever Book

14

1. Kaltwasser: I drove toward Kaltwasser, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, the first of eight Abraham Kajzer was interned in. Or, rather, I drove to where Kaltwasser used to be, because the camp itself—​the buildings, the barracks, the fences, etc.—​has been completely effaced; actually, “where the camp used to be” isn’t accurate either, because no one knows with certainty where the camp used to be. Rather my destination was the long-lat coordinates for Kaltwasser as per en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Project​_Riese, coordinates I later learned had, unsurprisingly, been worked out and uploaded by treasure hunters. There were coordinates for each subcamp and they were very precise, extending to the fourth decimal place, accurate to within eleven meters. I’d uploaded the eight sets of coordinates, virtually staked eight blue digital pins, created my own private Google map of Abraham’s suffering. The fact that the map was accessible only to me was I’ll admit a little bit thrilling; it was a thrill that was somewhere between the thrill of the explorer and the thrill of the pilgrim. Kaltwasser was my first stop because Kaltwasser was Abraham’s first camp. I was tracing his journey: I felt I should