go in order. My phone directed me through the village of Głuszyca to Gdanska Street, a street I was familiar with—this was the street Jacek and Dorota lived on, in a house that, despite the stubborn myth, Abraham did not hide in, although, that said, somewhere right around here was the house Abraham did hide in. The blue pin representing Kaltwasser was located (virtually, physically, historically, spiritually?) behind a new house that looked as if it was still under construction and not yet inhabited, so I parked on the unpaved driveway. As soon as I opened the car door, though, a dog from inside the house began barking. Still I was pretty sure that no one was home but even so I skirted the property, I was nervous about trespassing. Behind the house was an empty expansive field. How big had Kaltwasser been? I don’t know. No one knows. “Several numbered barracks,” Abraham wrote, “located fifty meters apart.” So quite big. The scanty sources we do have suggest up to two thousand prisoners were housed here, somewhere around here, and now it’s just field, uncut, growing wild, belonging to the owner of this just-built house, if not legally then de facto. The blue digital pin is deceptive. I labeled it “Kaltwasser” but Kaltwasser had dimensions, boundaries, measurements; the pin has none of that. The pin is a unitless point on a map: the most precise we can get is around here somewhere. What was this place? It was a field where once had been a concentration camp where once had been a field. I didn’t expend any imaginative energy trying to see—feel?—sense?—understand?—the camp through—behind?—beneath?—via?—the field. Maybe this was because there was no physical remnant of the camp, no visual anchor. I walked to the edge of the field and discovered I was wrong, there was in fact a remnant: an old stone dugout that was part of Kaltwasser, and even if it wasn’t part of Kaltwasser it was still part of Kaltwasser because here was the site of a concentration camp called Kaltwasser and here was an old stone structure; the association is so blatant there is no need for it to be factual in order for it to be true. The people who are living here in this new house, in whose backyard this stone structure is half-buried but hardly hidden—what do they make of it? I imagine, I like to imagine, that they have thought deeply about this strange stone ruin in their backyard. Have thought about the notion of historical residue. Have considered whether a place can become historically stained. But what if they don’t even know about the concentration camp in their backyard? Then I think it’s fair to say that they don’t know about concentration camps, full stop, and ignorance like that is a kind of choice, if not a personal choice then a collective one. We choose to forget. We choose to allow this place to forget its history. Abraham was in Kaltwasser considerably longer than he was in the other camps, from August until December 1944. I walked a big circle in the field then returned to the car. I backed out of the driveway—relieved to no longer be trespassing—and drove back to the main road.
2. Tannhausen: I parked and crossed a deserted playground and then hiked though thick growth, there was no path, I had to push through painfully sharp and thick bramble to reach the back of a low ugly building that housed a company that made drive belts: here were the coordinates for Tannhausen, where Abraham stayed two weeks, in the camp hospital. He didn’t do labor here, he wasn’t beaten here, he recuperated here, he was relatively grateful for his time here—should I relate differently to this camp? Or is that too granular an approach? My wrists and my forearms began pulsing strangely; it was more worrying than it was painful; but then it was painful. Dozens of small red marks, insect bites, emerged up and down my arms. A deer rocketed past me, startling me so badly I nearly fell over. This back lot was a very ugly industrial mess. It felt more transformed, and transformed more irrevocably, than had the open field at Kaltwasser. Residential, commercial, farm—most any other sort of space seems to me to better allow history’s whispers to be heard than an industrial space; this place had terrible historical acoustics. Why had I come out here? What was the point of driving out to these blue pins? I think I wanted a better sense of the geography, wanted to earn a familiarity with this land so pockmarked by Abraham’s history. I’d read Abraham’s book but not through the lens of where this happened and where that happened. In general that’s not the way you read these books: it rarely seems important to differentiate location, it’s an uninterrupted, undemarcated expanse of trauma. Yet Abraham’s book has persisted and is celebrated because of its attention to place; and Abraham himself was meticulous about location, heading each entry with the camp he was in at the time. So there’s that. And: if I believe that place has intrinsic meaning, i.e., if I believe that memory and history are somehow imprinted into, onto, place—and I don’t know if I do believe that; this is the question that seems to me to be at the heart of everything I’m doing in Poland, from the building in Sosnowiec to the mishegas with the treasure hunters—but if it’s something I’m even considering, wrestling with, then: then you go, you go to the place, you accede to the pilgrimage, you say yes to the obligation and you go. That’s not true. It’s something I might tell people and might tell myself, but the truth is I don’t feel obligated. A more honest answer would be that I made this trip because I thought it would be useful: showing up in person can help force the insight to the surface. Put another
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