Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

way, there was nothing else for me to see: you do all this memory-work and you hunger for the unabstract, for place person object noun. The irony is that it doesn’t really get more abstract than these eight blue digital pins; or maybe it’d be more accurate to say that the pins represent the process of abstraction: the concentration camp, its buildings and markers and fences, is seventy years later not there, is now a little blue digital pin on my Google map, which represents something like “place” but isn’t exactly “place,” it’s rather an idea of place, something like the spiritual counterpart to the original place. The concentration camp has been reduced, abstracted, into a single unitless point, which cannot be seen, only visited—​it has presence but not dimension—​and, maybe, depending on your spiritual sensibilities, intuited and felt. I think if you take the concept of place seriously enough you will end up having to work within the spiritual, or at least work with a spiritual vocabulary, because an ether is required—​how else can place and history touch?

3. Wüstegiersdorf: I returned to the car and doubled back toward the next pin, about half a kilometer away, and I could feel the area shrinking, which is what happens when a place becomes familiar, not unlike how a text you reread seems to condense. I think of this as a sort of submission, a surrender, of the space, of the text. Familiarity gives license to the imagination. After the war Abraham rode a bicycle from camp to camp, fetching the notes he’d buried beneath the latrines. Not the latrines but where the latrines used to be, because just a few months after the war some of these camps already didn’t exist, had gone abstract, although the treasure Abraham was after was hardly abstract—​the scraps of cement packaging he’d scribbled on and buried. He was on a holy errand. I wonder what he thought about the camps slipping into nonexistence. Did he prefer them effaced, destroyed, gone, or did he want them preserved and memorialized? Wüstegiersdorf had been inside a textile mill in the center of Głuszyca. Abraham stayed here one week, one of between seven hundred and a thousand prisoners. Now it’s a supermarket parking lot. Which really took me aback—​not because it’s a parking lot (in certain ways a supermarket parking lot feels like the most natural endpoint for the site of a concentration camp) but because I’d been here, on the drive in I had stopped at the supermarket to buy a bottle of water. I thought what a coincidence and then I thought maybe not such a coincidence, maybe this region is so saturated with sites of concentration camps that it wasn’t in fact so improbable that I’d unknowingly stopped at one. A city needs its supermarkets and you have to put a supermarket somewhere. It was a very hot day and I went inside the supermarket to buy more water and as I stood in line I realized that now I’d visited the camps out of order, I hadn’t followed Abraham’s route; though, of course, I hadn’t known, my stop at the supermarket was a stop at the supermarket, it didn’t mean anything, though then I had to ask myself what was the point of following the route in the first place. I had thought some meaning would emerge, but none had, and it would add at least an hour of driving to what was shaping up to be a very long day. So I decided to abandon that route and plot a new route, the one that was shortest. This had the icky effect of making the stops feel a little like errands, though if I’m being honest that had already been the case.

6. Schotterwerk: I turned onto an unmarked road and then onto another unmarked road and parked and walked to an open field. It was a stunning vista, gorgeous nearly to the point of cliché: rolling hills, fat brooding bales of hay, mountains in the distance. A handful of large modern homes spaced far enough apart that you read them as part of the scenery. It felt familiar or maybe I don’t mean familiar I mean expected: here is how a place with the awfullest history looks, this is what happens when time has a go at it. The more sinister the history the more lush the landscape? Schotterwerk had at least eleven barracks and housed at least 1,250 prisoners. I didn’t linger here; the picturesqueness annoyed me.

Detour: I drove toward Osówka, the Riese complex, because someone had asked me to pick up a couple of copies of Za Drutami Śmierci and they were available at the gift shop. About halfway up the winding mountain road I had to pull over to make room for two vintage American military jeeps coming from the opposite direction. Inside the authentic-seeming jeeps were men in authentic-seeming American military uniforms who were definitely not actual American military; I did not know who they were or what they were doing but I assumed they were, if not explorers (it was too neat, too organized, too matchy-matchy), then something explorer-adjacent, maybe reenactors, something like that. I resisted an impulse to chase them down. At the gift shop, as I was paying for my copies of Za Drutami Śmierci, I asked the man behind the counter if he’d read the book. He was young, early twenties, pimply, smiled easily. Of course, he said. What’d you think? I asked. He made a sound of exclamation and said he thought it was an incredible book, there was so much detail in it, everything felt so real, so true, except for maybe all the beatings, maybe that was too much. What do you mean, I asked, too much? He said, I don’t know how he could survive, I don’t know how it would be possible for someone who had so little food, who was worked so hard, to survive beatings like