Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

that. I asked—​genuinely, not confrontationally—​You think he made it up? I don’t know if he made it up, he said, but maybe also it is not exactly historical. He wrote a book and this is his story. Ah, I see, I said. Thank you! I did not tell the man behind the counter that I was related to the author, or that I was spending the day visiting the camps in which he may or may not have been beaten as badly or as often as he claimed to have been, or that I was writing a book about him. I didn’t see the need to embarrass the man behind the counter and I didn’t feel all that compelled to defend the memory of Abraham and/or the accuracy of Abraham’s book. The skepticism of the man behind the counter was a strangely sympathetic sort of skepticism. Back home, skepticism toward a Holocaust narrative is beyond the pale: you must not challenge in any way the veracity of the account, especially as it relates to details of suffering. We guard vigilantly against myth (though of course it’s there, it’s everywhere) because we worry “myth” is not sufficiently historical and we worry that what is not historical is antagonistic to history and thus too close to false, and we feel duty-bound to enshrine truth and to stamp out the merest hint of false. So it’s all true, it must be true, every word is true.

7. Dörnhau: The location of Dörnhau, unlike the location of the other camps, is known with precision; there is an extant map, drawn by a prisoner named Henryk Sussmanek. The camp was inside a carpet factory, and the building still stands, occupied by a company called John Cotton, which, according to its website, produces high-quality pillows and quilts. I parked in the large empty lot and walked past an unmanned guardhouse into the inner yard. There was a truck, empty, open, waiting. A forklift backed out of the bay. I took a photograph and walked back to the car. The camps, my experience of these camps, were starting to bleed together. I’m guessing something similar is happening on your end. I flattened my notebook against the roof of the rental car and made notes, mostly in order to be able to tell the camps apart later. It was important for me to be able to do this but I don’t think it’s important for you. Dörnhau was the seventh camp Abraham was in, and then after a transfer out and then another transfer back, was also the last camp he was in, was the camp he escaped from. I wanted to try to trace his escape route; I wanted to see if I could figure out or at least make an educated guess which house he’d hidden in. But regarding his escape Abraham doesn’t get very specific: the only clues offered are the direction—​northwest, in the direction of Kaltwasser, where he knew there were some houses—​and that he followed a country road. I drove around the corner and down an unpaved road into the open field separating Dörnhau and Kaltwasser. I passed a fence, in relatively good condition, whose posts were cement and had that familiar menacing curl toward the top. The camps were not far apart, less than a mile. What country road? On my map there was no road. I toggled the view from “Map” to “Satellite” and now there was a road, or a path, or something. It was just a little farther ahead but from where I stood it could not be seen, owing to the height of the grass. It was more or less where you’d expect it to be, a road between the camps that an escapee might have followed, it certainly could have been this road, this was the best tense I could hope for: could have been. I drove toward it and a man on a tractor thirty meters away stared at me for a very long time—​we were both driving very slowly—​and I turned onto the maybe-escape road, which I wasn’t sure would be wide enough for the car—​if it wasn’t I would have walked, part of me wanted to or maybe even felt like I was supposed to walk—​but it was fine, it was wide enough. I followed the road toward Kaltwasser. It continued beneath the forest canopy and terminated at a lot behind Gdanska 4. This could be the house Abraham hid in. But no, Abraham makes note of passing houses, so it couldn’t be the first house. But of course maybe this wasn’t even the right country road in the first place, maybe he went the long way, skirting the forest and emerging on the other side of Gdanska. It would be helpful to know whether he crossed the street. It’s true that the text does not say “I crossed the street,” and, under the circumstances, crossing the street would have been a dangerous and memorable act. But, of course, the omission of “I crossed the street” does not mean he did not cross the street; you can’t close-read the text like that; Kajzer’s book isn’t meant to be geographically traced. It is a narrative, not a map. I’m doing it regardless. Throughout the day I wondered to what extent I was approaching the text like the treasure hunters do, them with the tunnels and me with the camps. Joanna was of the opinion that the house Abraham hid in—​once it was determined it could not be Jacek’s house—​was an inn; and Joanna had sent me a prewar photograph of the inn she thought it was. I drove back down the maybe-escape road and circled back to Gdanska Street. Outside Jacek and Dorota’s house I saw Dorota signing for a package, and I stopped and said hello, showed her the photograph of the inn, asked if she knew which building this was; she didn’t, but called over Jacek, who pointed to a white roof peeking