Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

or, rather, where the house had been. When I visited Alexander Fruhlich, Gertrud’s son, he showed me videos from a trip he had taken in the early 1990s to Głuszyca, and there was footage of the house—​a pleasant-looking two-story cottage. But it had since been demolished, and Alexander did not remember the location of the lot.

Later I went over my footage of his footage (I had recorded it on my phone) and noticed that directly across the street from the house was a metal swing set, painted a distinctive red. The playground had also since been demolished, but Joanna found photographs of it in the archives, which let us pinpoint its location, and in turn the location of the house: it is now an open field on Kościuszki Street, on the west side, not too far from the cemetery.

Chapter 15

Bein Hamitzarim is, as I described, a relatively faithful translation of Za Drutami Śmierci, but it is far from a perfectly faithful translation, fascinatingly. There are dozens of divergences between the two texts. Most are minor, having to do with word choice or style—​the natural by-product of a translation—​or the peculiarities of the respective languages. Bein Hamitzarim employs more biblical and religious language/imagery, for instance, but that’s a feature of vernacular Hebrew. And some of the changes can likely be attributed to the fact that Za Drutami Śmierci was published in Communist Poland in the early 1960s. In Bein Hamitzarim, for instance, there is an unflattering mention of a Communist block commander followed by unflattering remarks about the political criminals in the camp. But in Za Drutami Śmierci, “Communist” becomes “bureaucrat,” and the bit about political criminals is deleted.

Some of the formatting is different, too—​chapters and sections break at different locations. I don’t know what to make of that.

Somewhat stranger are the disparities of facts and figures—​measurements, estimates, distances, number of prisoners, days of the week. I’m not sure what to make of these, either. Was Abraham, in Bein Hamitzarim, correcting Za Drutami Śmierci’s inaccuracies? I suppose it’s possible, although given that many of these are in the section of the book that was ostensibly written as an as-it’s-happening diary, that doesn’t really make sense. Maybe Ostoja had misread or for some reason changed what was in the diary, and Bein Hamitzarim was, in fact, a corrective. Maybe it’s the fault of the Hebrew translator.

There are also more drastic variations. Sentences and sometimes entire paragraphs have been moved or omitted/added. A few of these edits seem traceable. About halfway through Za Drutami Śmierci there is a heartrending passage wherein Abraham laments the loss of his son and wife; in the corresponding passage in Bein Hamitzarim, however, there is no mention of his wife—​presumably Abraham decided to remove her from the text (because otherwise it would mean that Ostoja, of his own accord, wrote the wife into the passage, which seems improbable). Who knows what Abraham’s motivations were, but I think it’s pertinent that Abraham had since gotten remarried. But most of these more drastic variations are opaque, because we don’t know the direction of adaptation. Presumably there was an original Polish manuscript agreed upon by both Ostoja and Abraham, which Abraham made changes to when publishing Bein Hamitzarim, and which Ostoja made his own changes to when publishing Za Drutami Śmierci—​so with respect to any given variation we don’t know what’s original and what’s tweaked.

I found Ostoja’s role in this story so strange and so patchy that I actually began to doubt his existence, began to wonder if he hadn’t been invented by the publisher in order to better present Abraham’s book or something. But while I was never able to learn all that much about Ostoja, I did eventually at least confirm he was a real person. I’ll tell you how it happened; it’ll give you some sense of the weird charged serendipity that seems to so often propel these Polish memory-adventures.

I went with a friend to Łodź to visit the grave of Abraham’s father and my great-uncle Fyvush—​as far as I know the only extant Kajzer grave in Poland—​and afterward we called a taxi and asked the driver if he could take us somewhere where we could warm up and have a cup of coffee, anywhere he recommended. He dropped us off in the city center, at Piotrkowska 86, a gorgeous restored building with a café on the ground floor. As we walked in I realized that, even though I’d never been to Łodź, I recognized the address: it was on the copyright page of the original Polish version of Za Drutami Śmierci—​this had been the address of the long-defunct publisher, Wydawnictwo Łódzkie. For months I’d been trying to find someone who had worked there or knew the whereabouts of their files in order to learn more about Za Drutami Śmierci and Adam Ostoja, but had gotten nowhere.

We asked the waitress if she knew anything about Wydawnictwo Łódzkie or the history of the building. She did not, but said the owner might, and brought us over to meet him. The owner said he didn’t know anything either, but perhaps his father would—​after Wydawnictwo Łódzkie had moved out, the owner explained, his father’s publishing company had taken over the space.

The owner of the café called his father, who didn’t know anything but suggested we ask his good friend Ryszard Bonisławksi, a senator in the Polish parliament and an amateur historian whose office, as it happened, was across the street; the father of the owner of the café put us in touch with the senator, who was happy to meet with us.

Senator Bonisławksi—​who turned out to be an amateur explorer—​knew the Ostojas well: Adam Ostoja’s son Andrzej had also been a senator, as well as a science-fiction writer of some note.

The next day, in Warsaw, we went to the Polish Writers’ Union and looked up Andrzej Ostoja’s books and discovered that he had co-written two books with his father, Tirolinka (1968) and Waleczny Domek (1969). From the flap copy