Then he hears the guides murmuring his surname. The men are arguing about Abraham Kajzer, a Holocaust survivor who worked in Riese and whose obscure memoir, “Behind the thread of death”, is the subtext of his subculture. “One of the most important men who went through the war, Jewish or Polish,” they explain. When they tell Kaiser that their hero grew up in a Polish city far from Sosnowiec, you know what’s coming. A cursory check of Kajzer’s memoirs, sold at a Riese gift shop, reveals that he is, in fact, from a neighboring town. “Abraham and my grandfather were first cousins,” finds Kaiser. And Abraham had brothers, and those brothers produced children who are still alive. “Thus, the family went from extinct to not extinct.”
As news spreads about the Kajzer-Kaiser connection, the author becomes the mascot of treasure hunters and new legends about Abraham are born. “Quickly, the story that I was your grandson has become … because that story is the best story.” These men provide a different kind of disturbance than what Kaiser initially sought. They dress up as commandos, look for Nazi artifacts and choke on it with noogies and vodka. Visiting the museum room of one of his original Riese guides, Kaiser writes: “Andrzej was not a skinhead, even though the skinhead and Andrzej might have similar ideas regarding interior design.”
This is strange and complicated territory – by that I mean it is fantastic. Kaiser’s new friends are fun and his lack of open anti-Semitism is a pleasant surprise. Still, he sees through the rot of those who swear that Riese is a UFO site or maintains Hitler’s time machine blueprints. “Under the bizarre claims, an insidious claim is hidden – that your understanding of war is wrong. … Genocide is accidental. ”He is much more affectionate with collectors like Andrzej. Both are just trying to get close to ghosts through objects, even though some of those objects are a little scary. “In the United States, a swastika is difficult to see as anything more than deliberate provocation and a sign of affiliation with Nazi ideology. But here? These were literally buried artifacts. They represented what was dead and gone. “
“Plunder” thrives as a morally complicated travel book, but when the action slows down – and the Polish legal complaint process is, uh, not fast – things can get a little complicated. A rhetorical dialogue chapter on the ethics of the complaint arises out of nowhere and leads nowhere, and the author’s conversations with his living relatives seem stifled, as if something is being withheld. It is not the first book that would benefit from 50 pages falling from the binding.
But it is original and ends strong. Kaiser chases the facts (fingers crossed) of Abraham Kajzer’s story, and they devastated me. It is not spoiling things to say that Kajzer survived the worst that humanity had to offer just to abandon the greatest reward of life. At a distance of all these years, your choice is incomprehensible. It is our duty to try to understand anyway.