Then he hears the guides murmur his last name. The men discuss Abraham Kajzer, a Holocaust survivor who worked on Riese and whose obscure memoir, “Behind the Wire of Death”, is their sub-culture’s original text. “One of the most important men who went through the war, Jew or Pole,” they explain. If 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 in a Giant gift shop, reveals that he’s actually from an adjoining city. “Abraham and my grandfather were first cousins,” Kaiser discovers. And Abraham had brothers and sisters, and these brothers and sisters bore children who are still alive. “Similarly, the family went from extinct to non-extinct.”
As the Kajzer-Kaiser connection is heard, the author becomes the mascot of treasure hunters and new legends about Abraham are born. “Very quickly the story became that I was his grandson … because the story is the better story.” These men offer a different disorder than what Kaiser initially sought. They dress like commandos, dig into Nazi artifacts and smother him in noogies and vodka. Kaiser writes in the museum room of one of his original Giant guides and writes, “Andrzej was not a skinny head, even though the skinny head and Andrzej have similar ideas regarding interior design.”
This is strange, complicated area – by which I mean it’s fantastic. Kaiser’s new friends are nice, and their lack of overt anti-Semitism is a pleasant surprise. Yet he sees right through the rot of those who swear Riese is a UFO website or keeps the blueprints at Hitler’s time machine. ‘Among the strange allegations lurks a treacherous allegation – that you misunderstand the war. … The genocide is made by chance. He is much warmer towards collectors like Andrzej. Both are just trying to get closer to ghosts through objects, even if some of the objects are slightly staggering. ‘In the United States, a swastika can hardly be seen as a deliberate provocation and a sign of association with the Nazi ideology. But here? These were literally buried artifacts. They stood for what was dead and gone. ”
“Plunder” thrives as a morally complicated travel story, but if the action slows down – and the Polish legal recovery process, yes, not fast – things can get hairy. A chapter of rhetorical dialogue on recycling ethics comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and the author’s conversations with his living relatives feel suffocated, as if something is being withheld. This is not the first book that would benefit from 50 pages falling out of context.
But it is original and ends strong. Kaiser chases the facts of Abraham Kajzer’s story (fingers crossed), and they destroyed me. It is not perverse to say that Kajzer survived the absolute worst of humanity to abandon only the greatest reward of life. From the distance of all the years, his choice is incomprehensible. It is our duty to try to understand in any case.