Plunder

passed a doorway built into a section of brick. Inside, Andrzej said, was a magazyn: a storage space, probably for dynamite, maybe for weapons. We passed beneath a couple of wooden A-frames, darkened by age but still sturdy-seeming; they looked vaguely religious, these strikingly man-made structures set against the cold rock. We followed Andrzej deeper yet; it got colder, darker, danker; not to belabor the point, but the tunnel was really very tunnel-like. Thus far into this paragraph, I’ve stuck pretty much to a material description: I want you to be able to picture it. But know that a material description here is wildly insufficient. There’re the visuals and then there’s the sensation. Because this place, Sobon, this aborted underground complex, made no sense. It didn’t add up. You crawl inside a precisely planned and engineered, if unfinished, Nazi tunnel hidden in the side of a mountain and your mind reels, tries to process but can’t quite, grasps for rationale, motivation, narrative. You are besieged by the mystery of it. Okay a tunnel, all very tunnel-like and everything, but why? Why is there a tunnel in the middle of the forest? To what end? The mystery of these tunnels, which on the Internet had struck me as something unaggressively curious and weird, was now—​once I’d donned rubber overalls and inch-dragged my way inside, and touched the walls of rock, and walked beneath the wooden A-frames, and waded through navel-high puddles, and ducked under the rebar, and examined the dynamite cavities—​so forceful. What is going on here? What was it they were trying to accomplish? And on top of that the mystery is itself a mystery: Why don’t we know? How is it possible that a project like this is off the historical grid?

I was beginning to understand whence the obsession.

Even with Jason stopping every few feet to take photographs, it didn’t take long for us to reach the end of the tunnel. An abrupt wall of undynamited bedrock—​you could literally see how sudden the cessation of work had been. Andrzej unclipped the stained-glass lantern from his belt, set it on the ledge, and from his pocket fished out a lighter and a tealight. He lit the tealight and placed it inside the lantern. The effect—​given that we were 170 meters inside the earth—​was dramatic. Pink-yellow light danced upon us and upon the stone. Andrzej said something about honoring the memory of those who had died here. Jason and I were quiet and confused. Andrzej was quiet and making a show of piety. That might not be fair. Like I said, we were confused. Did he do this mini-ceremony every time he came down here? We’d met Andrzej only a couple of hours ago but this didn’t seem like him. The gesture struck us as performative, more than a little absurd. But what did we know?

Then Andrzej told a story about once finding, in the very spot where we were standing, a Jewish ring. (I don’t know what a “Jewish ring” is, I don’t know if the ring had some sort of recognizable Jewish marking, or if it was an otherwise unremarkable ring that Andrzej assumed had belonged to a Jewish slave laborer.) He said he’d found the ring but hadn’t taken it—​he’d left it down here out of respect. (I wondered: respect for what exactly? For the ring? For the nameless Jew it ostensibly belonged to? I also wondered: Is leaving the ring in the cold, dark, dank Nazi tunnel a gesture of respect? Genuine question.) The next time Andrzej came down the ring was gone, presumably taken by another (less respectful?) explorer. Andrzej shook his head and told us he regretted he hadn’t taken the ring when he had the chance. Jason and I listened and hmm-ed. The anecdote was difficult to parse. Was Andrzej’s regret born of a sense that while he would have shown the proper respect (whatever that meant) toward this ring, the explorer who’d taken it was in all likelihood treating it disrespectfully, i.e., as unsentimental bounty, a mere Nazi curio? Or was Andrzej’s regret rooted in greed? Or, less harshly, did Andrzej simply wish he possessed that which he’d found—​that the ring was rightfully his Nazi curio? Or maybe these distinctions aren’t so useful here. Maybe when it comes to Andrzej and the rest of the treasure hunters, it isn’t so easy to demarcate motivations, to disentangle something like respect from something like greed.

After Sobon all of us, Andrzej and Janek included, drove back to the restaurant where we’d initially met to schmooze, drink, unwind. The details of the conversation I don’t really recall; it was informal, strange, fun; Jason, Maia, and I were giddy, giggly, overwhelmed and pleasantly stupefied by everything we’d seen that day. We had a thousand questions for Andrzej and Janek—​about their work (they were electricians by trade), treasure hunting, Riese, etc. Really only Andrzej spoke; Janek stayed silent or, if asked a direct question, offered a quick shy answer.

But at some point Maia asked a much heavier question. It went something like: How do you take into account all the people who died digging those tunnels? Is that part of the story you tell yourselves? Like, what do you do with that information? Are you affected by it? Does it matter to you? Does it change how you relate to the tunnels? Sure, Riese might be a grand exciting mystery, but it’s also, if not quite a mass grave, then a stark physical testament to mass murder.

The question wasn’t put aggressively, but it was unapologetic and to the point. And it clearly touched a nerve. I wouldn’t say Andrzej got defensive but he certainly got animated. He leaned forward, hands on the table, and started off on a passionate and emphatic answer that quickly outpaced Joanna’s translation and soon turned into a dialogue between the two of them, Andrzej and Joanna, in Polish, with Joanna less translating than offering periodic bullet points. Memory. Jews. Slaves. Honor.

Jason, Maia, and