Plunder

out from over the trees. I continued down the road. The inn, the former inn, was large and wooden and had once upon a time clearly been grand and stately; now it was abandoned and dilapidated. Now this could be the house Abraham hid in; in fact it felt like it was the house Abraham hid in, but I knew I was probably responding more to the fact that it was abandoned and run-down than anything else. Intuition should be celebrated, examined, investigated—​but not relied on. I investigated, I did my due diligence, I compared the building with the building in Joanna’s photograph, compared the angles, the driveway, the details of the roof. It was inconclusive. It was always going to be inconclusive. What do we do with the unknowable? What can we do but embrace it? Let us let our stories leak, become diffuse and imprecise. Maybe this was the house Abraham hid in and maybe it wasn’t the house but it’s now part of the story. Same as Jacek’s house. Same as Małachowskiego 12. I’ve come to acknowledge a broader definition of “story,” one that includes the misfires, that incorporates the misinterpretations and mistakes. The story anoints a place and when it’s found to be the wrong place it does not revert to being meaningless.

4. Larche: I continued driving down Gdanska until the street went no farther. I parked and continued on foot into the forest. There was no path. I oriented myself toward the blue pin, like a digital North Star. My phone, more omniscient by the day, knew not only my location but also the direction I was facing. I walked uphill through a muddy ravine, attempting to stay on as straight a path as possible. The concentration camp is over here, my phone says, just this way. For ten then fifteen then forty minutes I walked farther into the forest. Had I been doing this via written-out directions, with an analog map, I would have abandoned the effort almost immediately. The digital map was reassuring, it knew where I was, it knew where the camp was, I felt accompanied. (Though if I lost service I’d be hopelessly lost, I hadn’t been paying any attention to where I was going.) Then I was there. A brick wall, low, only two or three feet high, at least twenty feet long. The wall was half-consumed by the forest. A little bit farther uphill was a collapsed cement building, similarly ceding to its surroundings. Of all these camps Larche has the most extensive remains. The preservation is accidental, a function of its remoteness—​the camp was built here so that the prisoners didn’t have to travel too far to the worksite, which was not about mercy but efficiency. The conditions in Larche were particularly bad: the inmates lived in plywood barracks that offered no protection from the cold, and in the winter and spring, when the snow melted, water freely flowed inside. The pin was very precise, by the way, the camp was exactly where it was supposed to be, which made me feel more confident in the other coordinates, though I recognize the irrationality thereof. Because of the hike, because of the nature of the ruins, Larche felt the most like a pilgrimage. I sat on the low brick wall for a while to cool down; I was sweating profusely.

8. Erlensbuch: I drove halfway around the mountain, parked, crossed a bridge to where the Erlensbuch camp was pinned: a clearing at the edge of the forest that contained a single man-made object, a utility tower. In the Museum of Gross-Rosen there was an undated photograph of this clearing, and it was from this vantage: the view is exactly the same, down to the utility tower. Not a photograph of the camp but a photograph of where the camp used to be. It is a photograph of the abstraction, an iteration of memory. I got back in the car and continued driving around the mountain when I came up behind the two vintage American military jeeps, and in the back of the leading jeep—​I hadn’t noticed this before—​were two children and a dog. I followed them for a bit and when they pulled to the side of the road so did I. The men in American military outfits climbed out (the dog and kids stayed inside) and unstrapped large gas canisters from the side of the jeeps and began to fill up. I approached them and asked about the uniforms, about the jeeps. They were Czech, they said, and this was their hobby. They didn’t seem sheepish but neither did they seem particularly proud; I would have expected one reaction or the other. The jeeps were in fact authentic, the men confirmed, had been used in the first Gulf War. The uniforms too, they said. One of them unfolded an enormous laminated map. (I didn’t see any phones; I assumed this hobby had a rule against phones.) Do you know where is the rocket? they asked. I knew what they were referring to: right outside the Rzeczka complex there is, for no good reason, a full-scale model V-2 rocket. I showed them on the map. They thanked me and piled back into their jeeps and drove toward the rocket.

5. Wolfsberg: Wolfsberg was the largest Riese subcamp. It held at least 3,100 prisoners. The pin was easy to find. It was right there on the side of the road where a prominent stone memorial reads, in four languages: “IN MEMORY OF THE PRISONERS OF WAR, FORCED LABOURERS AND PRISONERS OF THE GROSS-ROSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP MURDERED IN THE OWL MOUNTAINS 1943–1945, PEOPLE OF THE WALIM COMMUNE IN THE YEAR 2010.”

15

In the plainest sense Za Drutami Śmierci is a first-person chronicle of the eight brutal months, August 1944 to April 1945, of Abraham Kajzer’s internment in concentration camps, first in Auschwitz and then in various Gross-Rosen subcamps in Lower Silesia. It is a blunt, sober, ungentle read; the material