Not wanting to feel their weight, I force myself to think about something completely different. Mostly I think about what the world and life will be like after the war.
There isn’t actually all that much Riese-relevant info in Za Drutami Śmierci. A few robust passages like these, some other details scattered about, but really not much, and little that struck me as revelatory or crucial. On the one hand, it shouldn’t have been so surprising, this scarcity—it isn’t what the book is about: Abraham had not set out to solve the mystery of the Nazi project he was being forced to work on—but on the other hand, given Za Drutami Śmierci’s outsized importance to the treasure hunters, I was expecting a lot more about Riese.
To some extent this is a function of how little material there is anywhere else: this is comparatively a gold mine of intel. It’s more than that, though. Za Drutami Śmierci is held in esteem by the treasure hunters for reasons that go beyond the scraps of information that can be gleaned from it. The book, and subsequently the author, has entered the realm of myth. Abraham’s book is totemic; it’s almost like a religious text. It transcends mere research material. Jerzy Cera, the renowned treasure hunter, told me he’s read Za Drutami Śmierci more than forty times. Many explorers told me about making a pilgrimage, tracing Abraham’s journey camp to camp, worksite to worksite. They weren’t doing it to learn or uncover anything, it wasn’t an exploration; they were doing it to experience something, something I’d have trouble relating to or articulating but that they, clearly, found meaningful. Many explorers asked me to sign their copy of Za Drutami Śmierci. Every time I was weirded out—this book is a Holocaust memoir, and also I am not the author. But they didn’t think it strange at all.
Even after reading Za Drutami Śmierci many times I had little idea who Abraham Kajzer was, really; I knew him only through the prism of myth. In his book there are no details from his prewar life, no reflections from his postwar life. The more time I spent with Abraham-as-myth the more acutely I felt my ignorance of Abraham-as-person.
I sought out his family. Abraham’s only child had died in Auschwitz. But his sister Necha had two daughters, one of whom was still alive, and seven grandchildren—this had been Abraham’s family in Israel. And Abraham’s brother Chaskiel, who had escaped to Argentina before the war, had four children, three of whom were still alive, and though they hadn’t known Abraham well, they had met him a few times.
I tracked down my new relatives, spoke to them about their uncle Abraham. These meetings were strange and poignant, sometimes stilted and awkward, sometimes affecting, always interesting. Ultimately, though, I didn’t learn much about Abraham, certainly little that carried insight into who he was. It is difficult to get to know a man refractively. By the time I showed up Abraham had been dead for almost forty years. After that amount of time I suppose what sticks are untextured impressions and quirks. He was kind, he was gentle, he was stuck in a severely dysfunctional marriage, he was desperately addicted to cigarettes, he trained pigeons, he grew strawberries in a barrel in his backyard, he rode a motorcycle. To them he was Uncle Abraham, lovable, scarred, low-key, eccentric, aloof. No one I spoke to seemed to have known Abraham intimately; I got the impression that no one, save for his late sister Necha, had ever known Abraham intimately.
Nonetheless, these visits provided a meaningful corrective: here was the anti-myth; here was Abraham-as-person. I couldn’t gain access, I could only orbit, but I could see that it was there. None of his relatives knew, or really cared, about the tunnels, about Abraham’s Riese legacy; his wartime experience was, to them, tragic but remote. None of them had read his book; most of them had never known about it, or had forgotten that it existed.
Speaking of myth: there is some confusion as to how many fingers Abraham had—how many fingers he had when he was born; how many fingers he lost; and when and how he lost them. The myths, you might say, do not agree.
Abraham Kajzer had nine fingers. He was born with ten fingers, a full set, but in the early 1930s, in order to avoid being drafted into the Polish army, he cut one of them off. “He used a large tool,” his niece told me, “a bolt cutter, or shears, in order to make it as quick as possible.”
Or he lost the finger during the war. Maybe he lost more than one. Ostoja writes in the preface that “[Kajzer] smiled gently and wagged the stumps of his fingers, lost in the camps.”
Although there is no account in Abraham’s book of how he lost his finger(s), the missing finger(s) themselves do come up:
I developed a way to ease the pain. I tell myself that what hurts me physically does not hurt me, only my body—I should not care. Me, this is me—the one who thinks, understands, and feels, while my body is just an object, an instrument. It’s just like the piece of finger now missing from my hand. Maybe that piece of finger, rotting somewhere, can feel pain. Perhaps the muscles, bones, tendons, red and white blood cells ache, but I don’t feel the pain anymore. Although it is a piece of my own
