Several years ago, Menachem Kaiser found himself far from his native Canada, deep in Poland’s forests, downing shots with a group of Silesian treasure-hunters, most of whom mistakenly believed him to be the grandson of their hero.
It’s the sort of stranger-than-fiction anecdote that characterises Plunder, Kaiser’s memoir of his time exploring his actual grandfather’s history and attempting to reclaim a building owned by his family before most members were killed in the Holocaust.
The book covers everything from the hunt for the mythical Golden Train — supposedly a treasure-filled vehicle hidden underground by the Nazis— to the righteous gentile who concealed a Jew in a box of potatoes and went on to fall for him.
It’s a rollercoaster journey, one that started more than a decade ago when Kaiser, 36, was a Fulbright Scholar in Lithuania, investigating the history of the Vilna Ghetto. He began visiting Poland, finding it “stimulating and compelling,” with a thriving community of artists and writers.
His grandfather, Meir Menachem, survived the Holocaust and made it to Toronto where he built a large, Orthodox family. He died decades ago having shared little of his experience, save the address of the building in Sosnowiec. So while in Poland, Kaiser began the process of reclaiming the building, assisted by a cartoonish lawyer known as The Killer.
Initially it was a private journey. “I didn’t see a way to write about it that felt new and honest,” Kaiser says. But in 2016 he became involved with a community of Polish treasure seekers fixated on exploring former Nazi sites, especially those around the Riese tunnels, a remarkable feat of engineering built by Jewish slave labour.
It was a window into a curious world— Kaiser describes the hunters as akin to “American civil war re-enactors mixed with amateur archaeologists and amateur historians and conspiracy theories” — made all the more so by the discovery first of another Holocaust survivor relative, and second that this man was a hero to the treasure hunters.
Abraham Kajzer, it emerged, was Meir Menachem’s cousin and had laboured on the Riese tunnels. Remarkably, he kept a diary, secreting scraps of paper around different sites and returning to reclaim them after the war.
Those scraps became a memoir that might have been forgotten but for it becoming the blueprint for Silesian treasure hunters. When the hunters realised the connection (although they assumed Kaiser was Kajzer’s grandson, and he could never convince them otherwise) he was invited into the inner circle. “Being Kajzer’s quote unquote grandson —that was bragging rights.”
At first, he was sceptical. “My initial impressions were this is a somewhat silly subculture, men with toys. I didn’t really take them that seriously.” Partly, he grappled with the murkiness of a hobby looking for Nazi booty in Jewish graves. But gradually, he saw things differently.
After the night in the forest, he explains, “they woke up super early and spent 14 hours cleaning the site. There’s a real sense of guardianship and caretaking of war and Holocaust memory.”
He notes too “there is valid historical scholarship going on”. “One guy who I met discovered a concentration camp, it just wasn’t on the map. They make documents used by museums all over the world. As a group they are doing work no one else is doing, and maintaining sites and memory that would otherwise be lost.”
There is, Kaiser admits, a more sinister edge, tied up with conspiracy theories, and he admits their reasons for exploring Nazi sites differ from his own. “But there’s overlap and it’s hard to disentangle,” he says. “I met multiple treasure hunters who had a Jewish grandparent, I didn’t meet anyone who identified as Jewish, but they absolutely saw their Jewish legacy as part of it, so they have a complicated relationship with history. The more thoughtful ones are not insensitive to the fact a lot of Jews died.”
The hunters were not his only encounter with Poland’s arguably conflicted relationship with the Holocaust. In the course of trying to reclaim the building, Kaiser found himself in the Kafkaesque situation of being unable to prove his murdered relatives (who would be well over 100) had indeed died during the Holocaust, because of the lack of records.
He remains torn over whether this was down to prejudice. “I think that at base it was bureaucratic. If I had a great-great grandparent and I needed to get their death recognised in a Canadian court there would be something bureaucratic, I don’t think the law is set up to stymie me or frustrate me. It became the more complicated question of how generous or ungenerous the specific judges were, but I don’t think the law is an antisemitic law,” he says.
“But I do think that it’s within a system. You need laws on the books to help cases like mine.” He notes that Poland lacks a restitution law. “It’s not very effective in other countries but at least they have made symbolic overtures.”
Ultimately, he was unable to learn much about his paternal lineage. Instead, he delved into Kajzer’s life, meeting new relatives in Florida, LA and Israel, discovering “this unbelievably rich legacy of this man people thought was my grandfather.
“The history is incredible, it was a real gift to meet his family and discover how deep the story went and meet the family of the woman who saved him.”
But writing the book has shed new light, nonetheless. “What has been an unexpected gift, me talking very publicly about my ignorance about my grandfather has prompted my father to restart that conversation.”
Even without the results he sought, Kaiser is an advocate of interrogating one’s family history. “My story is not that unique,” he says. “Everyone I know who has done work into their family — you’re sort of guaranteed some really unexpected things will happen.”
Of course, he says, some people don’t want to know. “But I just think, especially when we grow up with stories that are distant, they become rigid and sort of congeal into lore and they’re not quite true,” he says. “When you break them open something very strange happens, so I encourage people to if they have the opportunity to go back to their ancestral homeland, not because they might find something, who knows? But you’re guaranteed to have a rich, rewarding experience.”
Equally, writing the memoir has raised questions about what right he — or any subsequent generation — has to tell a grandparent’s story. In the book Kaiser writes that “we do not continue their stories: we act upon them. We consecrate, and we plunder.”
“I didn’t mean it in a negative way,” he says. “I meant it especially if it’s a storyteller or writer and you’re doing something with it, not exploiting but using and appropriating. I don’t mean stealing or thievery, it’s more of making something mine.”
The grandchild’s responsibility is complicated, he says, pointing out that he didn’t really know his grandfather, so he can’t directly recount his experiences. “I think you can definitely know the story and understand it, but when we enter the story it becomes a new story.”
Of course, one day we will see books like this from writers for whom survivors are not in living memory. “It will be an interesting challenge to define what that historical responsibility is,” says Kaiser. “Now it feels pretty straightforward — this person I knew growing up went through this, and we have to remember it. But if it’s someone you never knew and you don’t have that sentimental attachment, do you manufacture it, or do you acknowledge it isn’t there?”
The book’s publication has helped his family understand “Menachem’s zany adventures in Poland”, and has been a source of pride. Perhaps most of all for his mother, who has been following her son’s book tour quite closely.
Kaiser was doing a virtual talk at a shul in April, when his mother Judy piped up in the comments “I don’t have a question, but I do have the answer to the question that many of you may be wondering about: Yes —he’s single!”.
A red-faced Kaiser tweeted it and it went viral, liked nearly 100,000 times and reported on around the world. Naturally, he was flooded with messages — from women, from prospective yentes, even concerned brothers. “It became a feature of pretty much every subsequent talk,” he says wryly.
He started seeing someone shortly after —“I was, like, how did she know I was single, and then I remembered the world knew” — but is now back on the market. “So I guess I can go through all my Twitter messages.”
An invitation for Britain’s Jewish mothers? And for Kaiser, just another chapter in an eventful period.
Plunder is published this week by Scribe UK and is reviewed on page 38
