When Aaron Elkins visited Austria’s Altaussee salt mine in 1997, he was struck that nobody mentioned that the mine once housed millions of dollars of art looted by the Nazis.
“They tell you all about salt and they don’t say a word about the fact that this was where Hitler stored his pictures. That this history disappeared is just not right,” said the Carmel writer, who will be speaking at several book stores in the Bay Area this week.
In “Loot,” Elkins’ latest thriller, he imagines what might have happened if a truck of stolen art had disappeared and turned up years later in the hands of the Russian mafia.
“Loot’s” protagonist is an art historian named Benjamin Revere, an assimilated Jew more comfortable with ham and pepperoni pizza than synagogue.
“My religious education had ended at 13 with my bar mitzvah –which my far-from religious father put me through mainly to pacify Zayde — after which I could hardly wait to get everything I’d learned in Hebrew school out of my mind as quickly as possible, at which effort I’d been successful,” he writes.
Like Benjamin, Elkins said he, too, promptly left Hebrew school after his bar mitzvah and obliterated his religious education.
Elkins, 62, grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn where his family read the Daily Forward and attended synagogue on the High Holy Days. They maintained the parameters of kashrut at home, but his mother would occasionally sneak him out to a luncheonette where they would eat “bacon and tomato sandwiches and not let my dad know about it.”
Though Elkins was only 10 in 1945, he remembers his parents talking about the war and the family members who were killed in concentration camps. The experience left his parents with a lingering fear, Elkins said.
“They’d seen this happen before. They didn’t believe in this business of, `It can’t happen here.’ It’s [the Shoah} something I feel as if I was always meant to write about.”
In “Loot,” Revere wrestles with his own feelings about the Shoah when he meets Erhard Haftmann, a Nazi who’d been in charge of cataloguing Hitler’s art collection.
“An unrepentant Nazi, a true believer; it seemed fantastic. Naturally I’d known that such people still existed, but I hadn’t really known it, if you know what I mean, not down deep, not grasped that they got grease spots on their lapels, and had eye infections, and ate fish for lunch. I found myself watching his mouth as he spoke, the way I’d watch a talking snake, fascinated and repelled at the same time.”
The mystery of the lost truck surfaces when a Velazquez turns up in a pawn shop. Things start to become strange when everyone Revere makes contact with ends up dead. He travels to Europe where he meets an Austrian count, an old Nazi, and is almost killed running from a criminal mob.
Elkins’ current neighbors are Austrian Jews who survived the Shoah. He says he’s often struck by the dissonance between their history and their present life in their lovely Carmel house.
“How can these things exist in the same universe?”
That sense of cognitive dissonance is expressed in “Loot,” too. Jakob Nussbaum, a Shoah survivor who wants to recover his family’s stolen art, lives across the street from Eichmann’s old headquarters.
“Every day I look out that window, I see beautiful gardens. I look out this window, I see there’s nothing there anymore at number Twenty-two. Eichmann’s dead and gone, the bastard, with his boots, and his armband, and his Heil Hitlers. But me, I’m still right here, here I am.”