The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 41: Hillary Makes History, and Archery Makes a Comeback

Episode Date: July 29, 2016

In this episode, Andy Borowitz explains how the D.N.C. is like a Phil Collins music video from the eighties, and Patricia Marx practices archery at home.       New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

If you believe America great, then support Hillary. We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies why embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin. Hillary is ready. She's ready to fight. She is ready to lead. God bless all of you. On to victory. I accept your nomination.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Rem. We must say no to bad trade deals. and that includes the TPP. Well, it was a dramatic week in Philadelphia. There's no doubt about that. There were some speeches for the ages, but full unity, at least in the hall, was elusive.

One of the party's ideological divides is over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And I'm sure you all saw the signs reading no TPP. The agreement is one of the largest regional trade accords in history. It involves 12 countries on the Pacific Rim. President Obama is unambiguously for it, believing that it will give the United States at least some leverage against the economic powerhouse of China.

Bernie Sanders campaigned against ratifying the TPP. It was a central plank of his campaign, saying that it would lower wages and lose jobs in the United States, a familiar critique of trade deals ever since NAFTA and even before. Hillary Clinton was for it as Secretary of State, but now she's against it, rather tepidly. Even one of her greatest allies, the governor of Virginia, Terry McCallough, said publicly that in the end she might flip-flop and support it if she's elected. Of course,

he had to roll back that statement. And as for Donald Trump, well, he says he'd rip it all up. It's a disaster. New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy covers economic issues, and he was at the convention last week. Along with producer Stephen Valentino, he tried to get out on the floor and get a better sense of just why the TPP has become such a hot issue. Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting from me because I write about economics a lot, and I tend to see TPP as strictly an economic issue, you know, the copyright infringement issues, the issue of how far free trade should be extended. But when you talk to people on the ground here, you find that TPP is really a sort of symbol of a much larger set of issues,

and not only just on economic level, but on some sort of. sort of cultural level that their sort of local culture is being impinged upon and sort of subsumed in a huge sort of global agglomerative mass or something. That's a bit sort of high-fluing language, but the way they talk about it is very personal. So, wait, are we going the right direction? I just started walking. Bernie. Hi, could we talk to you for a minute? Certainly. First of all, just what's your name? My name is David. Wita, W-W-E-E-E-D. I'm from Bucksport, Maine. So, David, are you a Bernie delegate or are you doing some of the?

I am a Bernie Sanders delegate from the state of Maine. What issues are important to you, would you say? Environmental issues are extremely important to me. What about trade? I mean, some people say trade is an environmental issue too because of the... Trade is an environmental issue, and it's also an issue that's very important to those of us who care about human rights. And the TPP is not the answer. I'm opposed to the TPP.

Somewhere, this is my... One of my buttons. There it is. These are going to be imposed on our legislator. It's worse than corporate personhood. They're literally overtaking our system of lawmaking. We just got back from the Bernier Bus rally outside the town hall here, probably two or three hundred people listening to speakers,

all of whom were on the Bernie or Bus train. Actually, it was sort of ironic. We just got there, and the guy was railing against the TPP. What they're attempting is a corporate takeover. Paul needed a corporate coup and Citizens United on cracks. Citizens United on crack. I'm Kimberly Cooper, and I am now from Pinellas County, Florida. Do you see anything in your own life, which makes you suspect this sort of thing?

Oh, yeah. Take a look at NAFTA and CAFTA, what they've already done. People keep talking about how many manufacturing jobs have gone over to other countries. They've been offshoreed. Well, guess what? For at least five years now, we've had office jobs quietly being offshoreed, and nobody knows about that. When these corporations take the good-paying jobs

and they send them offshore and make American citizens get lower-paying jobs, these American citizens cannot afford to buy the products that these corporations are selling. Virginia Shugrin, Washington State. Do you think the world is moving in your direction on this issue? I think we are catching up with the rest of the world. I see Europe, Canada,

way ahead of us, way ahead. I mean, just in terms of like, say, you know, this attitude towards the TPP we just heard the man talk about there. Seems to be coming pop. Trump talks about it too. Yes, I know. It's scary. It's very appealing when Trump says that. He's against the TPP. He's gone left of Hillary on several issues that are very attractive to the Bernie folks. And the jobs have just gone away. A lot of people have just left. My husband works for an Indian tribe. So that's our livelihood.

When Donald Trump talks about poor negotiations, how we're just giving stuff away, I see it. I see it. And the Democrats just want to continue with that trend. So not that I'm a Trump support. But Bernie sees it too, you say. Oh, Bernie sees everything. Yes, he does. A lot of people are making links between sort of the Bernie phenomenon, this talk about trade, and the Brexit vote.

Right. Do you sort of see those links or? Oh, yeah, no. Yeah, no, they certainly are some links. I mean, in both cases, it's sort of a nativeist nationalist reaction against globalization in some sense. In the UK, the Brexit vote, the big issue was not so much trading goods and services, which is what the PTP is about, as trading people, labor market migration, immigration.

If you take a sort of few steps back and take a more cosmic view of it, They're both emanations of this sort of suspicion of globalization and the sort of world economy, which seems to be everywhere now in the advanced world. Does it surprise you now that in our two major political parties, there's sort of this overlapping Venn diagram where trade is right in the middle of it for both of them? It is a little surprising because over the last 20 or 30 years, both parties in the U.S. have really been pro-free trade, or that have been significant dissenting minority in the Democratic Party all along,

left of the party, some of the unions, etc. And the Republican Party, this is a whole new ballgame to have a really skeptical person on trade and appealing to the sort of working class base of the Republican Party. The entire Republican establishment believes in free trade. The party is financially dependent on large corporations who are completely bored into free trade. That's one of the reasons why Trump is so destructural. inside the party, and the fact that this issue is now cutting across party lines is, I think, something new in American politics.

John Cassidy at the Democratic National Convention this week with producer Stephen Valentino. Shortly after President Obama spoke, I got in touch with Jolani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of The Substance of Hope, Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, which was published not long after Obama's election. Jelani also recently hosted a PBS frontline special on race and policing, which is a terrific look at these issues. Jolani, you were at the 2008 convention for the Democrats, and now you've spent the week in Philadelphia, with President Obama doing everything he can to pass the baton to his old rival and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. And yet, throughout the convention, to say nothing of the last eight years, race has been a dominant theme.

And I wanted you to step back and give us an assessment about how you feel about the president's handling of race as a subject in the broadest sense, the way you were feeling about it in your book, The Substance of Hope, and the way you're feeling it now is he's facing his last months in office. So it's interesting in Denver in 2008 when Obama was being nominated, and I was a delegate at that point. And even among the delegates who were certain that he was about to be nominated, there was still this sense of disbelief. And of course, there was like this bigger sense of disbelief among virtually everyone in the country that this was about to happen. And at the same time, there was this kind of question about whether or not people were going to take this as the automatic inoculation against any concerns or problems related to race in the United States. And at the end of that speech, these confetti cannons went off and everyone down the row jumped. And it wasn't because it was startled by the cannons. I think there was this real sense of concern for his safety that even as he was talking about having kind of eclipsed one barrier in American history,

people were worried about, quite frankly, his safety and his life, given the history of black leaders in this country. country and assassination. And so I think that in some ways we've kind of steered between those two shoals in the ensuing years. We've seen kind of point after point after point after point in which race has emerged and been a dominant part of the conversation here, maybe not in ways that we anticipated. I don't think that people expected to see the kind of explosive, highly contentious situations that have involved, for the most part, firearms that have been a dominant theme in his presidency. And so here in Philadelphia, people have tried to very delicately touch upon that. And so when you saw the mothers of the movement, for instance, the women who had lost

children to gun violence in situations, for most part to gun violence, in situations that had serious racial implications very often with policing, they were preceded by a police officer and they were preceded by Eric Holder. And of course, it makes sense if you're trying to, if you're a Democratic Party and you're looking to say that you're trying to peel off people from the middle and independence and people who may not quite agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. And so they've been trying to strike that balance kind of time and time again and everything you've seen here. Do you think there's any space between Obama and Clinton when it comes to Black Lives Matter? Both Clintons have struggled with Black Lives Matter, to some degree,

in terms of rhetoric and approach in their meetings with them. You've seen protests and so on. Well, I mean, I think there's certainly a space in terms of credibility. You know, Barack Obama comes to this as, one, a black person and then also someone who does have that activist background as a young person in the south side of Chicago. And if you recall, kind of in the midpoint of the primaries, when Bill Clinton had that blow up had the protesters from Black Lives Matter. And, you know, he kind of went in and defended the 1994 crime bill. And then people that it was a disaster because African-American voters was supposed to be the firewall that was going to prevent the nomination from being snatched away by Bernie Sanders.

And so the next day or a couple days after that, you see Bill Clinton have to kind of walk that back a little bit. And then, of course, Hillary Clinton has been criticized by that movement as well for some of the rhetoric from the 1990s, the Super Predator references, and so on. So you've been at these different conventions. What struck you the most in Philadelphia? You saw a party that was not exactly unified, especially outside the arena, but sometimes in the arena as well. Well, you know, what was interesting is that these two, conventions are kind of almost like bookends or mirror images of each other because in 2008, there was this great deal of fear about the party being divided between Hillary Clinton's people

and Barack Obama's people and whether or not that lack of unity would be fatal. As a matter of fact, in talking to the Georgia delegation, former president, Jimmy Carter, said, well, you know, I'm an expert on what divided conventions do. And said, you know, as you saw in 1976, the Republicans were divided and I won. He said then 1980, the Democratic Party was largely divided and they won. And this was a real kind of concern that was floating around among people that turned out to be, for the most part, unfounded. And by the end of the convention, especially after Hillary Clinton gave that kind of barn-burning speech that she gave, which I think has been underrated in the number of speeches that Hillary Clinton has given, after she gave that speech, you

you saw the party really come together. And in Philadelphia has been the opposite. The delegates seem to be much, much more skeptical here. And so after the formal nomination of Hillary Clinton, about 300 people or so bolted from the hall. And, you know, many of these were people who were chanting Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, and, you know, marched over to the media tent and, you know, had a spontaneous sit-in in the media tent protesting the way that they,

in their terms had been silenced by the Democratic Party. And last night I went to a meeting of the Green Party that the Green Party held across town from the convention. And there, there was a serious conversation, even more contentious conversation than you might imagine. How many people were there? This was about maybe three or 400 people. This building was packed.

And they were debating whether or not Bernie Sanders should be considered a sellout for having given his endorsement to Hillary Clinton. And yet they're facing, in the arguments of the majority of the delegates are there and the Democratic constituency, they are facing ultimately a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the real existing world. Well, I think that, you know, what's interesting is when you talk with these people, they kind of reject the binary.

And so Jill Stein has this phrase that she uses that it's, time to reject the lesser of two evils for the greater good. Even if that means electing Donald Trump? Well, I think there's a kind of cause and effect disjuncture here where I think a lot of people who are liberals or maybe independence would see that as being the case. But in those circles, there is not that kind of assumption that those two things are connected.

Jill Stein suggests that in this meeting, she said we're choosing between the lesser of two evils and it's debatable which is the lesser. And one of other things I think there's been probably the case with Hillary is that having been in public life for decades, it's telling that the Super Predator line that she made was not fatal to her at the time. And the great deal of controversy that she's encountered has been 20 years later when we have a very different set of attitudes about it and not coincidentally, a much lower crime rate than we had in 1995, 1996. One of the interesting speeches came from Jesse Jackson, who didn't quite have the prime time spot that he had in previous years, but he was no less interesting. And he said that Hillary does understand that Black Lives Matter and said that she would stand up against the NRA and stand up to the Washington gun lobby and so on and so forth. And it's not quite clear how she would go about doing that.

I'd love to know your take on that, your view of what Hillary Clinton really can in the real existing world. do when it comes to guns that Barack Obama could not. I'm not sure what any American politician is going to do or able to do to break the logjam that we have right now. But I do think that one of the things that happens, it was not, I think, coincidental that Michael Bloomberg was here to speak. Not simply as someone who is appealing to independence and, you know, a businessman and so on, but also someone who's had this kind of very vocal presence about the issues around gun. in American society. And I think guns are the way of finessing these complexities

between wanting to appeal to people who think about Black Lives Matter as important and wanting to appeal to people who think that the safety and protection of police officers is paramount. And the common denominator between those two things is guns. Jolani, have a safe trip home from Philadelphia. Talk to you soon. Thank you.

Jolani Cobb, staff writer at the New York. As all the lunacy of the back-to-back conditions, Convention Weeks finally ratcheted down, I called up a man uniquely qualified to deal with these events. My friend, my colleague, Andy Borowitz. He writes the Borowitz Report for The New Yorker. So, Andy, kind of a transition from one week to the next. We've gone from Blade Runner Convention to what? Well, it's the Hillary Convention, and the biggest challenge of nominating Hillary Clinton

is that you have as the star of the show, Hillary Clinton. And she, to take a direct quote from her, she says, I'm not a natural politician, which sort of makes you question her choice of career in a way, because like I am not a natural, I don't know, harmonica player. And so I've like avoided jobs that require harmonica skills. I think the DNC and the way they've staged this, they've borrowed a strategy that was used a lot in music videos in the 80s. Like, if you had the star of the show with somebody like Phil Collins or Steve Winwood who could not really move or dance,

you would just surround them with lots of great dancers and bodies flying through the frame. And that's basically what they've done in this convention. You've got like Bill and Joe and Michelle and Barack and weird old Mike Bloomberg. And they've really distracted attention away from the fact that the star of the show is Hillary. Mike Bloomberg was a little weird, wasn't they? He is by far my favorite thing about this convention. Do tell. He kind of helicoptered in from the planet Bloomberg.

He got down there and basically said, Donald Trump is not a real billionaire. I'm a real billionaire. He sucks. And then he got out. Like he just flew away. And it's like, what was that?

Do you think it sealed the billionaire vote? Well, I think just people love to observe billionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's so rare to see it. And I think that people enjoyed it. Hot billionaire on billionaire violence. That's right. The one thing I could not have imagined for the world of me was the fact that you'd have a James Bond plot going, that there's a Russian element, a Putin-Trump bromance.

Yeah, a little bit Tom Clancy was good. Now, I wanted to talk to you about that because you're sort of a Russian hand. I know you've written at least one book on Russia. I have Googled Russia. So we're coming out of from slightly different angles. But I wanted to get your take. Obviously, Putin is very much. much his hand is very much of the levers of power here. But do you feel like he's trying to help the Republicans or help the Democrats? Do you have any hot take on that? Oh, I think Putin is much happier with the idea of a Trump presidency. First of all, he resents the United States enormously. Right. It resents it fantastically, you know, thinks of the 90s as a great humiliation in which we were laughing at drunk Boris Yeltsin and now we're telling him not to go into Ukraine, which is in his sphere of influence, they hate Hillary Clinton. They hate the Clintons because the Clintons were in power during the 90s when everything was going south

for Russia. It was chaotic and was humiliating in world affairs and at home. And now Hillary Clinton on the edge of the White House. He doesn't want to see that. He wants to see the United States as destabilized and as distracted and crazy as possible. Well, I thought you might say that because I've also I've also Googled you, but I actually think, I think it's questionable because I think everything Putin did this week really helped the Democrats. You know, last week we described the Republican Convention as dystopic and bleak and fear mongering and all the rest. And I think we were joined by the entire commentariat in that. And his numbers went way up. And his poll numbers in some areas have passed Hillary Clinton.

And there's a kind of general freak out among the Democrats. Do you think that Hillary will regain ground in the polls because of the smoothness of the week, the relative smoothness of the week? It was kind of a love in. It was sort of a love convention. And it was also a convention where when somebody did something incredibly cheesy and sentimental and you said, oh, my God, they're not going to do that.

That's never going to work. it somehow did work. I mean, I sort of came away believing in the audacity of cheese because I think, like, especially we have to talk about Bill Clinton. I mean, Bill Clinton, when he said, you know, 40 years ago, I met a girl. And he was like, oh, my God, he's actually going to... Oh, no, no, it was worse than that. It was worse than that.

He starts talking... Then I tapped her on the shoulder. And you're going to get his seduction technique. And you just thought, oh, my God. I know I'm not the only one thinking is, don't go down this route. I don't want to hear how you picked up girls. No, it was like, and just was like walking in on your parents having sex. I mean, you know they do.

You just didn't want to hear the details. And he went on and tried to make it seem like Bill and Hillary were one of the greatest love stories of all time. And I was hearing, I was saying, are people buying this? And sure enough, you know, that night on social media, I saw so many Democrats were just completely in love with it. So that did show the power of cheese. I mean, it just, it does work. It's also the power of what you want to hear. I mean, I have no problem with people having a complex marriage.

God knows marriage is complex and theirs is just famously so. And people who are going to watch the Republican Convention and want Trump to do well are going to see it far differently than the opposite. But I just thought that speech, you know, starting off, I met a girl and it was something very old-fashioned and not a good way, the way it started off. But then it kicked into it. to really high gear and talked about the depth of her accomplishments and what she's cared about.

That was good. It was good. Although the one thing I would say about, you know, these conventions are all about the reinvention of the candidate. And basically the message of these conventions tends to be whatever you thought about the candidate going in, the exact opposite is actually true. And so like last week we heard and we talked about it,

famously misogynistic Donald Trump is actually America's foremost feminist. We learned that. From his daughter, we heard that. Exactly. But this week, the message seemed to be from speaker after speaker, you think that Hillary Clinton has been a single-minded careerist her entire life. And actually, she spends most of her time visiting people in hospitals. That's really how she spends most of it. It's like 90% hospital visits, 10% career. Andy, thank you, and will you promise to be with us on the nights of the debates because those are not to be missed? Absolutely, and I assume we're going to be doing the same thing when Jill Stein is nominated for the Green Party because that's going to be amazing. Maybe at less length.

Andy, thanks so much. Thanks. Andy Borowitz writes the Borowitz report, and you can find it at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. We didn't even talk about Joe Biden saying malarkey. Malarkey's such a good word. I've loved malarkey.

Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, does this ring a bell at all? Finally, the race is on tonight to solve a mystery dating back to World War II and collect the riches that may come along with it. Legend has it that a Nazi train filled with gold was lost seven decades ago. But is it just that? A legend? It's a story from last fall.

In Poland, a couple of men announced that they, they knew where to find a train loaded with treasures looted by the Nazis. Gold, fine art, and rare documents stashed underground. For days, fortune hunters have descended on this railroad track in Valkic, Western Poland. It said the treasure hunters were led here by a deathbed confession. It sounds like an Indiana Jones sequel or maybe a weekly world news story, but the tale of the gold train, whether it even exists or not, is more complicated than you might think.

contributor Jake Helper and went to the province of Lower Silesia to see what he could dig up. Okay, so we're really close. It looks like we're like 200 meters from his house. So here I am. I'm in a car in the foothills of Lower Silesia. I'm riding with my translator, Carol.

What number of 67? It might be this one. We're pulling up this really steep driveway and this big, burly guy. Yeah, exactly. He's waiting. Kind of comes out and he's yelling at us, hey, over here.

And then we see what turns out to be this treasure hunter's clubhouse. It's like up on these pylons and it's got like this teutonic style. It looks like a treehouse. So we're there to meet this guy named Andre Bojek. It's Andrew Bacon in English. And he looks like an Andrew Bacon. He's like this big, beefy guy. He's a well-known treasure hunter in this region.

He's not, by the way, one of the men who claimed to have found the gold train. But Andre has been looking for hidden Nazi lute of his own. So we walk in, and it's clear right off the bat that he's not maintaining some sort of strict museum protocol. Would you like to have a beer? He says to me, like, have a beer, and he grabbed this Nazi night. He uses it to crack open the cap of the bottle and hands it to me. Yeah, so we're in this room here, and there's like these old rustling.

and helmets and some knives and a compass and some canisters. So, this is the clubhouse for the treasure hunters? It belongs to a friend of mine. We have the same passion, the same hobby. There are a lot of treasure hunter groups here. Our group has been here for 20 years or so. You need a place to bring all your finds. This will be our little kind of museum.

Andre starts taking on his loot, and he shows me a whole bunch of things. old Nazi war helmets, an old rifle, gas mask, gas mask canisters. You know, you have such a big amount of this stuff around here. There's this ornate swastika mounted on an eagle that once clearly went on the top of a flagpole. I mean, it's everywhere. There's like a boxhole. What's this with the swastika and the eagle here?

So that is. Look, he wasn't going on and on about how great the Nazis were. Andre's quick to tell me that his own uncle died at Auschwitz. I think Andre's position is something like this. This history is ours. All of our lives were somehow wrapped up in this. But he's excited about the fact that he's uncovered all of these relics of history around him.

You know, at one point, Andre even makes a joke that his group has found the gold train and that's how they got the money to build this clubhouse. But actually, Andre doesn't really believe that there is a gold train. He says, though, that there are other treasures, all sorts, big and small, that are buried all around in these hills.

We are in the most interesting place, what's to unkemanymedic scarves in Europe. We are in the most interesting spot when it comes to hidden treasure in Europe. This area used to be owned by the Germans during World War II. There was a decree in April 1946 that every German family had to leave. They hid everything.

Still today, people find stuff that was hidden back then. Because you had all these Germans that were running for their lives, basically. Before they went, they buried their typewriters, their dresses, I mean, even chocolate bars. Because they were thinking they're going to come back to get this stuff. And then all of these new people are moved in. And they take over these empty homes, which had to be kind of creepy. And every time they dig in the gardens or the fields, they unearth these small buried treasures.

But Andre is clear to point out that these small treasures, that's not what he's into. That's everyday stuff for dudes with metal detectors on Sunday in the woods. He's looking for big Holy Grail type finds deep in the ground in tunnels beneath the mountain. He reaches behind him and he pulls out this long kind of cardboard cylinder and from it he unfurls this big black and white photograph, which is an aerial photograph taken sometime during the war of the Polish countryside. and he points a thumb at these like cluster of maybe like a dozen or so small black specks. And you see that, those are barracks. Those are barracks from a forced labor camp. There was a camp here and it doesn't exist now.

There were two, two and a half thousand workers here. It's very important to find these camps. Because so many people means the Germans were doing a lot of work there. We also know how much work could be done in eight hours so we can calculate it how long the tunnels are. Tunnels. That's what's really got Andre's attention. And not just his, but the gold train guys, too,

and all the other dedicated treasure hunters. You see, in the early 1940s, the Third Reich undertook a massive project, carving miles of underground tunnels beneath the mountains. In fact, it's so big that some people call it a half-completed underground city. This project is called Riza, which means giant, because it is absolutely giant.

These are huge, giant underground. So here I am having lunch with a woman named Joanna Lamparska. She's a local journalist, and she's written books about these tunnels and the treasures that may or may not be in them. The biggest one is 9,000 square meter. Thousands of people, thousands of in Mexico. of concentration camp

were to beak those underground. Nobody knows for sure why Germans tried to do it. There is no documents. The thing that makes exploring these tunnels so tricky is that there are no remaining maps to the complexes. And many of the entranceways were collapsed

either by the Nazis or the Soviets. So far, the treasure hunters have found miles and miles of tunnels. I mean, a huge amount of space, 656,000 square feet. I mean, picture of full. football field times 11. It begs the question, why did the Nazis need that much space underground?

And there's a lot of theories about this. Some people say that it was to hide the Reich's planes. Others said it was to build an underground city or refuge for the Nazi elite. You know, still others say it was to hide the Reich's bank gold. Every treasure hunter seems to have their own particular means of finding new tunnels that might lead to treasure. And for some, it's comparing math. others use geo-radar, even using magic. A day or two later, I'm with another treasure hunter, this guy named Christoff.

He looks like Yol Brenner a little bit. He's got a shaved bald head. He's kind of a dashing guy, super deep voice. And we are standing in front of a spot where water is basically coming out of the side of a mountain. There's a bunch of collapsed rocks there. And you can clearly see a small stream just seeping out of it. Christoph then says, look, the next step to know how big this tunnel is and where it might go involves a very special piece of equipment. And he produces a wooden briefcase.

Imagine what you would carry a clarinet in in like 1890. And he opens it up and inside are these beautifully long brass rods, divining rods. These are like what mystics use to find water in the desert. It's almost a compass where you ask a question and it points the direction. Is that the idea of the second? So here he is. He's dressed in these military fatigues with a patch on the shoulder that has a wolf's head. And beneath it, it says, Third Reich deposits.

Fittingly surreal. So now he asked the question. If there is something that was made by human under the ground. So Christoph sets up a little demonstration for us. He takes us to this open area. And he says, you know, I think there's a tunnel beneath the ground. ground here. And the way that I find it is this. So you walk across

this space with the Wands and when you are above the tunnel when you hit the wall, the Wands will cross. Okay. Carol, my translator, is trying to, I'm talking quietly so it's not to mess up his concentration. The two rods are pointing forward. He's approaching the

wall. He crossed the threshold of the wall, but they didn't cross. He's now going towards, he's in what would be the tunnel. marked off on the road. He's got to the other line in the dirt. Oh, man, they crossed exactly when he touched it.

Exactly when he touched. Christoph won't tell me exactly how many tunnels he's found this way, but he says officially he's reported finding eight sections of tunnels. And he's taken these tunnels, and he's turned them into a museum of sorts. So here we are, right? What's the name of this reset complex? Vodash. Wadash.

So there's like a hillside here. on these two big black doors going into the mountain. It's worth pausing for a moment here. Okay, we're in. Because everything I've been told about the tunnel so far is colorful and interesting, but I'm not really sure what I make of them. Right, the floor, it's like a real metallic scent here.

When I crossed that threshold and I entered them for the first time, two things occur to me. The first is, I'm really aware that people had died in large numbers to dig these tunnels. It has a crypt-like feel from the moment you walk in. And the second thing is, they're huge.

It was on for quite a while. How many are there in this complex? I mean, I've been in tunnels before. I've been in the coal mining tunnels in Pennsylvania. I mean, I've been in mines. I've seen like the Carrara Marba mines in Italy. But they pale by comparison. First, it's kind of small.

But then that tunnel gradually expands in size until it becomes larger and larger and larger. And then eventually we get to a spot where it turns into a river and there's a boat there. Wow, the boat is quite big. How deep is the water here? It's up to one and a half meter. We walk down and get into this boat and we start basically making it. taking our way down this underground river deeper into this complex. So he's pulling us along.

He's got these ropes that are bolted into the ceiling and he's pulling our robo down like the... It's almost like a trolley car down this flooded tunnel. The main tunnel that we're in is bisected by these kind of cross tunnels every like 100 feet or so. And they're all flooded. And then it crosses with another tunnel and then all of a sudden the ceiling will open up. Oh, look up. Wow. Wow.

There's like a huge hole above us. So think, what is that? You see, there's a trolley over us. Yeah, let's hope it doesn't dry. So there's another tunnel directly above us. So it's the showtch on the, that there are another tunnel. But not. Yes.

The scale and parts of it is enormous. I mean, big enough to fit like an Amtrak train through. And for the first time, I get it. I get why it would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that someone could park a train down here. It doesn't take much to imagine how you could quickly become obsessed with this. Part of me is thinking, like maybe I'm going to be the dude. The gold chain's over there.

I mean, it fills you with wonder. You feel like there must be something down here. Back at the clubhouse, I'm talking to Andre. Come on. What is it the year after? What do you think that's down there? And he kind of gives me this little knowing smile. And then he reaches into the vest pocket of his coat.

Clearly, he's had this thing in there the whole time, and he's been waiting for this moment. And he pulls out this piece of paper, and he's flashing it around, and I'm trying to see what it is. And then he keeps it there for, like, just long enough for us, the glimpse at... It looks like a UFO.

A UFO. Tell him that looks like a flying saucer. Is that what that is? Yes, they were built first here by the Nazis underground during the war. Anti-gravity-farmity. I was like, dude, where did you get that? And he's like, this is from a survivor. He claims it was made by one of the prisoners from one of these forced labor camps.

Remember, Andre took out that map and showed us the barracks in the prisoner camp. He claims it was one of those guys that made it. I'm like, can you corroborate this? Is there any firsthand accounts? And he says, as a matter of fact, there is. He takes out his cell phone. He's going to call my friend Edward, who's in his 80s but was a boy during the war, and he saw it.

So Edward says, basically, oh yeah. When I was a boy playing, we saw these, he called them flying barrels, these mysterious flying devices that were shooting around. I'm skeptical, but I'm listening. And it was difficult to hear, Edward, because periodically there was this kind of like disturbance on the line as some sort of clicking or beeping or something when we got off the phone. Andre's like, did you hear that noise on the phone?

We were being tapped. Tap by who? The guards. I was like, the guards? And he proceeds at it. tell me this legend in Lower Silesia, that there are these guards that were left in place by the Germans at the end of the war to protect the secrets that they buried in the ground there. The Secret Society was founded by former SS members who escaped Argentina and Brazil after World War II.

It is financed and run by siblings of those SS members and people who share their worldview. And TDC think that they're still operating here? Yes. André has all these stories about these would-be guards, suspicious locals and these Germans that come in and do splunking that he believes are on the lookout. In fact, he says that one time he's on one of these treasure-hunting missions, and he looks over his shoulder and he just knows that these guys are following them. They were looking very elegant with fancy hairstyles, too fancy to be from around here.

We got into a car and they started following us immediately. They turned right when we did. We turned around and so today. It was obvious that we were being followed. So I know what you're thinking, right? We're talking about guys who are waving around magic wands and they believe in UFOs and there's some crazy Nazi secret society that's watching them.

It all sounds. I know how it sounds. But do you ever say to them, come on? Yes. Yeah, sometimes, yes. I asked them, come on, do you believe that there was gold in the gold train? And they say, come on, this is bullion.

There was machines on a gold train, not gold. Joanna Lamparska, she's the journalist who's written about the history here. She says that there actually were a few Germans who stayed in the region right after the war. And a myth grew out of this, that these leftover Germans, they were keeping the Soviets who took over away from these real treasures that were buried.

Then they said to them, don't dig here. I know the treasure is over there. They mistaken them, you know. Confusing them, almost like mythic kind of. And people believe this. So, like, what's the deeper thing here? I mean, is this just really about people's lust for gold? I will tell you why.

Okay. We have to go back to 1945. Okay. And what Lamparska says is that this fear, comes from a deeply unsettled feeling, that you're living in a landscape that you don't know in homes that aren't yours, in beds that once belong to someone else.

And then on top of that, you got this landscape with these huge, mysterious holes in the ground that thousands of people were forced to dig, and you don't know why. So what do you do? Your imagination rushes into fill the void. Maybe Andre and Christoph and the rest of the train. treasure hunters are just working hard.

I mean, really, really hard to make sense of the world around. Jake Helper, his article Nazi underground about the Polish treasure hunters, appeared in The New Yorker, and you can find a link at new yorkerradio.org. Jake's also the author of Bad Paper, a terrific book about debt on Wall Street. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. In a moment, Patty Marks tries her hand at one of those sports. that we only pay attention to during the Olympics. And it all comes with mixed results.

Oh, there's blood on the floor. There is? Yeah. Adventures in Archery. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. Now we've got just one more story for you this hour.

Ladies and gentlemen, Patty Marks. For my next feat, I'm going to ask my assistant, he likes to be called my producer, to help me. I'm going to put this nectarine on top of his head, William Telfstile, and shoot at, well, the goal would be the nectarine. We'll see what happens. All right, I suppose you take an arrow. Here, one, I guess you don't have to say one, two, three. Oh, I got it. I got it. Okay. All right. I get 100 points.

I'm Patty Marks, and I was in the Olympics as an archer. No, I wasn't. I went to overnight camp, and I played archery, and I loved it so much. You just felt as somebody who wasn't the tallest and strongest person, you had a shot, so to speak. Archery is a sport you play against yourself, which depends. I guess that's sort of a litmus test about you.

personality because you could say it's a lose-lose or a win-win or a win-lose if you're bipolar. There are a lot of different kinds of archery. The most popular kind of archery, and I just made it up, I don't know if it's the most popular, is target archery, which you do indoors. Then there is also field archery, which is kind of like golf. Then there is 3D archery, also outdoors but today I'm going to invent apartment archery for the very lazy

so this is a bow that I got really you got it on Amazon and I don't really know too much about it but it's beautiful it's made a very hard plastic as the Olympic archers use it's bright orange and disappointingly

they're not arrows there are suction cups I could just go around the apartment and shoot at things and my boyfriend, or I could just set up some targets. I do have a wooden decoy, maybe that's a little too obvious, but I do have a trivet shaped like a man. I got it! I'm so good. I have some shrink-wrapped chicken thighs, which I hope are thawed.

All right, I got closed. We're close. I scared the chicken thighs. Now, one more thing I'd like to kill, if you don't mind, which is, let's go over to the bookcase, and there are some books I want to get rid of. Finnegan wakes too obvious. So let's get Ulysses. Which is a big fat, hard back.

Say your goodbyes. One, two, three. I just hit a vase. Okay. I'll give myself some more points. Well, there goes the no-shoe rule in my apartment. Now that we've ruined a lot of relics and things in my apartment, we're going to go to the trendy industrial neighborhood of Greenpoint Brooklyn

to visit a company called Brooklyn Bower. We're not talking about the militaristic style of hunting bows you find online. These are the artisanal bows using different kinds of wood that you and by you I mean I have never heard of. I'm assuming I'm one of a handful of people in New York City who do this, but I do know there are a few others. The owner of Brooklyn Bower is Eric Clem. And this is one that I just started a couple days ago.

I cut out all the pieces, and right now it's in the glue-up process, so it just finished curing, but it's still wrapped in cellophane. No, it has a lot of metal clothespins and things that look like screwdrivers piercing it. Here, I'll actually show you a finished one. This is eventually what it will look like with different coloring. Oh, it's gorgeous. What kinds of woods are there? It's beautiful layers of different types of wood.

Yeah, this is a laminate of the hickory is on the back, and which keeps the bellywood, which is called Osage Orange, and that keeps that from breaking when you bend it back this way. And then the riser, which is the word for the handle, is made of, I think this is Bacote and more hickory and a little bit of mulberry. And do you make arrows? I do. Yeah, and they look something like this.

And these are made of Port Orford Cedar and turkey feathers. This is sharp. This could hurt somebody. Yeah, that could definitely hurt somebody. Who buys your bows? Random people. Also, I get commissions from friends, family, people that I've met at the archery tournaments who see the bows.

And, you know, it's one of those things. Archery apparently is making a comeback. Why do you think that is? Well, okay, so here's the deal. I go to this archery range in Ozone Park Queens, and it's full of old-timers who have been shooting there since the 60s or 70s, I want to say. And every single one of them will tell you.

They're like, oh, yeah, it's the Hunger Games. The damn Hunger Games movies are making, you know, but I think that has a lot to do with, but I also think it's the kind of thing that ever, you know, the sort of popular cultures moving back to traditional things. And I think people see Archer as sort of a hipstery kind of thing that they can take up for a hot second. It makes sense to me. We're here at Proline Archery in Ozone Park. I'm here with Eric, and he's going to give me a lesson. I imagine that you'd, do best in archery when you have no thoughts in your head, which means I should do very well

in archery. Is that what the goal is? Yes. You have to think about that too much. You know what they say is you think about your shot before you start shooting, and then while you're shooting, you think about nothing. I'll try that. You know, I hope it's not like yoga because I can't do yoga. Oh, that was terrible.

I don't know why that happened. And also with these bows, you close your non-dominant eye. That's good if I were going for that target. You are an inch away from the bull's eye on the target next to your target. Okay. You're not really telling me where, how do you aim? That's the thing with these bows, it's more in your body. What I always tell people is stare directly at the center of what you want to shoot

and then as you keep going, your body figures out what to do as you go. It's like steering a segue. It's exactly like steering a segue. This is embarrassing, but the arrow went over the board with the targets. You are consistent with your mistakes. So if I go hunting, I need some prey that is kind of low and on the left. Yeah, you need like a deer that's had a stroke. Yeah, okay.

When we returned to the apartment, there was a big surprise. Oh, there's blood on the floor. There is? Yeah. Oh, my God. Whoa. Oh, my God. It's all over here, too.

Who's bleeding? Look, it's all over here. So where was the blood coming from? My boyfriend Paul's toe. Oh, you know what it is? It's the vase that you broke cut my foot. I thought you said you cleaned up. Look, here's another piece of the glass.

Oh, Jesus. I was set out for you. I'm so sorry. It's okay. As long as it's not on the rug, I don't really care. It is on the rug. Can we get the Roomba to clean this? I think we should.

The one, the only, Patty Marks, the author of the book, Let's Be Less Stupid, and a contributor to the New Yorker since 1989. No boyfriends or producers were harmed in the making of our story, not deliberately anyway, but the blood was real. And that's it for today. Next week, we're taking a break from politics. You're welcome.

And instead, Paul Simon will talk about the art of songwriting in a conversation with the great poet Paul Muldoon. Don't miss it. You can hear The New Yorker Radio Hour on our podcast. Subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen. And while you're there, if you don't mind, take a moment to give us a review. It helps other people find the show.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nicks, Michael Rayfield, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Owen Agnew, Alex Barron, Rob Byers, Carol Chihottsky, Becky Cooper, Matt Fiddler, Eric Malinski, and Nick Palm Garden. The New Yorker Radio Art is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.