The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 13

  “We really need to talk, Hans.”

  “No. You need to go home,” he said pleasantly, while walking back to his car. He paused and snapped his fingers. “By the way, my men walked the perimeter of the camp last night searching for … oh, I don’t know … anything suspicious. They found these.”

  He tossed a pair of opera glasses to her and she caught them, clumsily.

  “They look like yours.”

  “No. They aren’t.”

  “They also found this.” He held up a hunting cap. “It’s strange, but it looks just like mine. How did it get in the forest next to your opera glasses, I wonder?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He dropped his cigarette and scrunched it beneath his boot. He looked up and smiled. “Now who’s lying, Jasmine? Look, be a good wife and go home. Stay away. This place is beyond you.”

  A train huffed in the distance and a curl of smoke lifted up from the trees.

  “I have to go,” he said, walking around the snout of his car. His shadow stretched across the chrome headlights.

  “I’m leaving. For Berlin,” she blurted out. “I’m taking the kids with me.”

  Something caught his eye and he pulled out a pure white handkerchief. He spat on it and began rubbing. Jasmine watched this and realized he was buffing bird shit off one of the car windows. He rubbed and rubbed. He spat and continued erasing the little spot that annoyed him. The train blasted its whistle and the engine grunted to life. Guth didn’t notice the jet of black soot rising up into the sky, nor did he see birds wheeling away in a peppery sprinkle. His whole body was focused on his Mercedes. He kept rubbing and rubbing.

  “Berlin. I mean it,” Jasmine yelled over the approaching train. “We’re leaving tonight.”

  The train came closer. The engine gathered speed. Fifteen wooden cars were pulled behind, and each one of them had arms sticking out of barb-wired openings. A face floated up in one of the windows and sank away. There were screams for help, screams for water and, as these 1,700 souls traveled down a final kilometer of greased rail, husband and wife said nothing more to each other. They got into their cars and turned in opposite directions. Huge clouds of dust were left in their wakes.

  A minute later, the forest was silent again. The circling birds settled back onto the trees. Dust settled back onto the road.

  It was as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

  12

  ZURICH

  Jasmine took her children and drove up to Lublin the next morning, where they caught a train to Warsaw and then, from there, an express to Berlin. When Guth found out about it, he calmly told her to return home, immediately. She refused and said that if he wanted to talk about the matter further she’d be at her parents’ house in the district of Charlottenburg. They came from good money and they had a huge stockpile of tinned food, jam, sugar, and flour. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was hunkering down with people that she loved.

  When she hung up, Guth stood beside his desk and stared out the window. A breeze kicked up some leaves and they skittered away in a small tornado of wind. He replaced the telephone in its holder and snapped wrinkles out of his uniform. He had other problems to deal with. Rather large problems, as it turned out.

  The machinery of the camp moved along with unstoppable terror and the killing took on a rushed, frantic schedule all its own. It didn’t matter if it was blazing hot or if a thunderstorm crackled overhead—the timetable of murder never changed and Guth had gotten used to it. He liked how predictable everything was. It made him feel calm. Soon a week passed without his family, then two weeks, then three, and he adapted to life without them. He let Lubizec absorb him so completely that he began to sit in his office thinking up new ways to streamline the slaughter and make everything more cost effective. Even though Guth was a skilled bureaucrat who snuffed out innocent life, and even though he was responsible for implementing the Final Solution with no moral qualms whatsoever, his superiors in Lublin and Berlin began to ask questions about his leadership. It had nothing to do with the gas chambers or the number of Jews he was killing—not at all—not that. It had to do with a small area of camp we have not talked about yet.

  “Zurich” was located in Camp I and it was made up of eight long, wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire. On each door were painted signs that either read Bekleidungslager or Effektenlager, but no one ever used these labels. Each barrack was stuffed with items stolen from the transports and it all needed to be sorted and tallied before being sent on to Berlin. One barrack held nothing but folded trousers and jackets. Another held nothing but shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. It was possible to walk into one barrack and see piles of jewelry as tall as a desk, as well as barrels full of wedding rings. There was an enormous pile of glasses in one barrack because, if someone entered Lubizec with poor eyesight, they were, as a rule, immediately sent to the gas chambers. It made no sense to have prisoners bumbling around in the rain if they couldn’t see properly, and the guards quickly realized that hitting a prisoner on the head often resulted in eyewear flying off and breaking anyway. Why save someone with poor eyesight when they were only going to be a burden later on? It was therefore decided that no Jew with glasses would ever be saved at Lubizec. As a result of this camp law, there were now so many glasses that Guth had them stored in a barrack until he could figure out what to do with them all. There were also thousands of wallets, purses, and photographs. The guards called this area of camp Zurich because it was like walking into a Swiss bank. Anything you could possibly want was there: clothes, booze, hats, watches, gold, silverware, money, diamonds. It was a place of unlimited wealth.*

  Thanks to Chaim Zischer’s book, The Hell of Lubizec, we know a surprising amount about this area of camp, as well as many of the guards. Names like Rudolf Oberhauser, Christian Schwartz, Sebastian Schemise, Gustav Wagner, and Heinrich Niemann have become synonymous with the brutality of the place. Zischer’s role as a dentist (that is, a prisoner who extracted gold teeth from the dead) meant that he was under the command of Unterscharführer Peter Franz, who was called “Birdie” because he had the odd habit of saying, “I’ve got you now, birdie,” before shooting a prisoner in the head. He ordered them to lie on the ground with their faces turned away and then he pointed his pistol at that little spot above the ear. Before he fired he always said that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.” It had become such a scripted line that other guards would often ask him, “How many today?” Birdie would hold up three fingers or maybe seven to show his tally.

  “He was short,” Zischer says in his book. “His eyes were hard green marbles and you didn’t want his attention for too long because you might hear that dreaded phrase, ‘I’ve got you now, birdie.’ Then it was off to the Roasts with you.”

  Things that made Birdie angry ranged from stealing, to yawning, to slapping mosquitoes, to having your tummy rumble, to needing the toilet, to hiccupping, to passing wind, to wearing a watch. Any one of these infractions could make him bring out his pistol and then a prisoner would hear that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.”

  Peter Franz was directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of prisoners. Maybe thousands. He was also in charge of Zurich and it was his job to make sure everything was sorted, labeled, weighed, boxed, catalogued, tracked, and placed onto railcars. Faceless men in the halls of Berlin seemed to think the amount of gold and money had gone down at Lubizec even though the number of transports had gone up. They wanted to know why profits had declined when traffic into the camp had become so brisk.

  A stern letter was written telling Guth that his guards were under investigation and that special attention would be given to Peter Franz. It was made known that an SS judge was on his way to Lubizec. A review was going to be carried out but the letter also stated that “under no circumstances should the resettlement of the Jews slow or stop. The primary function of your camp must continue while the secondary, more economical function, is under scrutiny.”

  Gu
th was furious.

  After yet another transport of human beings had been turned into a truckload of ash, he ordered his men into the Rose Garden and snapped them to attention. This was designed to knock them off balance because this was where the Jews were ordered to separate; it was a place where husbands and wives were torn apart, it was place of shrieking violence. Above all else, it was a place where the SS were in total control but, now, Guth made them stand there, uneasy and scrutinized.

  Dov Damiel was stunned to see his tormentors fixed at such attention. He worked all the harder because forty guards were watching his every move.

  “It was terrifying,” he later said. “Guth lined them up in the Rose Garden and I had never seen such a thing. It was like he was reminding them who was the chief bully at Lubizec. He was saying, ‘This is my camp.’ He was saying that everyone, Jew and gentile alike, was under his fist. No one was allowed to disobey him.”

  Guth paced. He said nothing at first but then he started shouting.

  “I mean really shouting,” Dov Damiel said in a 1977 interview. “We had never heard him shout before. No one had. His whole face, it becomes a purple beet, and then this killer, he holds up a single finger and that’s when the shouting really begins. No matter where you stood in camp you could hear this raging. I thought he was going to pull out his pistol and shoot a guard. I really did.”

  Guth stood in front of his uniformed men like a thunderhead. He paced and said this was no way for the SS to act and that stealing from Zurich must stop immediately. He said he wouldn’t have his camp taken away from him because he had worked too goddamn hard to become commandant and he’d be damned if someone took away his camp, his camp. Any guard caught stealing was a “miserable fucking thief” and he would be sent to the Russian front.

  “You assholes better shape up! I expect you to be as hard as Krupp steel!”

  Dov Damiel and Chaim Zischer also worried about an SS judge nosing around the camp because they wondered if all the prisoners would be shot beforehand. It would be easier for the guards to shoot them with machine guns and then repopulate the camp with fresh prisoners who had never seen the stealing firsthand. Why take any chances? Liquidate everyone. Purge and start over. Wipe the slate clean.

  Zischer was certain he would die. “Why keep me alive when I had personally seen Birdie steal suitcases of gold? Suitcases, I tell you. Huge leather suitcases that took two hands to carry.”

  As for Guth, his anger cooled like cracking lava. He adjusted his peaked hat with both hands and there was a long ragged sigh as if he were dealing with stupid children.

  He lit a cigarette, walked across the sandy ground for his office, and yelled out one final command.

  “Birdie. My office. Now.”

  *Other death camps had similar such stockpiles. These heartbreaking warehouses become inevitable when you murder thousands of people a day (final possessions have to be stored somewhere). Auschwitz, of course, was the largest and most infamous. The huge barracks there were called “Canada.” They were the size of several football fields.

  13

  THE VISIT

  It was early October and he threaded his way through the woods because it centered him. It calmed him. Leaves fluttered down in slow flipping twists of burnt color and he enjoyed the side-to-side motion of his horse moving through the cold light. It was peaceful, like a painting. Occasionally he stood up in his stirrups and took in a lungful of fresh air. Every now and then he ducked to avoid a branch while, all around him, leaves swam down in dark, beautiful colors. When he arrived at Lubizec he hopped off and led his horse to a little stable. Puddles of water were everywhere—they reflected the sky above. Guth handed the reins to a prisoner and made his way to the office.

  There was much to do with an SS judge coming to investigate the camp and he spent most of his time following Birdie around with a clipboard. They spent many hours sifting through silverware and weddings rings, and during one of these long sessions of cataloguing and counting, he reminded Birdie that everything in the barracks belonged to the Third Reich. They stopped before a pile of enamel pots and Guth nudged one with his foot. It rolled and wobbled to a stop.

  “If you need things for the black market, take these. No one’s going to miss a few pots. As for gold and silver though … well, that’s off limits. Understand?”

  Birdie nodded.

  “Good. Good.”

  We might wonder why Guth covered for Birdie at all. Why protect him? Why not send him packing for the Battle of Stalingrad that was raging in Russia? These are excellent questions and although we cannot answer them with historical documents, we can certainly hypothesize why Guth chose to shield Birdie in the first place. After all, it would have been far easier to step aside and point the finger of blame at him, but that’s not what Guth did. Instead, he used his power to protect this guard, which is rather telling, if not downright intriguing. Why do such a thing?

  Guth was a perfectionist, so it could be that he didn’t want others to see any flaws in his camp, and to admit that one of his own henchmen was skimming off the top would mean he didn’t have total control over his deathdom. It might have been better to cover such things up rather than to lose face. We should also remember that Birdie was very good at what he did. He was ruthless and murderous—he kept Lubizec ticking along smoothly—and for Guth this would have been paramount. For all of his bluster about sending his guards to Russia if they misbehaved (a rich word in its own right: “misbehave”), there isn’t a single report of this ever happening. Perhaps Guth remembered his own horrors in the trenches of World War I and he thought he was sparing his men? Although it is perverse and very uncomfortable for us to think about, it could be that Guth thought a death camp was a better assignment than frontline service. He may have felt he was doing his men a favor by keeping them away from enemy fire. Or maybe he didn’t want to train new guards. Or maybe he just liked the amusing stories Birdie told in the canteen.

  We can’t know the depths of Guth’s mind, but it is odd, indeed, that he protected Birdie rather than turn him over to the authorities. This, unfortunately, is one of the many unsolved mysteries of Lubizec. We want easy answers, but the more we dig into the past, the more we are forced to stand back in mute horror and confusion.

  Our attention is more rightfully placed on those who were murdered though. Who were they? Where did they come from? What were their stories? What would their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have accomplished in the twenty-first century? These are more painful questions to consider (and we will get to them at the close of this book), but, for now, we will focus on the upcoming investigation by that judge.

  “So,” Guth said, pulling out a cigarette.

  He stood in Zurich and watched prisoners run in and out with suitcases full of clothes. When the flame of his lighter was brought up to his lips, his pupils shrank. He puffed once, twice, and blew smoke up to the rafters.

  “Let’s count the money again, Birdie. Show me the books.”

  Guth usually left camp at dusk and clopped down the dirt road into twilight. Stars came out and he had the Villa to himself. He ate little. He wrote to Jasmine, begging her to return, and while this could be seen as a lovesick husband pining for his wife, he must have been aware that having his family in Poland was a good deal safer than having them in Berlin, which was being bombed by the Allies on a regular basis.

  We also know he wrote a letter to his immediate superior, Odilo “Globus” Globocnik. Guth writes in his usual clipped professionalism about running the camp and he closes the letter with an offhanded gesture, but it is clearly the main reason he wrote the letter in the first place. Just before his signature he says, “We have known each other for many years, Globus. I can assure you an SS judge does not need to visit my camp. Peter Franz is a good man. Very decent. His integrity is beyond reproach. He has run the warehouses in a first rate manner. He has my full support.” Guth underlined this last part himself.

  SS Hauptsturmführer
Odilo Globocnik responded with a terse letter. He said his hands were tied and that an SS judge would be arriving sometime in the next forty-eight hours.

  Although we cannot know what Guth was thinking during this period of waiting, we do know he slept in his own bed at the Villa and that the sheets were made of fine Egyptian cotton. The duvet was padded with goose down. He may have listened to the house settling around him. The creaking of beams. Wind against the roof. The flutter of a curtain. It seems reasonable to assume he was worried about the investigation, but maybe he slept just fine. Maybe he dozed off and didn’t think about the investigation any more than he thought about killing thousands of human beings.

  Maybe he began to snore. Softly.

  His name was Erich Bolender and he was much younger than Guth expected. He was tall, he wore the black uniform of a high-ranking SS officer, and his hair was so blond it almost looked bleached white. He got out of his chauffeured Mercedes with a sloppy “Heil Hitler” that suggested he was used to being the most important man in any given space. The young buttery sheen of his skin was at odds with his crossed eyebrows, which made him look perpetually furious. He took off his leather gloves, tugging at each finger carefully, and passed them to his chauffeur. He studied the camp and spent several seconds watching prisoners haul suitcases from one end to another. He covered his nose.

  “What’s that stench?”

  Guth stepped forward and saluted the young man who was, somehow, his superior. They walked through the Rose Garden, turned left, and when they passed the canteen Bolender paused. He nodded at the raked sandy ground and commented on the flowerpots that dotted the camp.

  “Very nice.”

  “Thank you. I thought we’d have a drink before seeing the warehouses,” Guth said, opening the door to his office. “Cognac perhaps?”

  The young man held up a hand. “Not for me. I don’t drink.”

  Guth looked confused but went around his wide desk and sat down. He pushed aside a pile of paperwork and smiled. “Welcome to Lubizec.”