The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 3

  “I saved dinner for you, Hans.”

  “Oh?”

  “Potato dumplings, red cabbage, and pork hock.”

  He rubbed his hands and sat down at a long table. He snapped open a linen napkin and placed it gently into his lap. He rubbed his hands again and smiled. “Oh, it’s good to be home.”

  Jasmine rang a little brass bell and this made a Polish woman appear in the doorway as if by magic. She stood with her hands balled up against her generous belly. With a nod from Jasmine, the Polish woman backed out of the room and returned a moment later with a large silver tray. She lifted the domed top and said a single word: “Enjoy.”

  Guth picked up his knife and fork and was ready to cut into the pork hock, but Jasmine touched his arm. He immediately folded his hands and bowed his head.

  The four of them said the Lord’s Prayer, and when they finished, the Commandant of Lubizec picked up his silverware again and went back to work. He cut into the veiny meat and speared it with a fork. He ate. He cut. He reached for a glass of red wine and swallowed it down.

  A clock gonged in the hallway and this made Jasmine glance at her wrist. “My God. Is it nine already? You kids should be in bed.”

  They groaned and complained and whined as Guth swirled bits of pork hock into cabbage juice. Jasmine tapped her fingernail on the table and, slowly, Sigrid and Karl came over to kiss their father good-night.

  They thumped up the wooden stairs and could be heard stomping above the dining room. The crystal chandelier jiggled.

  “Quiet!” Jasmine yelled up to the ceiling. “Get your pajamas on. And brush your teeth.”

  We know what happened next because Sigrid—rather than going to bed—crept downstairs to watch her parents. As she says in The Commandant’s Daughter, she missed her father and wanted to be around him. She also talks about being in awe of his charcoal-gray uniform and she wondered about the pistol he carried on his hip. She knew he was in the SS but beyond that, her father’s life was a deep mystery. She tiptoed down the stairs on bare feet. The hallway was dark and the dining room looked like a lighted stage.

  Guth brought his wine up to his nose and took a deep sniff. He closed his eyes and drank it in. “Gorgeous stuff. Where’d you get it?”

  “You still haven’t answered my question, Hans.”

  He unbuttoned his collar and the silver threads of his SS insignia caught the light. He rubbed his face and said, “We’ve gone over this a thousand times. Lubizec is a transit camp. There’s nothing more to tell.”

  He snapped his fingers for the dishes to be cleared away, and when the Polish woman emerged from the doorway he studied her rough, gnarled hands. His plate had globs of fat shimmering in little pools. Curly shreds of cabbage were left behind and the potato dumpling was untouched. His knife and fork made an X.

  “Thanks,” Jasmine said. “You can go home now.”

  Guth leaned back when she was gone. He yawned and stretched. A heavy silence fell between them and it began to rain, slowly at first, then more quickly. The rain was soon coming down so hard it sounded like static.

  “Has the new radio arrived?” he asked.

  Jasmine shook her head. She went over to a liquor cabinet for a wineglass. She gave it a little twirl of inspection and sat down again, motioning for the wine bottle with a flick of her finger. She poured out a measure and stared at the red patterns of crystal light that shimmered on the tablecloth.

  “Sometimes I think about those people … the ones in Berlin. The ones at the mental hospital where you worked. Did they really need to be put down?”

  Guth picked a bit of meat from his teeth and nodded. “They were crippled in the brain. We can’t have half-wits and idiots running around the country.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re not involved in that eugenics program anymore. Lubizec is a fresh start for you.” She took a long sip and eyed him. “It’s a transit camp. Right?”

  He glanced at the kitchen door. “Do we have anything for dessert? I’d like some strawberries, maybe some cream.”

  Jasmine reached for his sleeve. “Hans, what’s that awful smell coming from the camp? I had the windows open this afternoon and when the wind came up it was terrible. I had to turn on the ceiling fans. I even had to spray perfume around the house to get rid of it.”

  “It’s garbage. We’ve buried most of it now.”

  She looked doubtful, but he took her hand and brought it to his lips. And then, with a mischievous grin, he asked if their bed was ready.

  They climbed the stairs slowly, not holding hands, and undressed each other in the pale moonlight. Guth pawed at his wife. He was clumsy.

  Day-to-day operations were running smoothly and this pleased Guth enormously. He got up at five-fifty each morning and went downstairs for twenty minutes of calisthenics. He kept a logbook to make sure he did the same number of sit-ups, knee bends, and pushups every day. His shower was brisk. Cold. Invigorating. Breakfast was at six-thirty and he made sure to eat plenty of fruits and nuts. He never touched eggs or anything fried in lard. Most mornings he sat alone and watched lemony sunlight spill into the wood-paneled dining room. Dust floated in moats of light and birds sang outside as he sipped tea. Shortly before seven Sigi and Karl came rumbling down the stairs and whenever this happened he gave each of them a bear hug.

  He then snugged his SS cap onto his head, he looked at himself in the hallway mirror, and he opened the front door with a quick snap.

  “See you for dinner,” he said.

  There were usually two transports a day. The first arrived into Lubizec at eight when dew was still on the grass and the air had a wet chill to it, and the second pulled in at one o’clock when the sun was bright and warm. Whenever a transport showed up in the middle of the night, which happened often, the train stood on the tracks outside camp. The people sealed inside had to wait until the next morning and it was only then that the train was allowed to move forward down the remaining stretch of track.

  The smell of sweat, piss, shit, and death filled the air when each transport pulled in with a slow grinding of brakes. The heat was so intense in the afternoon that waves of it could be seen rolling up from the cars, and the rusty metal bolts on the doors were hot to the touch. The victims jumped out, stiff legged, sore, tired, wobbly because they hadn’t walked for a long time, and when the platform was clotted with people, Guth would climb onto a specially made wooden box. A guard would blow a whistle for everyone to be still.

  Guth cleared his throat and began to speak. What he said never varied, and years later, survivors like Chaim Zischer and Dov Damiel could repeat it word for word.

  “Welcome to Lubizec. I am Obersturmführer Guth, commandant of this little transit camp. We’re very sorry your journey wasn’t convenient but we’re at war and cannot spare more pleasant accommodation for rail travel. You will be given bread and cups of tea shortly. I give you my word as an SS officer that everything will be better now. Much better. We’ll take good care of you.”

  Prisoners known as the “Green Squad” would then carry luggage into a large wooden hut. They moved quickly, in a “kind of scuttle,” as one SS guard later called it, and they said nothing for fear of being beaten. These ragged men weaved in and out of the crowd as they tried to stay away from the guards. Unlike prisoners at other camps, these men didn’t wear striped uniforms nor did they have tattooed numbers because it saved Guth the hassle of having to buy specialized clothing or having to make any special provisions for them whatsoever. He saw no need to separate the prisoners from the new arrivals because to him they were all equally worthless. A man that survived one transport could easily be replaced two weeks later for a newer, stronger one. As a result, the prisoners all understood that death waited for them sooner or later. It was just a matter of time.

  As for the people on the platform, they were made to run into an area of camp called the “Rose Garden.” It wasn’t a garden, and it certainly never had roses, so the reason for the name has slipped into the unknown
. This, however, follows the standard Nazi ideology of deception and euphemism. It was easier to tell prisoners they were going into a rose garden than to tell them the truth, which was far more horrifying. Even though we have no idea how it became known as the Rose Garden, it serves as a subtle reminder that language itself has a secret archeology. If we could dig down far enough, we might discover that the name originates from a joke. Perhaps some new arrival asked an SS guard where they were being taken, and perhaps this guard said something offhanded like, “You’re going to a rose garden.” It is a short leap to assume that other guards found this humorous and they too began to use the phrase. And so, as transport after transport rolled into Lubizec, and as a river of people were channeled off the trains and diverted towards their deaths, the joke turned into fact. “This way for the Rose Garden.” What started off as black humor became useful for its deception and haziness. Words blunted a terrible and impossible reality.

  The victims were made to run beneath the massive WELCOME sign so they wouldn’t have time to think about what was happening, and Guth was very clear about this because he believed a revolt had less of a chance of succeeding if the victims were whipped on.

  “They should be shocked and nervous at all times,” he wrote in a letter to one of his superiors. “They should be disoriented. Always. The moment they get their bearings is the moment we lose control.”

  This meant the guards, which up to this point were merely standing on the platform with their hands cupped gently behind their backs, turned into demons. They picked up whips and truncheons. They pulled out pistols. They began to shout so hard their faces turned red. Some of the victims sensed this was the end and began ripping up the last of their money. It was a small protest, but a protest nonetheless. You may kill me, they said without words, but you won’t take everything.

  It would be good to pause here and remember that Lubizec and the other Operation Reinhard camps didn’t have a selection process. Once a train pulled into its kingdom of barbed wire, almost everyone was sent to the gas chamber. Occasionally, very occasionally, a strong-looking man might be plucked from the running river of people, and he would be forced to become slave labor, but this happened so infrequently that 99 percent of the people who entered Lubizec were dead within an hour. It was not meant to be a work camp. It was meant to kill people as swiftly and relentlessly as possible. It therefore becomes difficult, perhaps even impossible, to explain what Lubizec was like because we run into a fundamental failure of language. In order to describe a place we need to talk in terms of presence, but the only way to describe an extermination camp is through absence. We can say that A happened, then B happened, then C happened, and we can certainly look at the daily operations of the camp, but it is the holes, the gaps, the missing lives, the not-there-ness that deserves our attention. How do we represent this though? How?

  We can therefore talk about how the men and women were separated, and we can explain how the men were forced to undress in a cramped area, and we can talk about how they unbuttoned their shirts, and we can imagine their trousers sliding to the ground in pools of fabric. Perhaps we can sense their embarrassment as they stand around cupping their penises. Some of them may still have their socks on but when the whips come out—hitting indiscriminately here and there—these socks are pulled off. Maybe their mouths are as dry as steel wool.

  Some of the men might whisper the Shema or Adon Olam to calm themselves in the pale luminous dust of morning.

  All we know is that these men are rushed down a walled path called the “Road to Heaven” and they disappear from us, forever. Only their clothes remain.

  Words like fear and pain can certainly be used to describe what these men were feeling but what does this mean when we view Lubizec from a safe psychological distance? At this very moment you might be on a sofa or sitting in a coffee shop. Raspberry-flavored iced-tea might be within reach and at any moment you can look away. You can perform a magic trick and make Lubizec disappear. So what do terror, hunger, and pain mean to any of us under such cozy circumstances? How can words describe this camp at all?

  They cannot.

  Words fail us. Language fails us. Our own imaginations fail us.

  Even the word Holocaust is too small. In Greek it means “wholly scorched,” but how can this tiny cluster of ink summarize the sound of a steel door being screwed shut and poison being dumped into a room? No, in order to capture what happened between 1939 and 1945, a whole new language needs to be created; it needs to be a language of destruction and absence. Perhaps the best way to understand the Holocaust is to imagine a giant book and then watch it get erased, word by word. If you flip through the pages of this book—this very book you are holding right now—if you thumb through it and imagine each individual word getting erased, as if it were a life, then, perhaps, maybe, we might have a language that begins to explain what happened. (As a point of reference, this book holds over 81,000 words, but if each of these words were to represent a human life, that is still only a tiny percentage of the millions who disappeared under the Nazis.) Thus, in order to describe the Holocaust in any meaningful way, we need a language that isn’t there. We need to think of absence. We need to imagine words being erased. Murdered.

  The men were gassed first. And while they were being sealed into concrete airtight rooms, their wives, daughters, and mothers were being pushed into wooden barracks to have their hair cut off. The barbers had strict orders to make only three snips with the scissors. No more, no less. The women were rushed in naked, they were forced to sit down on benches, and then these barbers would snip in quick rapid jerks. Curls fell to the floor, like a carpet of leaves.

  Dov Damiel, a survivor, was interviewed about this in 1977. He says when groups of women rushed in, he was forbidden to say anything. Not a word. The only sound in the room was the furious clipping of scissors. These women knew something horrible was going to happen and many of them asked how they would die.

  “By firing squad? Electricity? Tell me.”

  When these women spoke, their voices sounded like powder. They stood around, covering their nakedness as best they could with their arms. Many of them had pale skin and varicose veins. Some wanted the barbers to slow down so that they might have a few more minutes of life. Many sobbed.

  The guards paced the floor and shouted, “Die Haare schneller schneiden. Schneller, schneller!”

  When interviewed about this in 1977, Dov Damiel said he tried to pat the women’s shoulders and offer one last act of kindness but, as he says, “The Nazis, they make us move so quick. One woman, she sits down and I have to cut, cut, cut, and then another takes her place. Blond hair, black hair, gray hair, red hair, curly and straight, it all falls when the scissors go to work. It was such a violation taking these women’s hairs and I still hear their cryings in my head. ‘Please cut slowly. Please … I want to live.’ They begged me these things but what can I do? I am only one man caught in a web.”

  We don’t have a single story about what it was like to run into this room naked, to have your hair cut away, and then to be pushed back out into the sunlight. Hundreds of thousands of women went through this at Lubizec, but none of them survived to tell us what it was like. Their stories have all been erased.

  Anyone unfamiliar with a death camp may wonder why the Nazis were gathering their hair in the first place, but the answer is simple as long as we are satisfied with a technical response like: “It was useful for the Third Reich.” Enormous sacks of hair were gathered up and shipped to Hamburg where they were made into blankets. These blankets were then given out to submarine crews. Hair, like gold or wheat, or life itself, was just a commodity to the Nazis. It was there to be harvested.

  “Schneller schneiden,” the guards yelled.

  From this room of flashing scissors, the women were then herded down that walled dirt path called Himmelstraße (the Road to Heaven). They were forced to run so they didn’t have time to absorb where they were going. Running meant they were always o
n edge and it meant they couldn’t think of escape. The guards whipped them, constantly. They used heavy leather cables and took sloppy aim at shoulders, heads, and buttocks. If someone tripped and fell into the sand, a guard would flail away until that woman staggered up and joined the others. In this way, fear and speed drove everyone into the gas chambers because they all wanted to escape the hail of whippings. Once the door was screwed shut, it hardly mattered if a revolt was planned. By then it was too late.

  Guth, however, didn’t want his guards behaving like “silverback gorillas.” Brutality was necessary to keep everything in order, but he didn’t like to watch it, possibly because it reminded him of the trenches of World War I. So, after he delivered his speech at the train platform, he strolled back to his office with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t like watching the victims undress, nor did he like the haircutting, but he usually appeared when the naked masses were driven up the Road to Heaven. Guards later said it reminded them of cows or pigs being pushed into pens.

  The gas chamber was the only brick building in camp and Guth had it painted white because he thought it might appear less threatening, more medical. There were flowerpots near the entrance and immediately above the door were the words, Bad und Desinfektion (Shower and Disinfection). Inside the building were four separate chambers and they were rotated so that at least one was in constant use. Behind the whitewashed building was a massive engine with an elaborate system of pipes that was connected to the bunker. The gas chamber doors were heavy and required two guards to push them shut. Three winged screws (one on top, one in the middle, one beneath) were spun home quickly. A glass peephole was in the middle and the last thing many victims saw was an eye looking at them—it glanced left and right. A moment later, carbon monoxide spilled into the room and a cloak of heavy poison fell upon them.*