The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Read online

  “Solution to what?”

  “Nothing.” Guth smiled.

  He blew out the match and looked at the burning orange tip of his cigarette. He puffed a few times and then, very carefully, tapped a small body of ash into the tray.

  He looked up and seemed pleased. “What’s for dessert?”

  4

  THE GOOD MEN OF BARRACK 14

  While Guth spent his days making sure the machinery of his camp was well oiled and that it hummed along with merciless efficiency, the prisoners of Lubizec were worked to the bone. They sorted luggage that had been piled as high as a house, they dragged bodies, they stacked clothes, and they did all of this on the run. At night they were locked into their barracks—the padlock clicked shut; bolts were driven home—and while they settled into the exhausted dark, they often felt as if they were floating above the camp itself. This cramped world of bunk beds was both part of Lubizec and separate from it. The SS could certainly enter these sleeping areas whenever they wanted to but they rarely did, and this made the barracks the only place in the camp where the prisoners felt a little safer, a little more at ease. The prisoners loved the night because it freed them from the nightmare of the day. To crawl into bed was to realize they had survived yet another twenty-four hours. To live was to fight. It was an act of defiance.

  They lit candles without saying a word. Little flames twitched and jerked against the darkness as first one man coughed, then another. They pulled out crusts of crumbly rye bread from their jackets and stuffed them into their mouths. They chewed. They swallowed. Crumbs were picked off clothes and eaten. Flickering shadows danced on the wooden walls until they were chased away by a searchlight—it slashed through one of the windows, blinding everyone for a moment, before it went away to another barrack. The faint sound of polka music could be heard from the rear of the camp. The SS laughed. They drank beer. Sometimes radio broadcasts of Hitler’s voice could be heard.

  The men ate their crusts of bread and shared with each other. Although it was not wise to talk about their lives before Lubizec, they sometimes mentioned the streets of Warsaw or Lublin or Radom, and they talked about buying a bag of plums and going home to their families. They talked about walking up the creaky stairs and seeing their wives and children in the kitchen. They resurrected these loved ones, these faces that had existed before the Nazis stormtrooped their way across Poland and shattered lives apart as easily as if they were smashing a mirror to the ground. These men sometimes held up broken fragments of their past and turned them around in their minds. They talked of love, and wives, and sons, and grandfathers, and lighting candles on the Sabbath. And whenever the burden of this loss washed over them to the point where they needed to close their eyes and breathe deeply or risk bursting into sobs, that’s when they stuffed another chunk of crust into their mouths.

  They chewed. They swallowed. They ate.

  It was common for a man to chuckle at something his wife had said and it was equally common to watch this same man bow his head and study his frayed shoelaces. It was dangerous to think too much of the past because it crippled you, it sapped your will to live. Whenever this happened, the men of Barrack 14 nudged each other and passed over ribbons of dried meat.

  “Eat,” they said. “Eat.”

  They distracted one another with talk of meals they once enjoyed. Apricots, roasted potatoes, beef cuts the size of a fist, pierogi, ice cream, pączki, blueberries, mushrooms, salmon, pickled red cabbage, chocolate, candied oranges, gefilte fish. They licked their lips. They created dreams together and whispered words into the candlelight to keep the hallucination going. Shadows flickered and danced on the walls.

  “Green beans.”

  “Butter on warm bread.”

  “Jelly. A jar of it.”

  “Tomatoes.”

  “Yes. Large ones that’re red and juicy. The kind where seeds dribble down your chin when you bite into them and they make that crunch. I can almost hear that crunch.”

  “My wife used to make green tomato relish,” said one man. His voice cracked. “I’m never going to eat that ever again now. She’s gone. Just gone.”

  A man nudged this prisoner who was wandering too deep into the past. “What else would you eat?”

  “Her relish. I only want her relish. It was so tangy, so sweet. I never appreciated it until now but …”

  “What would you put it on?”

  “Chicken, I guess.”

  “Tell me about the chicken. Forget the relish.”

  These husks of men who had been rounded up with their families and pushed into railcars, these men who tried to care for each other, they imagined a world without barbed wire. They dreamed of escape.

  Chaim Zischer and Dov Damiel found themselves among these shadows in late September 1942. They didn’t know each other before they were shoved into Barrack 14 but now they were forced to share a bunk.

  Years later, in 1983, for the fortieth anniversary of the rebellion and escape, Chaim Zischer was asked about his time in Lubizec. The Israel Broadcasting Authority traveled to New York and interviewed him in his apartment. In the video, Zischer sits in a green leather chair and, just behind him, is a massive bookcase that has many titles about the Holocaust as well as a number of framed photos of his grandchildren. A mug of coffee steams next to him. He leans forward and pushes a wisp of gray hair away from his forehead. Liver spots dot his arms and he looks strong, healthy. His eyes are little flames.

  When the interviewer asks about his first day in camp, Zischer glances down and clears his throat.

  “All of us, we all saw Guth give that speech of his near the train, and then …” He pauses and starts over. “First, they robbed us of everything. Suitcases, money, clothes, wedding rings, watches. Everything. An SS guard tapped my shoulder with the snout of his pistol and told me to start stacking suitcases. My wife and son were carried away into the Rose Garden with the rest of the crowd but I, I was forced to stay behind. I was told to stack suitcases. It was the last time I would see my family.”

  Zischer goes on to explain that his wife was wearing a pink coat and he watched this color shrink away. Her form turned through the gate that said WELCOME, and then she was gone.

  “It was the last time I saw Nela and my son, Jakob.” Although his voice is blunt and matter-of-fact, he rubs the lower half of his face and his eyes mist over. “That, that, was my first ten minutes in Lubizec. That.”

  As you watch Zischer in this interview, your eye is slowly drawn to the coffee mug and the steam rising next to him. It is easy to imagine the steam as ghosts floating up and you quickly sense that Zischer lives in two different time zones. His body may be in the here-and-now but his mind flits back through the decades, back towards the camp, back towards the shouldering crowds. Watching Zischer is like watching a man travel through time. His body may be in the present but his mind is not. When he looks at the camera he isn’t seeing a film crew from Israel. No. He is back on a platform, sorting luggage, and he is watching a pink coat and a little boy disappear from him forever.

  “Why do you think you survived?”

  Chaim Zischer cocks his head. “A good question. One that I have asked myself many times, over many years. Anyone who speaks Hebrew knows my name means ‘life.’ Maybe I was destined to live because of this?”

  There is a scowl, as if he is reprimanding himself for saying something so stupid. “That is, if you believe in destiny, which I do not.”

  He goes on to explain that he still marvels at the beating of his heart and the movement of his hands and the bellows of his lungs. He doesn’t use the word miracle at any time during the interview but he does shake his head on a number of occasions, as if he is still trying to comprehend the odds of his own survival. Zischer leans forward and says that both he and Dov Damiel arrived into Lubizec at the same time—late September 1942—and that it was dumb luck they pulled themselves away from the gravitational field of the gas chambers.

  “It was a black hole, those g
as chambers. Thousands of human beings arrived each day and they were all sucked in. You know how stars and planets get devoured by a black hole? How everything spirals into its drain of fire? That was Lubizec. Relentless. All powerful. Final. It pulled people in from all over Poland. It was unstoppable.”

  He mentions that he wasn’t any smarter or faster or wiser or better than those who were murdered. He and the others who lived were just blessed with a greater share of luck. That’s all it was. We may want to pinpoint certain qualities that explain why these men, and not others, survived, and we may want to see their steely-eyed determination to break out of Lubizec and tell the world about what they witnessed as making them somehow stronger than those who were killed, but Zischer is adamant they were just luckier, not more in love with life. This is an unsatisfactory answer for us. We want some mysterious ingredient that explains their survival. Zischer, however, does not want to be seen as special, quite possibly because he doesn’t want to think of himself as being somehow better than those who were murdered.

  “It was chance. I could be dead now and someone else could be alive. It is 1983 right now and I live in a possible world where I am still alive. It could have gone the other way in the 1940s just as easily. Because of this, I often feel like a corpse on vacation.”

  He takes a long sip of coffee and shakes his head as if he wants to change the subject. He smoothes back his graying hair and adjusts his bifocals.

  “In Barrack 14, we cared for each other as best we could. If we didn’t watch out for each other—if we allowed these killers, these Nazis, to make us into animals—it would have been a victory for them. So there you have it. We wanted our barracks to be a place of goodness even though evil surrounded us. To do such a thing made us feel human. Do you understand what I am saying? It is only by helping that you are truly alive. If you can do this, especially on the cliff of death, it separates you from the beasts.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m not sure you do. To us, it felt like goodness itself was caged inside Barrack 14. It was a prisoner like us, on the verge of dying. It needed to be nursed back to health.”

  There is a pause. A very long pause.

  “Were all the barracks like this?”

  “No. No. Absolutely not. But in Barrack 14 we decided that sharing food and making our space one of righteousness, as much as we could in a place like Lubizec where there was no righteousness, this was the only way we could survive day to day. Men still died … nothing could stop that, not even God himself … he was on vacation during the Holocaust … but we lit candles in the dark. We pulled out bread and apples and herring. We shared these things and got variety into our stomachs. Maybe this working together saved me? I do not know.” Zischer shakes his head and closes his eyes. His large Adam’s apple bobs up, then down. “Many good men died in Barrack 14. At night I see their faces.”

  Although it may surprise the reader, there was an adequate amount of food in Lubizec because the transports brought in a steady stream of chocolate, bread, canned fruits, nuts, and dried meats. Prisoners only had to hunt through pockets and suitcases of the freshly murdered if they wanted to stuff their mouths. The prisoners of Lubizec certainly didn’t get fat or put on weight, but they weren’t on the verge of starvation, as was the case in the concentration camps.

  “The transports were endless. Rivers of people were channeled down the Road to Heaven and they always brought food with them because they thought they were going to a work colony in the east. They had no idea what Lubizec was about. So after they were gassed, we ate their food.”

  “Did this make you feel guilty?”

  “No. No. No. No.”

  There was also no shortage of clothing in Lubizec. Prisoners only had to root around for a new shirt, or sweater, or hat, or a new pair of shoes. Because it wasn’t a concentration camp like Dachau or Bergen-Belsen or Sachsenhausen, the prisoners didn’t have to wear pinstriped uniforms. They could shuck off one set of clothes for another. There was no need to do laundry. Just dig around in the mountain until you found something clean. However, if a prisoner was caught changing clothes, he was badly beaten—not because it was illegal but because he was taking care of personal hygiene when he should have been stacking suitcases or sorting goods. Once again, it is important to remember that Lubizec and the other Operation Reinhard camps were not designed to detain people or use them as expendable slave labor. They were designed to kill them. And this meant there was a surplus of just about everything because in Lubizec the dead always outnumbered the living.

  Chaim Zischer and Dov Damiel may not have suffered from crippling hunger but they did have to worry about whippings, beatings, gunshots, and they were often thirsty because the guards never allowed them to drink water. They and the other prisoners were also infested with fear. It was like living with a cocked gun behind your head. When would it go off? Now?

  Maybe now?

  In ten minutes?

  Tomorrow?

  When?

  Not surprisingly, there were a number of escape attempts from Lubizec. If someone managed to avoid going down the Road to Heaven (the survival rate for this was roughly one percent), the most popular escape attempt was a mad dash to the barbed-wire fence. The guards often amused themselves by letting a prisoner climb halfway up the fence before they cut him down in a hail of bullets. The body hung on the spikes, limp and bloody. Startled ravens from the forest circled up from the trees, they did a slow orbit in the blue cloudless sky, and then they settled back onto branches.

  A few prisoners studied the rhythm of the camp and realized the only way out was the same way in: by train. There is a story that one prisoner, Wladyslaw Sadeh, managed to get out by hiding himself under a carriage and when the train backed out of Lubizec with its steel wheels spinning faster and faster he went with it. It was twilight, it was raining heavily, and the guards never looked beneath the carriage. The train clattered through the trees and on to freedom.

  Zischer is adamant that Sadeh made it out and there are reports that he managed to find his way up to neutral Sweden in the hopes of warning the Allies about what was happening in Poland. A few people in the coastal town of Trelleborg remember a “mad Jew” approaching city hall and demanding passage to the British Consulate in Stockholm, but the trail ends there. It vaporizes into rumor. We have nothing more.

  When the Israel Broadcasting Authority asked Zischer about this in 1983, his face tightens and he raises a finger as if to drive home a point.

  “I knew Sadeh. He was a tough man and I am telling you he escaped. We never saw him again.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  Zischer shrugs. “Who can say? War is a thick fog. It covers the truth.”

  “Did others try to escape by hiding under the train?”

  “Three others, yes. They tried the next day but they were foolish … stupid really … they left at the same time. It wasn’t twilight, and it wasn’t raining like it was for Sadeh. The Nazis, they saw them clinging like monkeys to the bottom of the train and they—” Zischer pauses and pretends to shoot a machine gun. “The train ran over them.”

  “And then?”

  “Security around the train was immediately tightened. Guth saw this as a puzzle that needed solving. To him it was just an interesting puzzle. Nothing more.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He got long poles with mirrors on them. In this way the guards could look under the train before it left and no one escaped after that. No one. Guth made sure of it.”

  The interviewer for the IBA shuffles some paperwork and there is the sound of a fire engine whining down a nearby street. The shriek rises, then fades. Zischer doesn’t glance up at the alarm. He keeps staring ahead.

  “Next question: You were badly whipped in your first month at Lubizec. You almost died but the men of Barrack 14 saved you. Tell us about that.”

  Zischer scratches the back of his head and almost smiles. One gets the impression he is used to answe
ring this question and, in fact, many of the sentences he uses in this interview are similar to those that appear in his memoir, The Hell of Lubizec. He says that like many of the innocents who arrived into Lubizec, he hid valuables in his suitcase and took the further precaution of sewing his grandfather’s pocket watch into the waist of his trousers. It was a family heirloom that dated back to the 1820s and he wanted to keep it safe. He didn’t want the Nazis stealing it and they would have because it was made of gold. It gave Zischer strength to feel the small circular disc press against his waist and he went to bed each night with the knowledge that part of his family past was still safe. Part of it lived on.

  And then one of the guards, SS Unterscharführer Rudolf Oberhauser, discovered the watch when he saw Zischer fiddling with his trousers. The tall man with beady weasel eyes marched over, pulled out his pistol, and cocked it against Zischer’s forehead.

  “What are you hiding there?”

  The watch was found, Zischer was tied to a wooden sawhorse, and he was whipped twenty-five times for “hiding property that belonged to the Reich.”

  The world was a blur of pain as the hippopotamus-hide whip came down onto his back. It felt like cactus needles and broken glass were digging into his spine. With each heartbeat, his skin pulsed and bled. He was on the verge of blacking out. The world moved like a kaleidoscope.

  And when he was finally untied from the sawhorse, he slumped to the ground.

  “You must work, Chaim,” came a voice. It was Dov Damiel. “You must work or say goodbye to this world forever.”

  He somehow managed to stack suitcases and, whenever he stumbled, or fell, or tripped, the arms of the other prisoners caught him. Damiel’s voice hovered in his ears. “You must work or they will shoot you.”

  When he was finally allowed to stagger back to Barrack 14, he was pushed into one of the top bunks and his fellow prisoners examined the open slash marks on his back. Pus was forming and they sponged it out as best they could with prayer shawls.