The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 9

  He sat down in a leather chair and yawned. He ran his fingers through his coppery hair and smiled. “You’re lucky to live in such times, children.”

  He pulled out a silver cigarette case and slouched back with one leg draped over the kneecap of the other. Rain threaded its way down the patio door as he sat in a room full of antique furniture and expensive bone china. Cigarette smoke drifted up to the wooden beams of the reading room, and hanging above the marble fireplace was a painting of Adolf Hitler.

  “Lucky indeed,” Guth said, closing his eyes.

  Sigi looked up. “How come you’re home so early?”

  He took the next day off work. It was the first time he’d done such a thing since they moved to Poland and he decided that a hike was in order. The Villa overlooked a massive private lake and there was a little island full of trees in the middle that Guth had yet to explore. He said they should load up a wicker basket with ham sandwiches and row across the water to see what mysteries waited for them on the island. Sigi liked the idea and gathered up a pad of paper to map what they found. Karl wanted to bring his compass.

  “Good. Be prepared,” Guth said.

  Jasmine, however, refused to come along. We know from her unpublished diary that their marriage was beginning to strain by late August 1942 and, although they still shared the same bed, they bickered whenever their door was closed. In The Commandant’s Daughter, Sigi mentions how she heard murmuring deep into the night. A peculiar mood filled up the house but Sigi couldn’t pinpoint why her parents were so snippy with each other. She worried it might be her, that she had done something wrong, and she tried to be extra nice to the whole family. She cleaned bedrooms even though the Polish girl was hired to do such things. Sigi also cleared away dishes and tidied Karl’s room.

  On the morning they decided to explore the island, her father was fidgety. Restless. His leg bounced up and down at the breakfast table and this made the coffee in his mug jiggle. Jasmine refused to look up, even though her husband tried again and again to jump-start a conversation.

  “Weather looks good today …”

  “Those sandwiches’ll taste good after paddling around in a rowboat …”

  “We should spend more time together as a family …”

  “I said, we should spend more time together as a family. What do you think, darling?”

  She covered a bread roll with cherry jam and bit into it. “Do whatever you want.” A quick swallow and she wiped her mouth with her thumb. “But tell the kids. Do it today.”

  Guth crossed his arms. It was the look of a man who didn’t like being bossed around.

  “It’s one thing to hide it from me but …” she trailed off. There was a smile, as sharp as a saber cut, and she stood up. She smoothed her flowery flowing dress and looked at her children, who were eating quietly.

  “Have fun with your father,” she said, reaching for her purse. Her heels clicked down the hallway and she closed the front door without slamming it. Silence filled the house. The soft effervescent bubbling of seltzer water could be heard in their glasses.

  Guth tore off a bit of bread and popped it into his mouth. “So,” he finally said. He squinted at the lake. “Should be nice out there today.”

  We should pause and consider the two different versions of Hans-Peter Guth that are before us in this moment. There is the man who snuffed out entire villages and towns, a man that can only be described as a serial mass murderer, and yet there is this other man, a man who obviously loved his children and enjoyed being a father. We almost want Guth to go home after killing thousands of people and inflict pain upon those he loved because it would make us feel better if he beat his wife, or sexually abused his kids, or drank too much, or whipped his horse, or had an affair with the maid, or sodomized boys. We could write him off as a disgusting human being. But this wasn’t how Hans-Peter Guth acted when he stripped off his Nazi uniform. Instead, he went about the business of being a loving father and husband. How could this man go home after watching children die in such horrible ways? How could he separate his two worlds so completely, so thoroughly, so cleanly?

  It could be that Guth was in fact a monster at home and that Sigrid’s book is an attempt to whitewash history—this is certainly possible—anything is possible—and yet it is unlikely that Sigrid lied about how deeply her father cared about her. What are we supposed to do with this information though? What comfort is there in knowing that Guth had the capacity for love but he chose to make a fist of his heart whenever he crossed over the threshold of Lubizec? How are we supposed to reconcile Guth the Commandant versus Guth the Father? For now, that answer must be set aside, but these two different worlds will soon collide in surprising ways.

  He stood up and made a shepherding movement towards the patio. “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Get your things.”

  They loaded up the wooden rowboat with a picnic basket full of sandwiches that had been wrapped in wax paper. Guth told Sigi and Karl to put on their life jackets before he muscled the boat out into the water. Sand scratched the hull as he pushed it out into the clear water and then, in one graceful motion, he pulled himself into the boat. It wobbled a bit as he sat down.

  “Beautiful day,” he said, squinting at the cloudless sky. He reached for the oars.

  He wore plaid shorts, a white T-shirt, and he was barefoot. Sigi wasn’t used to seeing her father’s legs and she pretended not to look at them. He was tanned and toned with muscle. He was attractive. Even Sigi knew this. There was a thick, earthwormy scar on his thigh where he got hung up in some barbed wire during the last war. It happened in a trench somewhere when he was fighting the British. Back in 1917 or 1918. She wasn’t sure which. He never talked about it. She studied its long purple shape out of the corner of her eye, how it twitched and relaxed as he rowed across the lake, and it was such a beautiful day.

  A train whistled deep in the woods and the sound echoed across the glassy water. The whistle came again and Guth glanced at his wristwatch. There was a nod of approval.

  “Is that your train station, Papa?” Karl asked.

  He said nothing. He kept on rowing.

  Sigi let her hand trail in the water. She liked how her fingers split open the surface and made a soft burbling sound. A fish flapped up and she turned to see spreading ripples from where it had splashed. The water was gray and gentle. Her father pulled on the oars and she watched them dip in and out of the lake, over and over again. They were moving fast and she enjoyed the speed as well as how her body moved in rhythm to the oars. Karl held a compass and yelled out directions.

  “South! Southeast!”

  Oaks and pines towered up from the island and Guth rowed hard until they slid up onto a sandy, gravely beach. It scraped the bottom of the boat. All around them were pebbles and mud and minnows. The surface of the water was slick, sun dappled, and shimmeringly alive.

  “We’re here,” Karl clapped. “We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”

  They pulled the boat up into some weeds and Guth looked around. “Now what?” he asked.

  “Indians,” Karl said, already pushing into the ferny undergrowth. He picked up a stick and brought it up to his face. He took aim and shouted, “I see three of them! Bang, bang, bang!”

  Pine needles were everywhere, along with dragonflies that zipped through shafts of honeyed sunlight. In The Commandant’s Daughter Sigi writes about her time on the island as something she wanted to safeguard and preserve forever. For the rest of her life she would remember it as a perfect day in the Garden of Eden. Her father was out of his uniform and everything associated with Nazism was far away. There was no war. There was no Hitler. There was no Holocaust. He was simply her father. For Sigi, the island came to represent a type of lost innocence, and as she grew older and had to grapple with what her father had done, she felt that if she could have kept him there forever maybe she could have stopped him from killing all of those innocent people. For her, the island became a symbolic place where her fath
er could still be redeemed.

  “Bang!” Karl yelled.

  “How many now?” Guth asked.

  Karl wiped sweat from his forehead. “Twenty-three. Bang! Twenty-four!”

  “Good. Good. Keep this island safe.”

  Guth put an arm around his daughter as they weaved through trees. It didn’t take long to reach the other side of the island, and when they did, they circled back, slowly. Karl shouldered his imaginary rifle and ran ahead, jumping over fallen trees and stopping every now and then to look at a turquoise beetle or some wide mushrooms. When they returned to the rowboat they opened the picnic basket and pulled wax paper off their sandwiches. They bit into apples—crunching down on the juicy hardness—and they stared at the Villa. It looked tiny and fragile. Like a toy. Sunlight flashed off one of the windows as it opened. A train clattered in the wilderness and Guth checked his watch again.

  “Trains are fun,” Karl said, dropping a fist-sized rock into the water. It sploshed.

  When they finished eating, they packed away the wax paper and apple cores. Guth lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree. He looked happy, content. He crossed his legs at the ankles and let out a little groan of happiness.

  From somewhere across the lake, a crow began to complain. Craaaaw-caw.

  “Papa?” Sigi asked.

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “You’re supposed to tell us something.”

  A pause. “I am?”

  “Mom said you had something to tell us.”

  Guth took a long drag on his cigarette but didn’t open his eyes.

  “Is it what you two are arguing about?”

  He dug a bit of sandwich out of his back molar and flicked it into the water. “Arguing? What do you mean?”

  “This morning. Over breakfast. Mom said you’re supposed to tell us something.”

  Another pause. He nodded and opened his eyes. “Okay,” he said, sitting up. “Okay. Yes. You should know.”

  Sigi and Karl leaned in as a dragonfly floated past. Guth studied the far side of the lake and acted as if he were speaking to himself. He told his children they needed to be strong, that Germany was at war, and that certain sacrifices had to be made.

  “I’m sorry to say that your grandmother was killed in an air raid. It was a quick death. She wouldn’t have felt much.”

  Sigi and Karl began to shriek but Guth snapped his fingers for them to quiet down.

  “People die in war all the time. She was an old woman and she had a full life.”

  Karl continued to cry but Sigi gathered herself and wiped her eyes. Her bottom lip trembled. “When did it happen?”

  “A month ago.”

  “A month ago? But … can we go to her funeral?”

  Guth stood up and waved his hand as if a mosquito were floating around him. “There wasn’t a funeral. Now help me load the boat and we’ll—for God’s sake, Karl—stop your sniveling. Crying won’t bring her back. People die all the time but sacrifices need to be made.”

  He fit the wicker picnic basket into the rowboat and dropped his cigarette into the water. It hissed like a snake.

  They rowed home in silence. Karl wept quietly, with his back to Guth, as Sigi stared out at the calm gray lake. She tried not to cry as the wooden oars squeaked against their metal locks. Beads of water ran down the oar shafts and trickled back into the darkness.

  Sigi would later say her grandmother’s death made the war real in a way that nothing else had up to that point. In her book she wonders how this one death could have taken up so much space in her heart when, just five kilometers from her bedroom, thousands of people were being gassed every day. She goes on to explain that her grandmother died in a firestorm. It happened near the docks of Hamburg on the night of July 26, 1942, when the Royal Air Force set its crosshairs on the submarine pens. Due to bad weather, the bombs drifted badly off target and they blasted into residential property. A thousand homes were immediately engulfed in flame and huge tornadoes of fire lifted up to the clouds. Two days later, a telegram was sent to Guth’s office. His mother had been found in an air-raid shelter, unburned but dead. As the firestorm raged overhead, and as oxygen was sucked up to feed the towering flames, she and many others were caught in the vacuum below. Their lungs couldn’t inflate and they were slowly asphyxiated—they panted for air until there was none left. When the door to the air-raid shelter was finally opened, everyone inside looked like they were in shock. Their mouths were open as if they were in the process of saying, “No.” The shelter had become, in effect, like a gas chamber.

  What angered Jasmine was how Guth lied about it. When she first heard about the raid she asked if his mother was okay. “Was her house hit? Have you heard from her?” Guth stared at his red wine and said she was fine, just fine. Four days later Jasmine asked the same question and again he gave the same answer even though he knew—he knew—she was dead. Five weeks passed, and when Jasmine finally discovered the truth she was horrified by her husband’s indifference.

  “Hans. She was your mother.”

  “Lots of mothers have died in this war. Lots. What do you want me to say?”

  It wasn’t just the icy way in which he talked about her death that angered Jasmine, it was also his evasiveness. Shortly after she first heard about the bombing, she sent a care package to help the old woman with her rationing cards, and Guth knew she was doing this, but still he said nothing. He watched her wrap the package with brown paper and he offered to mail it.

  What made Jasmine prickle, what really made her ball up her fists in anger, was how Guth painted fib onto fib, even though she repeatedly asked about his mother.

  “Did she get the package? Is she okay?”

  He said they talked on the phone and that she was doing well. “She’s fine. Just fine.”

  When Jasmine realized how much he was dancing around the truth, she stewed with rage—this had been an ongoing problem since Berlin—and she demanded that he start telling the truth or there would be consequences. Serious consequences. After all, she didn’t want to live in Poland.

  When the rowboat crunched up onto the sandy shore, Guth and the kids walked up the stone steps. Their bare feet left watery prints on the flagstones. The sliding glass door was open and Jasmine was inside, smoking. She used an ivory holder because it made her feel elegant. Like a movie star. When she saw the stunned looks on her children she opened her arms and gave them a hug. The three of them cried as Guth looked on. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.

  Jasmine gave her children a few kisses. Lipstick butterflies hung on their cheeks. She smoothed their hair and said, “I’m sorry, my dears. Now … give your father and me some privacy. We need to talk about adult things.”

  Karl went upstairs, dragging his feet against each tread, but Sigi slipped into the front hall and positioned herself next to a mirror. It was large and reflected what was happening in the lounge. A grandfather clock ticked out the seconds. Her parents said nothing for a long time. They looked at the floor and rubbed their faces. The heavy pendulum kept swinging back and forth.

  Jasmine adjusted a bra strap and finally said, “Why did you lie?”

  He turned to stare at the lake. His reflection looked back at her.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “State secrets are—”

  “I’m not talking about stupid state secrets. I’m talking about your mother. Your mother, Hans. She dies five weeks ago and you go around acting like she’s still alive. Who does that? It’s not normal.”

  He lit a cigarette. He turned back to her and picked a fleck of tobacco off his lips. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”

  “You said the same thing in Berlin when you were euthanizing those people and it just seems that—”

  “Stop. We’re not talking about that again.”

  “I don’t care about that. What I do care about, Hans, is how you said you were involved in security at a mental hospital and how you never once said anything about putting peopl
e out of their misery.”

  “It was Reich’s business.”

  “No, no, no.” She got up and began to pace. “You don’t understand. You lied to me about what you did in Berlin and you lied to me about your mother. It just comes so naturally to you. That’s my problem. How can I believe anything you tell me if you can’t even mention the death of your own mother? I didn’t come to Poland for this.”

  Guth opened his mouth as if to say something but she silenced him. She pointed to the front door. “Is that place a transit camp?”

  “Jasmine.”

  “Yes or no? I’m your wife.”

  He took a pull on his cigarette and held it. When he exhaled, his words were made of smoke. “Don’t be like this. I need to come home to a loving wife.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Stop. Stop right now.”

  “Because I’ve heard rumors in this backwater hole-of-a-place and I need to know the truth. For once, can you please just share something with me?” Her voice rose but she calmed herself. She smoothed her dress and cleared her throat. “I deserve that much at least after moving here from Berlin.”

  “Ah yes, marvelous Berlin. Look, I won’t be interrogated like a common criminal.”

  Jasmine reached into her purse and tossed several black-and-white photos on the table. They skittered to a stop. One was of a fake train station, another of a travel poster to Barcelona, and there was one of the WELCOME sign.

  Guth pointed. “See? I’ve tried to share.”

  “You also shared rather extravagant lies about your mother. You’re good at deceiving people. But I’m not other people. What am I to you?”

  He moved to hug her. “Darling …”

  She backed away. “What are you burning in that place? The sky is stained orange every night. Are you burning bodies?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Jews are filthy creatures. When they arrive into camp, their clothes are teeming with lice. We give them fresh trousers and shirts and then we burn what’s left over. We’re burning their clothes. Their clothes, Jasmine.”

  “You say that now but how can I believe you? How can I believe anything you say?”