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

by Patrick Hicks

  Chaim Zischer, who managed to survive all of this, said that screaming happened all the time at Lubizec.

  “It was constant from the moment a transport arrived, until the moment it was processed. There was always screaming at Lubizec. It was horrible. Horrible. These cries were made from deep within the lungs and it kept on going and going. This noise only stopped in the gas chamber. It was like a switch had been flicked, and then the silence was total. You could actually hear the silence. Imagine all that noise and then … nothing.”

  When the mass killing ended, the prisoners of Lubizec became busy with other tasks. A “camouflage unit” was ordered to rake footprints out of the Road to Heaven as well as clean up any blood that might have been splattered onto the wooden walls. Other prisoners were forced to inspect clothing for diamonds that might have been stitched into seams. Another group pulled gold teeth from corpses, and lastly, some one hundred prisoners began hauling bodies to the graves. They laid them out—head to foot—and when the bodies were all knitted together in the earth, quicklime was caked onto them.

  Guth was pleased with the clockwork motion of his camp, and whenever he had a free moment he disappeared into his office. He put on a little Mozart and lost himself in numbers. If a problem was particularly sticky, he might sit back and twirl his wedding ring. At other times, he pulled out a slide rule and did math on a large piece of paper. When the sun began to set over the guard towers, he loaded up his briefcase and drove home. Trees swayed in the wind. Rabbits darted out from the murky woods. Guth followed the dirt road away from camp and felt his heart swell with love for his children.

  He wondered, vaguely, what was for dinner. He pressed down on the accelerator.

  *Unlike Auschwitz, which used Zyklon-B (hydrogen cyanide) to murder the innocent, the death camps of Operation Reinhard used carbon monoxide from engines. We will discuss this more in the following chapters, but for information on the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, please see two harrowing eyewitness accounts from survivors: Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979) and Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers (2007).

  3

  THE VILLA

  Commandant Guth took up horse riding at the end of the summer. He first learned to ride in the early 1930s to impress the higher-ups in the Party and, to his great surprise, he ended up enjoying it. Living in the heart of Berlin made this new hobby difficult because there were so few places to ride properly, but the Polish countryside was lush and wide open. It was built for a man and his horse. He didn’t like galloping through tall, wet grass or jumping wooden fences but he did enjoy the lazy pace of a horse threading its way through birch trees.

  He bought a muscular white animal from a local breeder and got himself a saddle—an American one that seemed very cowboy. It had fine leatherwork, strong cross-stitching, and he paid to have his name embossed in heavy gothic lettering. HP GUTH. It cost a small fortune but money was flowing into Lubizec. It was like a money pump had been turned on because gold, diamonds, and currency from France, Norway, the Netherlands, and Russia were funneling into his camp. It was tempting to skim off the top, of course, but he always bundled everything up and made scrupulous records of what had been found. The Reich Office gave him a huge raise because they were pleased with how much he was sending back to Berlin. This new salary, along with the massive country house at his disposal, made him feel like a feudal lord or baron.

  “These are good days,” he wrote to his mother. “I haven’t been this happy before.”

  Thanks to Jasmine’s unpublished diary, we know Guth rode to work most days and that he enjoyed the solitude. It calmed him, it soothed him, and he liked how the rolling motion of his horse brought him home at dusk. Sometimes he looked down at the leaf rot and pinecones beneath him, and other times he studied the circling hawks overhead. Misty sunlight surrounded him as he plodded home, unbuttoning his SS collar. Sometimes he stopped by a bubbling creek and watched the crystal-clear waters.

  We might wonder how Guth could oversee the machinery of mass annihilation and then go home to his family. It’s easy to use words like monster or beast when we talk about him but we should remember he was a human being that walked the earth. By calling him a monster we remove him from our species, and although this might be precisely what we want to do, to dismiss him as an aberration, we need to remember that a man committed these crimes. Not a monster. A man.

  It’s hard to understand people like Guth. We imagine that for him coming home from Lubizec was like taking off a great woolen cloak of wickedness and hanging it on a peg. There it hung until the next morning when he robed himself in it again. He opened the front door, stepped back into the world, and returned to killing. Guth went to work with the same indifference as a butcher or exterminator. No doubt he slept well at night. He worried about his kids and was affectionate with them. His worldview was crystal clear and he saw absolutely nothing wrong with mass homicide. He went to work, he did his job, he came home and hung up his uniform.

  The path beneath him was firm and sure as he rode through the trees, his conscience unbothered. The leather saddle creaked beneath him as he clomped up the cinder driveway towards the house and sauntered into the stable, where he turned the reins over to a Polish boy (he never could remember the kid’s name) and he muttered something about buffing the brass until it sparkled.

  “Like a diamond.”

  He jogged up his small hill and came to a patio. Huge banks of sparrows were wheeling and tumbling through the air in choreographed bursts of speed and peppery black. His wife sat in a chaise longue watching the sun dissolve into the lake. He joined her. A band of oily pink simmered on the dark water as he sat in a pinstriped deck chair. Fireflies came out as burning green dots. They winked like little stars in a shifting constellation.

  Guth pulled out a silver cigarette case, one that had someone else’s name on it. A Jewish name.

  “Hans. What is that smell?”

  He lit a match and ignored her. The flame illuminated the lower half of his face.

  “It’s been two months since we arrived and that stink’s still in the air. What’s going on in that camp of yours?”

  He rubbed his forehead and exhaled slowly. “We don’t have water pipes installed yet and the prisoners need to bathe. We’re at war … remember? I can’t snap my fingers and make copper pipes appear.”

  She made a face. “That seems like more than unwashed bodies.”

  “Well then,” he said, pointing to a lilac bush, “do you want more of these around the house?”

  “No, I’d like the truth.”

  They watched the fireflies glow and fade for a moment. The world beyond the patio was shadowed in dark but a large carpet of warm light spilled out of the house. It was inviting.

  The wind batted Jasmine’s hair and she removed a few strands from her mouth. “It’s just that …”

  “What?” He was obviously annoyed but he took a little breath and asked the question again, this time with more patience. “What?”

  “I’ve heard things. In the village. People say horrible things about what’s happening in that camp.”

  “Oh yes, the trustworthy Poles,” Guth said, picking a burr off his trousers. He stood up and straightened his uniform. “Don’t believe everything you hear. It’s a transit camp, nothing more. It’s a place of arrivals and … departures.” He pointed to the reading room and smiled. There was a bow, as if he were being a gracious host. “Shall we go inside? I hate talking about work.”

  She looked at her fingernails for a long moment, as if weighing up a thought. “Yes,” she finally nodded. “It’s good to have you home.”

  The Villa was lush and ornate. Antique furniture was in every room along with carpets, cabinets, and bone china. Guth moved past these collected things and called out for his son and daughter.

  “Karlie? Sigi?”

  He breezed past an enormous oil painting of Hitler. Flowers were everywhere and a radio murmured in the corner, its dial
s glowing in circles of light. Guth drew in the last of his cigarette and stubbed it into an ashtray—a puff of smoke, like a skinny phantom, floated up from his fingertips.

  “Karlie? Sigi?”

  A clattering of feet came from the kitchen. Karl appeared first with a handful of tin soldiers. He dumped them onto the table and began to make shooting noises. Sigi walked out in a dark swishing dress and leaned against a wall. A book was tucked into the nook of her arm. She looked bored.

  Guth asked about their day. He leaned in close. He smiled.

  Karl held up a soldier and talked about killing dirty Communists while Sigi stood back and waited for her younger brother to finish. He spoke quickly, with long pauses and exclamation points.

  “I!… used my soldiers!… and we attacked!… the Soviets!”

  “I see.”

  “Yes! And … and … and … it was hard!”

  “Did you get Stalin?”

  “No!… He … he ran away!”

  When the little boy no longer talked about machine guns or planes or bombs, Sigi stepped forward and explained her day. She was in the middle of reading yet another book by Karl May and she liked how he brought the American West to life. She especially loved his stories about Old Shatterhand and how he did everything with his Indian friend, Winnetou. Together they roamed the wilderness and sometimes they were chased by mountain lions.

  “Karl May is a good German writer but”—Guth raised a finger in warning—“don’t get too dreamy about his idea of America. It is a country of mixed races and Negroes.”

  Sigi nodded and walked across the carpet. She curled into a wing-backed chair and went back to reading. Karl was sent upstairs to put on pajamas while Guth sat down to roast beef, apricots, and peas. He poured seltzer water into a crystal glass and watched it effervesce into stillness.

  We have access to these snapshots of domestic life thanks to Sigi’s book. More specifically, she mentions how her father ached for love and, at least from this account, we are led to believe he liked how Jasmine looked at him when he was buttoning up his uniform. The Commandant’s Daughter is bloated with stories of a doting father and there are many photos of Guth standing beside his children with his long arms draped around them. He looks happy. He is smiling. It is very odd seeing him in a sweater. It’s also very hard to balance these images against the murderer we know him to be and it makes us wonder how he could switch so easily between his two selves. It’s almost as if we are dealing with two different men, a Jekyll and a Hyde.

  Through this book we also gain a deeper understanding of Guth’s relationship with religion. Jasmine was a practicing Catholic—we know that much—but we also know that Guth formally signed a document in 1934 stating that he was no longer a Gottgläubiger (a believer in God). The Party had never been too excited about religion in the first place because it believed the survival of the Fatherland was the only true faith for any good German to practice. In spite of this, Guth still attended Mass every Christmas, but he probably did so to appease his wife. Although there were several crucifixes in the house and one image of the Sacred Heart, it’s hard to imagine he gave them a second glance. To Guth they were just old icons of a dead spirit world. They meant about as much as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

  “Hans,” Jasmine said. “You forgot to say grace.”

  Guth opened his mouth as if to argue but he folded his hands in prayer. He made a steeple of his forefingers and pressed them against his lips. They said the Our Father together and in that moment Guth was obedient, submissive.

  When the prayer was over, he picked up his silverware and went back to his undercooked beef. His knife squeaked on the bone china plate and, after a few hesitant chews, he reached for Jasmine’s hand.

  “I see the Polish girl still isn’t cooking food long enough. Maybe we should replace her?”

  “No. The children like her, Hans. And the dinner she made for us earlier was just fine.”

  “Boooom!” Karl said at the base of the stairs. He was playing with his tin soldiers again. “Boom-crackle-rackle!”

  “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  Karl shrugged and went back to making explosions. A tin soldier was tossed high into the air. It hit the ceiling.

  “Stop that. I asked you a question,” Jasmine said. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  A shrug.

  She pointed to the stairs. “Off you go.”

  “Do I have to?” he half sang, half whined.

  Guth cleared his throat and this brought the boy to full attention. He gathered up his soldiers and thudded slowly, very slowly, up the stairs, one after the other.

  “Faster,” Guth said without raising his voice.

  The boy’s footsteps were soon moving around his bedroom. A door slammed. The house was silent except for the ticking of a grandfather clock and, from the other room, the mumbling radio. The window was open and a night breeze fluttered the drapes. A rotten-egg smell floated around the table and Jasmine made a face. She got up, latched the window, and pulled the drapes across in one fluid motion.

  “Agh. What is that?”

  He speared an apricot and used it to mop up some beef juice. “We’re back to that again, are we?”

  “Don’t be dismissive. Not with me. I’m not one of your guards.”

  He picked up a linen napkin and wiped the O of his mouth. “I told you,” he said, reaching for the seltzer water. “It’s a transit camp. I can’t tell you more, I’m sorry. It’s official business. You know I can’t tell you more.”

  “Can I see the place?”

  “Good Lord, no. No one’s allowed within a kilometer of the camp without being shot, not even you, my dear.”

  The grandfather clock ticked heavily in the background.

  “Are the prisoners treated well?”

  Guth was confused. “Why should that matter?”

  “Rumors. In the village.”

  He pushed his plate away and reached for her hand. “I crunch numbers. Other men take care of discipline.”

  “So these rumors are—”

  “Rumors, my lovely. Just rumors. Don’t worry about all that stuff.”

  “I have a right to know.”

  He squinted as if to challenge her. “No. You don’t. Not when it comes to Reich’s business.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment before Guth glanced at his daughter. She was still reading.

  “Are you eavesdropping on us?” he asked. His tone was sharp.

  Sigi shook her head.

  “Don’t lie. You must never lie.” His face hardened and he pointed his chin upstairs. “Go to bed.”

  She closed her book and stood up.

  “You must never lie,” Guth said again. “Always tell the truth, especially to family.”

  In The Commandant’s Daughter, Sigi mentions how her father never raised his voice. Instead, he was able to make a room tremble by speaking slowly and drilling holes into the air with his eyes. This hard gaze now followed her as she went upstairs but, according to her account of this particular evening, she sneaked back down on bare feet. She was curious to know about the smell and what her father did in the camp. These thoughts wouldn’t have concerned her at all except that her mother had been wandering around the house and was now obsessed with the tangy stench. “What in God’s name is that?” she asked, squirting perfume here and there. Sigi began to wonder too. It became a big mystery and she thought about creeping into the woods like Old Shatterhand to find out more. She would bring a compass and head out into the wild.

  That summer was one of the hottest on record, so the stink would have been overwhelming and ghastly, especially when thousands of new corpses were stuffed into the ground each day. As the body count continued to grow, quicklime seemed increasingly useless. “It was like throwing salt into the sea,” one guard later said. Other accounts mention how the ground heaved up and down by half a meter or more because the gasses under the soil began to expand and contract. An unholy essence lifte
d up from the ground and blood began to seep up towards the surface. It was against the laws of gravity and common sense but somehow the thick motor oil of these bodies wicked up into the sandy soil. Bloated earthworms began to appear in biblical plaguelike proportions and a low popping sound came from the ground as if the earth itself refused to hide the dead, as if it were choking on what had been given to it, as if the ground were spitting up evidence of crime. Guth worried about the water table being contaminated and he ordered crates of seltzer water trucked into Lubizec because he didn’t want his guards getting sick from bacteria in the ground. The huge number of decaying bodies stacked in the earth did much to explain the invisible stink that floated out from the camp but, as Guth stood near the mass grave with his eyes stinging from the rot of human flesh, he knew something had to be done. But what? Other camps like Auschwitz and Chelmno were experimenting with cremation. Treblinka was having a similar problem. So too were Sobibór and Belzec.

  “So these rumors about the camp are …?”

  “Just rumors,” Guth said again, shaking his head. “That’s all they are. Which reminds me, the groundwater has been fouled by something, so only drink seltzer water from now on. I’ll have more cases delivered tomorrow.”

  Jasmine squinted. “Fouled?”

  “My men are looking into it.”

  “Is it from that camp?”

  Guth drank until an ice cube rested on his upper lip. He slouched back and pulled out his silver cigarette case. “Reich’s business. I can’t discuss the camp with you. You know this. Just let me come home and relax, darling. That’s all I ask.”

  He lit a match, but instead of bringing it to the tip of his cigarette he studied the wavering flame for a moment. He glanced at the ashtray and spoke quietly, almost to himself. “Yes, that might be a solution.”