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

by Patrick Hicks

  Everybody stood back.

  There were four such pits at Lubizec and they were each built at a slight angle so that, as the bodies burned, a steady stream of human fat might leak into the lowest corner. When it looked like the fire might need more fuel, the prisoners were ordered to scoop up this liquid fat with a smelting ladle and toss it back into the fire. The Roasts often burned deep into the morning but Guth tried to avoid this because the smudgy black smoke made the new arrivals nervous.

  When Dov Damiel was interviewed about this in 1977, he said it was nightmare work. Demonic. They had to drag corpses over to the blazing pyre and it was common to see bodies move and twitch as muscles began to contort. When he mentions this in the interview, he stares at the floor and clears his throat.

  “The dead, they look like they were rising back to life. Sometimes their mouths begin to open and … and the sexual organs of men … their penises they grow bigger as blood superheats inside their members. At the top of the pile, the bodies they sometimes sit up as they curl into the fires. It was horrible. Horrible. I will never forget the Roasts. Ever.”

  The SS watched all of this with great amusement. They pointed at bodies that were twisting in strange ways and they drank vodka, or port, or whatever else they could lay their hands on, and Guth allowed this to happen because it made the “necessary work” easier. Laughter filled the air as the guards got drunk and fired guns into the blazing hellfire mass of human flesh. Livers, stomachs, diaphragms, windpipes, kidneys, elbows, gallstones, bunions, tongues, ovaries, fingers, wombs, eyes, pinky toes, bellybuttons, and hearts, it all went up in flame. Little bits of the universe perished and we are still trying to understand what this means even today.

  Guth stood a few paces back and took notes, which was easy to do because the fire was so intense, so bright. Shadows danced around and sparks floated up until they mingled with the stars.

  The smoke was dark, like used motor oil, and granular ash swirled around everyone. Guth took off his cap and wiped sweat from his brow as the landscape baked in invisible waves of heat. The stars blurred as if underwater and a horrible crackling filled up the night as teeth exploded like popcorn. The sky became an ugly burnt copper and still the bodies continued to glow.

  “If you closed your eyes,” Dov Damiel said, “it sounded like rain, like heavy rain falling on a street.”

  In the interview there is a long pause. The camera pans in on Damiel’s face.

  “After the first day I worked the Roasts, I had trouble eating. I kept looking at my hands, these hands, and thinking about the dead I touched. Sometimes, sometimes I am eating an apple or pear today and I think of the dead. I see them as if it happened an hour ago. My hands, they have touched such horrible things.”

  Another pause. The camera comes in closer still.

  “At the Roasts it was impossible to take a breath and not also take in the atoms of the dead. Their ash and smoke went down my throat. They filled up my lungs and made me cough. They coated my tongue. I would spit, and I could taste them. How can human beings do such things to each other? I ask you. Where was God on these nights?”

  Among the SS that night was Heinrich Niemann, that giant of a man who beat Hanel Wallach for refusing to give up her son. He had already drained one bottle of vodka and he was on the prowl for more. His speech was slurred and he stumbled around as more bodies were dragged over to the fire. One new prisoner, someone who hadn’t yet gotten used to the casual brutality of Lubizec, moved slowly, too slowly. He held the corpse of a woman. He carried her body as if he were a groom ready to bring her across the threshold of a new life. Her body was slack in his arms, but he kept kissing her shaved head. It was his wife. They had been separated in the Rose Garden a few hours earlier and now, at the edge of the Roasts, he finally found her again. He stumbled forward with tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh my honeybee. My honeybee,” he said. The man walked up to the guards and began to sob. “How can you do this to her?”

  “I’ll show you,” Niemann said, and he pushed the man into the fire.

  A shriek lifted up as the man scrambled over the body of his wife. His clothes became a wick and he screeched and screeched as he pulled himself out of the pit. He ran like a torch towards the woods. The grass began to catch on fire and that’s when the SS got nervous because he might burn down the whole field. One of the guards aimed his pistol but missed because he was too drunk. There was another shot, but still the prisoner was screeching out in agony. A final shot hit home and the flaming body dropped. It stopped moving.

  Guth wrote something down in his ledger. The flames licked higher and higher as he nodded to the remaining bodies.

  “Faster,” he said. “Faster.”

  The moon swung in its tethered orbit across the sky and still the Roasts continued to burn.

  The four pits at Lubizec were rotated so that one of them was always in use. After one pile of beloved flesh was torched, the remains were allowed to cool until, like an old campfire with wisps of smoke coming off it, the ashy leftovers could be sifted. Prisoners scooped bucketfuls of debris and dumped them into giant sieves in order to find bones that needed extra attention. Guth wanted only ash left over—no bones. He was very clear about this. It was for this reason the prisoners used steel mallets to hammer down bits of skull, ribs, and femurs. Pelvis bones had to be pounded down because they were so dense. The prisoners used an anvil and they pulverized the remains until there was nothing left but dust. Occasionally they found a diamond that had been swallowed by a victim in the wild hope it might remain hidden in their stomach, but such things were always found during the sifting process. In this way, nothing was allowed to escape Lubizec. Nothing.

  When the ash was so fine it looked like it had been tipped out of a cigarette tray, only then was it carted away in a dump truck. The powder was scattered into a pond. Thousands upon thousands of lives were reduced to nothing more than dust flittering down through water. Whole generations coated the rocks at the bottom. Algae turned gray because there was so much ash, but this too was about to change, especially when Guth realized the cremains could be used as fertilizer. He sold ash to local farmers (not telling them what it was) and he invested the money back into the camp itself. He got potbelly stoves because winter was on its way and he didn’t want his guards to get cold. He also bought them a movie projector and a ping-pong table.

  Dov Damiel, Chaim Zischer, and the other prisoners watched all of this in numb horror and vowed to tell the world about it somehow, someday. What they couldn’t have known is that their lives were about to take a strange new turn.

  Things at Lubizec were finally about to change.

  *Aside from a failure of language, there is also the problem of wanting to visualize the Roasts. Who wants such images in their head? Burning thousands of bodies a night is too grotesque, too obscene, too off putting. It is an assault on our sense of goodness and decency. Even though the story of the Roasts needs to be in a book like this, we instinctively want to turn away and shield our souls from such things. However, it is important to remember that massive outdoor cremations happened every night at death camps like Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. It was standard operating procedure. What follows is an accurate portrayal of how thousands of bodies were turned into dust. But how are we to reckon with such things? How?

  10

  OLD SHATTERHAND

  In Jasmine’s unpublished diary, she writes about Berlin before the war and how the shops were always packed with people, how cafés on Unter den Linden stayed open until sunrise, and how everyone strolled around the parks at dusk. Cigarettes and pipes flared to life in the growing darkness. She enjoyed watching blue sparks fly off the trolley cars and she especially enjoyed shopping with friends and ending up at some wild party in the back of a restaurant. True, she didn’t miss hearing gunshots in the middle of the night, nor did she miss covering the phone with a heavy blanket when it wasn’t in use; there were rumors buzzing around of men planting de
vices in phones and, because of this, you had to be careful about what you said in your own home. Of course she never said a bad word about the Party, but it was still alarming to think that another ear might be listening into your conversation. And whenever the SA had yet another parade down the street, you had to stop and give the Hitler salute or risk being beaten.

  These however were just tiny annoyances and Jasmine was mostly delighted with “the New Germany,” as she called it. She liked how blackened swastikas marched down the street in huge banners of red and she also liked how her country—her country—was becoming a world power once again. She particularly enjoyed the 1936 Olympics and how the city was buffed clean for tourists who came from Europe, America, and Asia. It was nice to have them in Berlin but, since they weren’t exactly German, it was equally nice to watch them leave.*

  She believed Hitler was a great man and agreed with his policies about the Jews (“pests can’t live in our house,” she found herself saying at a party), although she couldn’t understand why some women went absolutely mad for Hitler. She saw delirious young women scoop up dirt he had recently walked upon and she saw them place it with trembling hands into metal containers. They kissed it as if it were a holy object. They cried. They wept. One woman pulled out clumps of her hair she was so ecstatic. He was a great man, yes, but it seemed a bit odd, a bit too much really, to treat him like a prophet or a demigod. The Führer was just a man—a man with wonderful ideas about Germany’s future to be sure, but a man nonetheless.

  Jasmine met Guth at a raucous, wild, over-the-top party on Unter den Linden and she was immediately drawn to his good looks and his SS uniform. She also liked how he couldn’t say where he worked. There was an air of mystery about him.

  “What do you do?” she asked while sipping a martini.

  “Reich’s business.”

  “What, though?”

  A slow smile. “Reich’s business.”

  They kept on talking until he kissed her wrist and placed his SS hat on her head. They went someplace even louder and then, after that, a place where champagne flowed and someone banged out bright tunes on a piano. There was an enormous swastika cake made out of marzipan and it was circled by huge wet strawberries, the largest ones Jasmine had ever seen. Trumpets blared out and women danced around with long strings of pearls. They talked until the sun came up and then stepped over people who had crashed out on the dance floor. They grabbed a bottle of champagne and moved out into the pale morning light. They held hands and walked along the river, where she wore his SS hat at a jaunty angle. She liked feeling his eyes on her when she looked away.

  When Guth was sent to Poland, it felt like they had been banished to some hinterland because there were no parties, no piano bars, and no new restaurants to discover. Lubizec was a tiny village in a dense forest of nothingness. It was like living on a lost continent. Oh sure, there were a few lakes to paddle around but it was dull and boring. Humdrum. Tedious. Try as she might, she just couldn’t understand why her husband had been exiled to such a dead place. What had he done wrong? Why was he running a transit camp for Jews?

  These are just some of the questions in Jasmine’s diary. She clearly enjoyed having a large home on a private lake, and she also enjoyed having a servant jump whenever she rang a little brass fingerbell, but in reading her choppy handwriting, it becomes clear that she was losing patience with both Guth’s evasiveness and her new station in life. She missed Berlin and her extended family. She missed the hustle-bustle. She also had a problem with state secrets driving a wedge between them and she wanted to discover the truth about Lubizec because, if she could just find out what was really going on, maybe she could use it as an excuse to go home.

  “This is the last straw,” she envisioned herself saying. “I’m going back to Berlin.”

  As the days ticked by, ideas boiled in her head. Did he really love her? Was he capable of sharing his life with her? Maybe he was having an affair? He sure didn’t seem very interested in her sexually any more.

  Although there are many reasons why she might have decided to find out about Lubizec once and for all, what we can say with absolute certainty is this: What she does on September 8, 1942, is both unexpected and startling. It will change her family.

  It began when she woke up and reached beneath the duvet for her husband. He wasn’t there (again) and his side of the bed was cold (again). As she dressed in front of the large bay window, turning this way and that to admire her reflection, she looked at the lake and found herself thinking about the camp. It was out there somewhere, like a dark magnet, and her eyes searched the treetops, wondering about it. The sky was hazy.

  She put on an old pair of hiking boots and moved down the grand wooden staircase, where she reached for a hunting cap. She twisted her bronze hair into a bun, went into the dining room, and began rummaging around in a drawer.

  Karl was busy playing with a tin model of Hitler. He placed the Führer in a shoe and pretended to drive him towards a frontline of matchboxes. Sigi was reading another book about Old Shatterhand, but when she saw her mother in a man’s cap and weeding through drawers for something, she used her finger as a bookmark and looked up.

  “Here they are,” Jasmine announced to herself. She slid a pair of opera glasses into a leather satchel and turned to the maid, who, at that moment, happened to be bringing in an armful of logs.

  Jasmine’s voice was stern and businesslike. “Watch the children for me, Malina. I’ll be gone for a few hours.”

  Sigi put down her book. “Can I come?”

  Jasmine kept speaking to the maid. “Don’t forget to clean the windows and get those apples cored.”

  The country girl let the logs tumble into an iron grate. Bits of bark fell on the carpet and she bent down to sweep them up.

  “Can I come?” Sigi asked again.

  “No,” Jasmine said, without looking at her. The air curdled as she moved down the dark hallway and slammed the front door. A string of decorative bells jiggled into silence.

  Sigi touched an eyelet on her hiking boot. Why was her mother dressed so strangely and how come she needed opera glasses? What would Old Shatterhand do if he saw such a thing?

  Without thinking about it, Sigi tied her laces and slipped out the front door so quietly the bells hardly jiggled. At the far end of the cinder driveway, her mother was pushing into the woods.

  Sigi followed. She ran on her tiptoes like an Indian scout.

  Sunlight got caught in a cathedral of branches. It was murky and Jasmine threaded her way through the trunks, stopping now and then to look at a compass. Her feet stepped around pinecones and large stones. She knew roughly where the camp was supposed to be and she decided to circle around to the north. It was dangerous to approach Lubizec and she was reminded of this when she saw a large wooden sign nailed to a tree. It had a skull on it along with the words, DANGER! REICH ZONE OF INTEREST. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT! The angry eyesockets of the skull made Jasmine look around.

  She thought about turning around but what purpose would that serve? She would only be back where she started, and if she told her husband she was coming to see the camp, he’d only try to stop her. No, it was best to approach the camp and pull out her opera glasses. She’d get close enough for a quick peek and then run home. If it was a transit camp she could put the matter to rest, but if it wasn’t a transit camp—if it was something else—well—she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Jasmine studied the skull for a long moment and wondered if the guards would really shoot her. There were so many trees around it seemed impossible that a bullet could hit her from a long distance, but it was still an ugly thought. It made her shudder. What would it be like to have metal come through your chest?

  She looked at her hiking boots and rolled a pinecone beneath her toe.

  A robin sang from somewhere overhead and, in that moment of gentle peace, she stepped over an invisible line. She put one foot in front of the other and moved beyond the wooden sign.
It felt like she was crossing a border.

  It was strange to look at the ground for twigs that might snap beneath her weight, and it was stranger still to wonder if her sternum was in the crosshairs of a riflescope, but she took off her cap and let down her long curly hair. It tumbled over her shoulders. Cobwebs would get caught in the strands but surely they wouldn’t shoot a woman, especially not a good German woman with bronze hair and blue eyes. They’d see that in a riflescope surely.

  Jasmine kept walking. Slowly. Carefully. Watchfully.

  When she slapped a mosquito, the sound seemed too loud, too noisy, but she didn’t like the idea of a bloodsucking needle sinking into her skin.

  “My God,” she whispered. “I left Berlin for this?”

  The little compass needle bobbled in her hand as she walked to the northwest. A terrible smell clawed at the back of her throat—it was campfire and something else—bacon fat—rancid butter—burnt fish. She covered her mouth and kept on moving through matted leaves and twigs. Shafts of sunlight pierced the air and the wind whooshed overhead, making the branches creak. There was another sign, one that had the twin lightning bolts of the SS. It read, in white paint, RETREAT OR DIE.

  An engine was running up ahead. It sounded like someone was using a gigantic typewriter. It revved into a higher gear and a whiff of gasoline floated on the wind.

  She stepped closer. It felt like she was on a tightrope. Gently, gently. One step, another step. Easy now.

  She saw a wall of barbed wire and every hundred meters or so there was a guard tower. Each one stood on four legs and the guards had machine guns slung over their shoulders as if they were backpacks. Each tower had a searchlight. A sharp terror made Jasmine’s muscles coil into hyperawareness and every atom in her body felt like it was being pulled away from the camp, like some kind of magnetism tugged at her to run away, but slowly, very slowly, she crouched down and lay behind a tree. The wind rocked the leaves overhead and the engine—wherever it was—continued to thrum. Cicadas were screaming up ahead.