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

by Patrick Hicks

  She reached into her satchel and noticed that her hands were shaking. The ground was cold against her chest and she brought the opera glasses up to her face.

  So there it is, she almost said out loud.

  Everything was in a jerky circle of vision in her hands and she saw that the guards faced in, towards the camp, as if they were busy watching the inmates. They seemed more concerned with what happened inside Lubizec than what happened outside it. Maybe if they heard something in the woods, they’d assume it was a deer or a falling branch? Jasmine couldn’t be sure, but beyond the silvery threads of barbed wire, she noticed what looked like men running around in ratty shirts and trousers. Each of them dragged something slender and rubbery behind them. It was hard to see what they were tugging through the grass but each of them moved quickly and they dashed back to a large wooden shed in an endless circle of work.

  She lowered the glasses.

  Jasmine breathed heavily and thought about running away, but if she did that now she wouldn’t be any wiser about what lay beyond the barbed wire. Was it a transit camp or a prison?

  She brought the glasses back up to her eyes and studied the guards. They still had their backs to her.

  Good, she thought. Good.

  Barbed wire had been coiled around the ancient trees and the entire perimeter of the camp was made up of living trunks rather than posts that had been pounded into the ground. It must have been her husband’s idea. It had his hallmark because it was so practical, so handy. Why put in huge wooden posts when barbed wire can just be wrapped around existing trees?

  She also noticed a sign, and what it said made her blood turn cold.

  DANGER MINEFIELD.

  She looked at the ground beneath her rib cage and wondered if explosives were hidden in the earth. Was she lying on something right now? If she stood up, what would happen?

  She searched for signs of digging—little mounds of dirt or disturbed pine needles—anything—because if she rolled over or stood up or coughed, maybe something a few centimeters down in the earth would click and this would send wet pieces of her body flying up into the trees.

  As she thought about these unpleasant things and carried on a mental conversation with herself about how stupid she was, one of the guards began yelling. He was in a dark uniform and he ran across the field with a rubber truncheon. He began beating one of the prisoners and the man let out a terrible scream. The rod became a blur as he beat the man harder and harder. Spouts of red flew into the air. The other prisoners kept on dragging their loads but Jasmine still couldn’t tell what they were pulling. Sandbags maybe?

  She looked at the face of the guard through her opera glasses and recognized him as Heinrich Niemann. He came to the Villa one evening for dinner and made crude jokes all night long. He swilled two bottles of red wine and stuffed massive forkfuls of sausage and potato into his mouth. She made the mistake of wearing a low-cut dress that evening and whenever she bent over for anything he stared at her breasts.

  “He’s a good soldier,” Guth later said.

  And now this good soldier was cleaning his rubber truncheon with the hat of the man he had just beaten. He stopped to light a cigarette and looked out at the trees. Jasmine froze. She didn’t drop the opera glasses or make any sudden movements because she didn’t want to draw his attention. Niemann blew smoke out of his nose, dragonlike. From somewhere inside the camp a pistol went off. There was another shot. Niemann twirled his shoulder as if he were working out a kink or a sore muscle and he strolled away, blowing plumes of smoke into the air.

  Jasmine sighed with relief and turned to the other prisoners. What on earth were they tugging across the grass? It looked like—

  She lowered her opera glasses and felt something icy crawl up her spine. Slowly, almost against her will, she brought the glasses back up to her face.

  The bodies were naked, many of them were bruised, and the women didn’t have any hair. She didn’t understand any of it. She squinted at what she thought was a huge pile of wood and let her eyes refocus. It was—arms, legs, heads, feet—it was a compressed jigsaw puzzle of flesh. A truck appeared from around the corner and, as it bumped over the uneven ground, sheets of ash flickered down. The wind caught this fine powder and it drifted away.

  Her heart filled up with magma when she thought about her husband coming home with his fabricated stories about this place being a transit camp. She didn’t know what was happening in Lubizec but she knew this much: He had lied once again.

  Jasmine became a capped geyser of heat and she wanted to run away from the camp as fast as she could, not because she was disgusted by a truckload of human ash or the sight of prisoners being beaten, but because she was furious with her husband. Before we address this monumental failure of empathy, it needs to be said that something happened in that moment which made Jasmine wide eyed with terror. There was a loud crack behind her and she turned towards the noise.

  Was it a guard? A falling branch?

  Her eyes moved back and forth. She didn’t see anything. And then Sigi stepped out from behind a birch tree and tiptoed forward as if she were in an adventure story. She carried a stick and looked around as if she were hunting bears. Jasmine wanted to run to her daughter but she glanced at the guard towers. She also thought about that sign, the one that read, DANGER MINEFIELD. She stood up, slowly. She waved an arm, which caught Sigi’s attention, and the girl in hiking boots stopped walking.

  Time became a syrup that Jasmine had to wade through as she crept for her daughter. She expected a bullet to flash through the air at any moment or maybe there would be a tremendous eruption of dirt and her daughter would be blasted up into the trees. It crossed her mind that if they were spotted by the guards, maybe she could raise her arms and say that she was Guth’s wife. Could she yell such a thing before they started shooting with their machine guns?

  When she finally reached Sigi they tiptoed through the dense trees, and when they were far enough away from the camp, they broke into a mad run. Their legs pumped hard and they gulped in air. Jasmine pulled Sigi up a muddy hill and they slid down the other side. Leaves got stuck in their hair. Burrs attached to their trousers. They jumped over small rocks and scratched their arms on thorny bushes. They ran and ran and ran until they reached a golden wheat-field. Only then did they stop.

  They bent over and grabbed their kneecaps. They panted. The sun felt good on their skin as they wheezed in air.

  The fear inside Jasmine crystallized into anger and she slapped her daughter across the face. Hard. “That was stupid to follow me.”

  Sigi nodded, surprised that she had been hit. She rubbed her cheek and backed away.

  They began walking down a dirt road and the sound of their boots fell into a steady rhythm. Dust floated up from their heels. They examined the nicks and cuts on their forearms.

  When they reached a little vegetable market, Jasmine added, “You’ve been reading too many of those damn adventure novels.”

  Sigi nodded.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”

  “You went.”

  Jasmine stopped walking. “I’m the adult here and I had my reasons.” She pointed a finger at her daughter. “Don’t go near that place again. You hear me?”

  There was a nod and they continued down the sun-drenched dirt road towards home. It was a beautiful afternoon, the farmers were in the fields, and soon Jasmine and Sigi turned up the long cinder driveway for their house. Lilac bushes lined the way and a bee hummed through the air, its wings moving so fast it looked like a bead of water was boiling on its back.

  Jasmine patted her trousers and realized—“Damn it”—she’d dropped the opera glasses and her hat somewhere.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jasmine’s voice was soft. “Nothing. Everything’s fine now. I’m, I’m sorry I slapped you. That was wrong of me.”

  They went inside and called out to Malina, the maid, for some blueberry juice. Sigi kicked off her hiking boots and w
alked down the hallway, dragging her fingertips against the oak walls as she went. The patio door was open and a breeze lifted the curtains. They billowed like sails.

  Sigi flopped into a chair and reached for Old Shatterhand. She tugged out a leather bookmark that was embossed with the word, Jungmädelbund. Seeing it, Jasmine remembered how much Sigi enjoyed her meetings back in Berlin. The “Young Girls League” met twice a week and it was associated with the Hitler Youth. They wore long black dresses, white shirts, and they had kerchiefs with an enamel swastika pin. Most of the girls had pigtails and they went on long hikes in the woods. They sang songs. It made Jasmine miss Berlin all the more. She strolled over to the bookcase and pulled out a souvenir program for the 1936 Olympic Games.

  Mother and daughter sat like that for a few minutes, each absorbed in a world they would rather live in.

  Jasmine looked at the book in her daughter’s hands. Old Shatterhand wore a bearskin robe and stood on a plateau that overlooked a thickly treed valley. In the distance, smoke threaded its way up to the sky. Old Shatterhand seemed to be saying to the reader, Let’s go into the woods. Let’s explore.

  “Listen to me,” Jasmine said. “I don’t want you going near that camp again. In fact, I don’t want you leaving this house without asking me.”

  Sigi rolled her eyes but when she saw the look on her mother’s face, she nodded.

  Malina came in with two glasses of blueberry juice but Jasmine waved off her glass and went to the drinks cabinet instead. She poured herself a three-fingered brandy and sat near the fireplace. Her mind wandered back to Berlin. She thought about the blue sparks flying off trolley cars, and busy cafés, and cute shops full of interesting people. There was so much to do, so much to see.

  She looked down at her wedding ring. It suddenly felt heavy and tight.

  *Of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Jasmine writes in her diary that the “American black, Jesse Owens, stole 4 gold medals from us in the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4×100 meter relay. It’s unfair. You might as well have deer or gazelle on your team.”

  11

  WHILE OTHERS STEP INTO THE DARKNESS

  Guth didn’t come home that night even though Jasmine waited up and looked through old photos of happier times. The moon was a pale coin in the sky as she sipped brandy and seltzer water. She wasn’t drunk, but she was mellow. The kids had been tucked into bed ages ago and Jasmine sat in a frilly pink nightgown carrying on an imaginary conversation with her husband. She used words like marriage and trust and together. At no time did she gaze out the window and look at a sky stained dark orange with fire. It had become so commonplace that she merely lit some lavender candles out of habit and went back to her photos.

  “Transit camp,” she grunted.

  She slapped the album shut and stared at her painted toenails. Now what? she wondered.

  Malina was already preparing a breakfast of fruit and yoghurt when Jasmine came downstairs the next morning. The stove needed a good cleaning and she ordered the young woman to scrub it “until it shined like a mirror.” Jasmine then went into the front hallway for the telephone. Her shoes clicked on the wooden floor as she picked up the black receiver. The cord was twisted. She dialed her husband’s number and heard the phone ring once, twice, three times.

  “Guth here.”

  She had been practicing the speech all morning and the words just poured out like a faucet. Her voice was clear and she nodded at the end of each sentence.

  “Listen to what I am about to say, Hans. I am going to drive to your camp. I will be there in five minutes. I would appreciate it if your guards did not shoot me. I will honk the horn as I approach.” She took a sharp breath and enjoyed taking the power back. She added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ll be there soon. We need to talk.”

  She hung up before he could answer.

  Jasmine pinned a red hat to her hair and shut the door, gently. The phone rang from inside the house but she marched across the cinder driveway and got into her Mercedes. She adjusted the rearview mirror and watched a plume of blue exhaust lift up. The steering wheel felt good in her hands (it gave her power and direction) and when she pressed on the gas pedal, tiny stones pinged off the undercarriage.

  She drove past the village church and the old ladies selling their vegetables. Horses clopped through town and groups of men waited at the train station in huddled black forms. Swastikas dripped down the front of a library and she climbed a low hill towards the camp. A wooden sign announced she was entering a REICH ZONE OF INTEREST but there were no guards on duty and the little dirt road bumped along through a haze of honeyed light. The morning sun stumbled through the trees.

  She didn’t slow down and she didn’t care if the shocks were damaged on the chassis. It felt good to hit potholes at full speed and to feel the ruts grab ahold of the steering wheel. The car bounced along, enormous clouds of dust lifted up behind her, and when a corner came she took it sharply—it gave her a thrill to feel the back end slide out—but she righted the car just in time and began practicing the second part of her speech. Murmured words came to her as she glanced at herself in the rearview mirror.

  There was something up ahead and she took her foot off the gas.

  “What’s this?”

  It was another Mercedes parked sideways in the road, forcing her to stop. Her husband was leaning against the front fender and smoking a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world. Two tiny swastika flags were on the chrome headlamps and the whole car was buffed to a high black shine. When her tires finally stopped rolling, he flicked his cigarette on the dirt road and came towards her with open arms.

  “Darling,” he said.

  He wore a silver wristwatch that she’d never seen before and his hair was cut much shorter than usual. Although there were bags under his eyes he looked alert and awake. When he kissed her on the cheek she could smell coffee on his breath.

  “What a nice surprise,” he added. “Sorry I’ve been so busy at work.”

  He lit yet another cigarette and seemed like an actor playing a part. There was something uncanny about him because he was her husband and yet, at the same time, he wasn’t quite the man she married. Being this close to the camp made him somehow different, somehow changed. Metamorphosed. He glided on power and spoke to her like a king speaking to his court.

  “While it’s good to see you darling, turn that car of yours around and go home,” he said shooing her away. “You can’t be here. We’ve talked about this.”

  Two gunshots came from the woods. She glanced at the noise but Guth never took his eyes off her.

  “Darling. Did you hear me?”

  She kept looking into the trees.

  “Jasmine.”

  The sound of her name brought her back to the dirt road and she felt pebbly stones beneath her heels. She took a step forward and let the memorized lines of her speech roll off her tongue.

  “You lied to me again, Hans. That’s no transit camp. You’re burning people in there.”

  “No. We’re burning Jews in there.”

  “You need to—”

  “My dear, this place doesn’t officially exist. Do you understand what I’m saying? You don’t get to drive up for a visit and you definitely do not get to ask me about it. What happens here can never be known to the outside world. And that … includes … you.” His eyes narrowed to slits. He stared at her and then added, with a smile, “Now get into your car and drive home. This place is beyond you.”

  We want Jasmine to be outraged that her husband is killing people on an industrialized scale, but instead she is angry that Guth is totally disinterested in the two of them being a married couple. She wants a shared life but he is distant, aloof, and slippery. While she may have qualms about “burning people” in Lubizec and perhaps she is a little nervous about how the place has changed him, her anti-Semitism blots out any possibility that a monstrous crime is being committed. We should note that it isn’t the killing that bothers her—it’s the burnin
g of corpses. How the corpses came into existence hasn’t crossed her mind yet. This is why she can say, “You’re burning people in there” and not, “You’re killing people in there.” It is an alarming gap in her thinking.

  We only know about this conversation because of her unpublished diary. In it, her words are choppy and full of exclamation points. She is angry that Guth didn’t mention his mother’s death in the air raid sooner, and we also learn about her frustration that she is “marooned in terrible Poland!!!”

  At no time does she wonder about the thousands of people murdered at Lubizec, and this makes reading Jasmine’s diary obscene. She outlines her confrontation with Guth in great detail, yet we know little about what happened in Lubizec during this same period of time. Put another way, we have a very clear picture of September 8 and 9, 1942, but it focuses exclusively on a rocky marriage. Of the estimated 6,200 souls that were murdered during this same forty-eight-hour period of time, we have nothing. It is a blank. While thousands of others stepped into the darkness, Guth and Jasmine quarreled, and it is this quarrel that takes up space when we consider September 8 and 9 in the history of the camp. This is the banality of genocide: that everyday life is allowed to go on and murder becomes just background scenery.

  As Jasmine states in her diary, she stared at Guth for “a long hard time on that road until he blurred into double vision.”

  Her husband eventually turned away and reached for something in the backseat of his car.

  “Presents for the kids,” he said, pulling out a child’s suitcase. He came over and placed it on the hood of her car. The latches sprang open and he pulled out a toy airplane, a dented gold bracelet, and a camera.

  “Where’d you get this stuff?”

  Guth shrugged as if to say, It dropped into my lap. He leaned in to kiss her but she stepped back.