—Hermann Göring, Reich Marshall, letter to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941
As an old National Socialist, I must state that if the Jewish clan were to survive the war in Europe, while we sacrificed our best blood in the defense of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success. With respect to the Jews, therefore, I will only operate on the assumption that they will disappear. […] We must exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.
—Hans Frank, Governor-General of the General Government (occupied Poland), addressing senior officials in Kraków, December 16, 1941
A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy, which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war, is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. [.] Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied to us in peacetime.
—Josef Goebbels, Reich Minster of Propaganda, diary entry, March 27, 1942
Members of the SS must apply one principle unreservedly: be honest, decent, loyal and true to those of your own blood. And to no one else. The fate of the Russians and Czechs is completely inconsequential to me. We shall tap the good German blood which is among those peoples, we shall obtain it by stealing children, if necessary, and we shall bring them up in Germany. Whether other peoples flourish or die of hunger interests me for only one reason: we need them as slaves for our culture. We Germans, who are the only people on earth who treat animals decently, shall also display this trait when dealing with human animals.
I would like to be frank with you about another serious issue. I am referring to the evacuations of the Jews—the liquidation of the Jewish people—it’s one of those things people talk about casually. “The Jews will be exterminated,” every Party member says. “It’s in our program: elimination of the Jews. Fine. Let’s go ahead and do it. A small matter.” But then they turn up, these 80 million honest Germans, each with a respectable Jew, and they say, “All the others are pigs but this here is a fine Jew.”
But none of them has witnessed or endured it.
Most of you know what a pile of 100 corpses looks like or what a pile of 500 or 1,000 corpses looks like. I believe having gone through this and, at the same time, maintained our decency, has hardened us. Moreover, it is an unnamed chapter which shall remain forever unspoken about in our history.
—Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS Poznan, Poland, October 4, 1943
Large Metal Sign at Lubizec:
WELCOME
In order to avoid sickness you must present your clothing and all belongings for disinfection. Gold, money (including ALL foreign currency), jewelry, and photographs should be given over for deposit. Cleanliness and truthfulness in this transit camp is everyone’s business!
Example of Train Schedule:
From: Reich Railways, Department 33
P Kr 9021, (December 15, 1942), Lublin – Lubizec
Destination Arrival/Departure
Lublin 09:37
Zabia Wola 10:02/10:28
Osowa 11:56/12:57
Bychawa 15:31/21:13
Krasnik 23:31/09:47
Aleksandrówka 10:52/06:45
Lubizec 08:00/(08:42)
Train Composition: 1 engine, 15 cars
Camp Dimensions: Lubizec:
A large upturned rectangle measuring 275 meters on the northern and southern boundaries with the eastern and western boundaries measuring 600 meters; the camp was bisected across the middle with a fence camouflaged by tree branches, thus separating Camp I and Camp II. Barbed-wire fencing (non-electrified) surrounded the entire grounds as did a “moat” of anti-personnel landmines commandeered from the defeated Polish army.
Four watchtowers, one at each corner of the camp, and two additional towers in the middle of the eastern and western boundaries respectively. Each tower had one guard armed with an MG 34 air-cooled 7.92 mm machine gun as well as a Sauer 38H semi-automatic pistol. Searchlights affixed to the towers were turned on at dusk. A seventh tower was in the middle of the camp and it overlooked the so-called Himmelstraße (Road to Heaven). The central tower had two guards armed with MG 34s. A radio played folk music from a loudspeaker.
Gas chambers were located in Camp II. It was the only brick building in Lubizec and it had four chambers that held 250 to 300 victims each. Carbon monoxide from a captured Soviet tank engine was installed on a concrete pad; fumes were fed into these chambers by way of steel piping. The more tightly packed in the victims, the more lethal the fumes. A generator attached to the engine supplied electricity to the entire camp.
Four burning pits were located on the northern end of Camp II. They measured 10 meters by 50 meters by 2 meters. Ash was sold to farmers as fertilizer.
Camp Personnel of Importance: Lubizec:
SS Unterscharführer Gustav Wagner
SS Unterscharführer Michael Hustek
SS Unterscharführer Kurt Hackenhold
SS Unterscharführer Christian Schwartz
SS Unterscharführer Sebastian Schemise
SS Unterscharführer Rudolf Oberhauser
SS Unterscharführer Peter “Birdie” Franz
SS Oberscharführer Heinrich Niemann
SS Obersturmführer Hans-Peter Guth (commandant after May 1942)
To: SS Hauptsturmführer Odilo Globocnik
From: SS Obersturmführer Hans-Peter Guth
Date: 28 November 1942
Dear Globus,
I write today in the hope of bringing a new matter to light about the special treatment rooms in Camp II of Lubizec. After a shipment arrives it can be processed at a fair rate of speed. It has come to my attention that further refinement of methods can yet be accomplished. I recommend all facilities have a lightbulb placed in the middle because when the doors are screwed shut and sudden darkness fills the facility this brings about panic. If a light were to remain on during the processing, the noise might be lessened.
Might I also recommend that all future facilities have larger drains installed in the floor? After processing, waste materials make cleanup a challenge and therefore a problem of time management. A larger drain and more powerful hoses will allow for faster cleaning. This means faster turnaround and an increase in production.
I look forward to having a meal with you in Lublin when we meet again.
Heil Hitler!
Hans-Peter Guth
Plunder:
suitcases, purses, knives, scissors, watches, pencils, razors, hats, underwear, scarves, earrings, enamel pots, dice, belts, combs, necklaces, slide rulers, bracelets, wallets, lipstick, toothbrushes, raincoats, pendants, bibs, diapers, mallets, diplomas, kiddush cups, wedding announcements, cufflinks, ties, crutches, newspaper clippings, screwdrivers, tweezers, herbs, chess sets, apples, cigarettes, gin, antlers, drapes, pliers, boiled eggs, shtreimels, typewriters, tape measures, yarmulkes, stamps, monocles, evaporated milk, nylons, diaries, mezuzahs, coal, perfume, onions, fingernail clippers, records, shoehorns, prams, brassieres, marmalade, aspirin, sweaters, teacups, pacifiers, wooden toys, tefillins, identity cards, French francs, Polish zlotys, U.S. dollars, British pounds, Russian rubles, potatoes, flashlights, suspenders, sewing kits, jars of dirt, whiskey, diamonds, chocolate, fountain pens, copper wire, stale bread, syringes, fishing poles, salami, bologna, mascara, hammers, blotting paper, compasses, Star of David armbands, powder puffs, ice bags, tobacco boxes, cameras, hairpins, artist brushes, aprons, needles, mirrors, alarm clocks, bandages, sardines, house keys, vials of poison (used), thimbles, birth certificates, gloves, candles, skillets, violins, pillows, blankets, yarn, coins, flour, ink, canes, soap, seeds, pearls, oboes, turnips, corsets, socks, rings, marbles, pipes, rakes, furs, books, vests, maps, kettles, oats, dentures, dolls, photo albums, sugar, and love letters.
Number of eyeglasses: approx. 323,500
Artificial limbs: approx. 14,500 wooden l
egs and 57,000 leg braces
Total weight of clothes gathered at Lubizec: 8,875 tons
Total weight of hair gathered at Lubizec: unknown
Death count: 710,000 (estimated)
Survivors: 43
15
GAS AND BURN
Chaim Zischer was one of the forty-three survivors. As a young boy growing up in Lublin he was unusually smart and enjoyed reading the Talmud. There was serious talk of him going to the Academy of Sages, and perhaps grander things waited for him in the future. He enjoyed strolling in the parks just south of town and he often leaned against an oak tree to admire the rise of the horizon or the green veins of a leaf. “Contemplative” was how his mother liked to describe him. He liked that word because it sounded grown-up and he imagined himself becoming a great thinker, perhaps becoming someone who lived in an empire of ideas and maybe, just maybe, people would come to him one day for advice. Maybe they would call him “wise.”
He met Nela when he was seventeen. It happened in a bakery when they were both reaching for the same pączki. It was a large crispy doughnut with raspberry filling and when their hands nearly touched beneath the glass they both laughed. He said it was hers, and she said it was his, and then they both reached for it again, which made them laugh even harder. She had bright hazelnut eyes and her smile filled up the whole bakery—it was like July sunshine. In the end he said “I’ll buy you the pączki” and she said “Let’s share it on a bench outside Maharam’s Synagogue.” So they walked down the jostling street and talked about the weather and how much they liked that particular bakery and of course within five minutes they found out they knew many of the same people.
“How strange we’ve never met before,” she said, coming to a green iron bench.
Chaim opened the wax paper and tore the gooey pączki in half. He offered the larger chunk to Nela and watched her lean forward to bite it carefully. She covered her mouth with one hand and let out a little groan of happiness.
“Oh. So good. Oh, my goodness.”
A raspberry seed was stuck in her front teeth and this made Chaim laugh all the harder. The day was bright and warm and generous and it was so good to be alive, he thought.
An oboe played down the street and crowds bustled in a mighty flood of noise. The rush and burble of voices sounded like a river flowing over a rocky bed but he saw only her, he heard only her.
They were married a year later and he couldn’t believe she was standing under the wedding canopy with him, which acted as a symbol of the new house they were going to build together. She was in a modest white dress and there were so many people circled around them it felt like they were being crushed. Everyone was smiling and they kept on saying how it was an excellent match. And when he stomped on a wineglass wrapped in a linen towel everyone erupted into cheers. Mazel tov! Mazel tov! There was dancing and dancing and more dancing. Wine too. There was plenty of wine. And of course there was raspberry pączki for everyone.
A son was born sixteen months later and this pleased Zischer to the bone. He couldn’t have been happier. His boy, Jakob, came into the world on a cloudless winter night and Chaim paced the cobblestones below, smoking a pipe. He glanced up at the moon and wondered what was going on behind the locked door of the nursery. There was an awful lot of panting and screaming and grunting so he stayed outside with his father and his brothers. They talked about local politics as they walked up and down the snowy street, but his gaze kept creeping back to the candlelit window. The gas lamps around him flared like jailed ghosts. Snowflakes fluttered down.
When he was finally allowed inside, he took the steps two at a time. His son had bits of dried blood matted to his hair but Chaim didn’t care about this. He brought his son to his chest and kissed his pink new forehead. He silently asked God to give his son a long and healthy life. “May only goodness and beauty touch this child. May the world be gentle to him.”
When Chaim first heard about Nazism he thought it was a poison that rotted the mind and turned decent people into wolves. He also thought Germany would come to her senses and turn away from Adolf Hitler. The man was a crackpot. He was an evangelist of hate. Surely the Germans could see this?
Yes, he predicted, cooler heads would prevail. Just be patient. This Hitler has bitten the apple of power but people will soon turn away from him.
But when Poland was invaded in 1939, he knew Nazism was more than a passing political fad. It was something new and terrible. Tanks were soon chewing through wheatfields. They rumbled over low stone walls and swatted young trees to the ground. He watched columns of black-helmeted SS march into Lublin on September 18. They filed through Krakowska Gate and down the little cobblestone hill toward the castle. Their boots echoed off the medieval buildings in a terrifying stamping unison and he watched them march across the brick bridge into the castle where, an hour later, the flag of Poland was yanked down and a giant swastika was unfurled. It hung in the sky like a gash, and that’s when he knew his world was lost—that’s when he knew things would be different forever.
Posters were glued to shop fronts that ordered all Jews into a ghetto and this was followed by beatings, the closure of all twelve synagogues, and endless demands for money. Medical equipment was taken out of the Jewish hospital on Lubartowska Street and hardly a syringe or stethoscope was left behind to treat its hundreds of patients. Even the beds were stripped away. Many of the windows were broken out of spite.
Other things began to happen. If a German was strolling down the sidewalk it now meant everyone else had to walk in the gutter. Zischer saw a young boy—no more than ten or eleven years old—who didn’t get off the sidewalk quickly enough. A German officer pulled out his pistol, pushed the boy against the wall, and shot him. It was as fast as a car accident. One minute the boy was walking along and the next he was dead. It was shocking, yes, but what really haunted Zischer was the sound of it. There was a loud krumpf as the bullet cracked into the boy’s skull, like a melon being split open. Zischer stumbled away when he saw this and he went home to hold Jakob close to his chest. How could he protect his child from such wild beasts? The Germans were not men. They were animals dressed as soldiers. He kissed his son’s forehead and tried not to think about that sound, that splitting.
They lived in the ghetto for two years and he became resourceful at smuggling in bread and tinned goods from someone on the outside. Snow fell. The seasons changed. Random shootings and beatings continued to happen. The old were shot against brick walls. Children that had been newly orphaned begged in the street and people went around selling whatever they thought would make money—toffee, books, boiled eggs, candles, matches, Star of David armbands. One man walked around with a huge tray of sliced bread. It was covered with barbed wire to keep thieves from snatching a slice and running around a corner. Another sold milk by the glass. But there was never enough food in the ghetto. Stomachs rumbled and it became popular to talk about extravagant meals no one could possibly afford. Men and women dropped dead of hunger and people walked past their bodies, no longer horrified by the sight of death.
Somehow life carried on and underground theatres popped up. Music was played in backrooms and it was easy to delude yourself that everything was still normal. You could sip coffee at a table and talk with your friends as if you hadn’t a care in the world. The Star of David armbands became so commonplace that no one gave them a second thought and there were even times when Zischer walked around the ghetto, lost in a world of his own fanciful making. He imagined strolling the countryside and having a picnic. He twisted and turned down the streets with this pleasant image in his head when a wall suddenly appeared in front of him. Whenever this happened, he remembered that little boy being shot. The horrid realities of the ghetto immediately came rushing back and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, telling himself it would all be okay in the end.
Such moments of mental freedom happened to everyone in the ghetto but they were always interrupted by a brick wall, or a dead body, or the sight
of a Nazi strutting imperiously down the street, and in these horrible reawakenings to Hitler’s World, everything felt so much worse. Zischer ran up the steps to his small apartment and held his wife. They rocked their son and listened to the distant rattle of machine guns.
“We’ll be fine,” Nela said. “I don’t know how but we will.” She nodded, as if placing a period onto the sentence with her chin.
And then one morning, when the sun was hardly up, Zischer and his family were rounded up on Furmanska Street along with hundreds of others. The sky was an ugly sulfurous yellow when they were marched away under heavy guard. Guns crackled in the streets as motorcycles with sidecars revved around corners. Dogs snapped and barked. Near the sooty rail yards the air stank of coal and iron. Some of the men rocked back and forth, praying to God.
The journey to Lubizec lasted two days, and when they finally arrived he watched the commandant stand on a wooden box. It was raining slightly. There were travel posters on the walls. And then—
He had no words for what happened next.
One minute he had his arm around his wife and the next he was plucked from a running group of men because he looked strong and healthy. Of the 1,400 people that arrived into camp with him, he was the only survivor. He was the only one to be spared, and it happened when a guard ordered him to unpack suitcases while, one hundred meters away, his mother, father, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, his wife and his son, they were all shoved into the unknown. His whole world was snuffed out—Nela, Jakob—everyone—and it happened so fast. It only took thirty minutes to wipe out everything he knew and loved. Only thirty minutes.
Zischer was so stunned by the overwhelming scope of this crime that he kept looking around, waiting for the universe to stop it, but the rain kept falling down, and the wickedness was allowed to continue. Days passed, then weeks, and still the trains kept on coming. Clothes were dumped into ever higher piles of fabric and still the universe did nothing to stop the murders. He watched it all. It was like being handcuffed to devastation.
The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 15
