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

by Patrick Hicks

  Sometimes it didn’t seem possible that Nela was really dead. Maybe he imagined it all? Maybe she was somewhere back in Lublin with Jakob and it was all just a bad dream? But there were other times, especially when he saw the Roasts being lit at night or when he saw a toddler with black hair, then he knew that her ashes, and the ashes of his boy, were scattered somewhere in the fields.

  As Zischer makes painfully clear in his memoir, the first three days at Lubizec were the worst, and if we are to understand what happened next in the history of the camp, we first need to understand what it meant to be a prisoner. Zischer’s account is generally considered to be the best and he says it was possible to look at new prisoners and tell if they would last more than twenty-four hours at Lubizec.

  “It became a sixth sense to us,” he said during one interview. “There was a vacancy in their eyes. They looked right through you.”

  He goes on to explain how one such prisoner, a Hasidic Jew from some remote corner of Poland, had been plucked from a new transport. His forelocks and beard were snipped by the guards and he was told that his entire family (indeed, his whole village) had been gassed. He was then forced to carry their bodies to the Roasts. It was nearly midnight before this man was whipped back to Barrack 14. He took a bunk near Zischer and began to wail. He rocked back and forth, reciting the Kaddish in great broken sobs. The other prisoners told him to shut up before the SS came in to beat them silly, but this man kept on weeping and rocking.

  He shouted out, “May his great name grow exalted and sanctified in the world he created as he willed.”

  Another prisoner—a man with sharp features and a huge Adam’s apple—was slapping mosquitoes when he heard this. He threw a shoe at him.

  “Why are you reciting the Kaddish, idiot? Look around. Does it look like God lives in this place?”

  The weeping man paused for a moment. His eyes were bloodshot and full of tears.

  The prisoner who threw the shoe continued slapping mosquitoes. He held up something between his fingertips.

  “Do you see this? This is what we are in Lubizec. Bugs. Pests. Something to be thrown into the fire. Now stop your weeping and your prayers. We all need sleep.”

  “Hey,” someone laughed a few bunks down. “Do you know why God isn’t in Lubizec?”

  It was an old joke, so another voice called out the answer. “God isn’t in Lubizec because he ran up the Road to Heaven.”

  The new prisoner stared at the dirt floor. His voice was weak. “They made me touch the dead. I carried my own daughter to a gigantic fire. My own daughter.” He began to murmur again. “May his great name grow exalted and sanctified in the world he created as he willed.”

  “Shut up,” another prisoner shouted. “There’ll be more trains tomorrow and we need our rest.”

  “More trains?”

  “Plenty more. They’re killing all the Jews of Poland in this place. Now go to sleep.”

  The new prisoner hugged his knees. He continued rocking back and forth. A searchlight roved across the barrack window and this cast eerie shadows on the floor. When it moved away, the shattered man began to sing a new prayer. The other prisoners did not interrupt him.

  Remember the promise You made to Your servant for it has given me hope,

  even as I am humiliated by those who mock You.

  From the teaching of Your Torah I have not strayed.

  From the teaching of Your Torah I have not strayed.

  And then this man who witnessed the destruction of his family, and his village, and his entire way of life, fell into a deep silence. Sometime during the night, he hanged himself with a belt.

  Zischer quickly realized that Lubizec could be boiled down to one simple and undeniable truth: the day was for killing, the night was for burning. The guards called it “Gas and Burn.” It was as reliable as gravity. It was fixed, permanent, and habitual.

  The day started at 0600 hours when folk music blared out from the central tower and a single guard came into the barracks with a rubber hose. He beat it against the wooden bunk beds and yelled out, “Antreten zum Appell. Antreten!” (Fall in for roll call. Fall in!)

  He walked across the dirt floor and smacked his hose against the bunks.

  “Antreten! Antreten!”

  The prisoners spilled out of their barracks and assembled in the Rose Garden where other guards walked the perimeter and smoked cigarettes. Many of them yawned. Some munched on bread or they held steaming cups of coffee. A jaunty tuba sounded from the central loudspeaker and it conjured up images of a beer hall. It made Chaim Zischer think of lederhosen, long tables, and mustardy, greasy bratwurst. Sometimes he could almost taste the fatty seasoned beef juice running down his chin.

  “Antreten! Antreten!”

  The polka music blasted out as three hundred prisoners ran into the sandy parade ground. When they were all standing at attention and panting heavily, the guards ordered a small group of them to collect the buckets of shit and piss that acted as toilets. They also brought out the dead. No one was allowed to move or speak as the ragged limp corpses were dragged by their legs and heaved into a wooden cart. Many bodies had a belt around their neck because they had decided to hang themselves from the low rafters inside the barracks.*

  Zischer stood at attention with his hands on the seams of his trousers. He always tried to be in the center of the parade ground because it meant being farther away from the guards. Men on the edges were often hit, but being in the middle offered some degree of protection.

  Zischer stood there—ramrod straight, cap off, chest out—and he watched leaves skitter across the parade ground. They blew in from under the fence, they flipped and tumbled and danced across the sandy ground, and they slipped away beneath the opposite fence. They were free. Bewilderingly free. A rooster sang out in some nearby field. Surely, Zischer thought, that farmer could hear the folk music, the gunshots, and the screaming. Who was this man that lived so close to a portal of death and was able to turn away from it? How did he get on with his day? Zischer hated this Polish farmer living so close to the camp. It was a pure hatred, more pure even than what he felt for the Nazis, because this Pole was a fellow countryman and he was doing absolutely nothing to help. Zischer hated this man down to the marrow in his bones.

  Breakfast was served at a long wooden table held together by rusty nails and they had to file past “Quickly! Quickly!” in order to get their rations. They got a crust of rye bread, some thin oatmeal, and a cup of coffee that tasted suspiciously like dishwater. The metal ladle clicked and clacked against an enormous soup pot as the prisoners filed past, one by one. Coffee was slopped into cups while the guards yelled, “Schneller. Schneller.” Still the ladle clicked at a furious pace.

  “Schneller. Schneller.”

  Through Zischer we gain a deeper appreciation of what it might have been like to be a prisoner at Lubizec. All of the official documents, train schedules, and interrogative army interviews with camp guards offer us strong historical information but we would be wise to remember that these are Nazi sources. Zischer describes what it was like to watch people run down the Road to Heaven with truncheons and whips flailing at their naked bodies. He witnessed the sandy path covered in blood and diarrhea. He watched one group of prisoners rake the sand while another group furiously applied white paint to the walls.

  “They did this to cover up the spatter,” Zischer said in 1985. “The whole thing was magic. One minute you see people and the next you see corpses. It was hocus-pocus.”

  Thanks to Zischer we know about moments in camp that would have vanished into time and never been known about by anyone. We know, for example, that the guards liked to see how many people they could cram into a single chamber. We also know the steel doors were lined with green felt in order to keep the poison from leaking out. We know that Rudolf Oberhauser yelled out the phrase “Time to die” shortly before the carbon monoxide was pumped in. The inflection in his voice was always the same, almost like a song he liked to sing at a be
er hall. “Time to diiieeee.”

  Zischer mentions, in stark clinical terms, how the gas chamber had to be mopped out after each use because the floor was smeared with blood, feces, and urine. A fresh coat of paint was applied to the walls to hide the awfulness of what had just been done. To struggle for air, even for a few moments, as some of us have done for one reason or another, is terrifying enough, but most of the victims at Lubizec beat the walls for twenty minutes as they searched for breathable air. It would have been an excruciating and very long death. Most people today probably imagine these victims smelling the gas and coughing a few times before they blacked out, but this wasn’t the case. We would like to think of them falling asleep, as if their heads were falling onto a large pillow, but the reality was far more terrifying and far more slow. Twenty minutes is a long time, especially if you know you’re dying.

  In his job as a “dentist,” extracting gold teeth and metal bridge-work from the freshly dead, Zischer used a crowbar to open each mouth and then, with pliers, he wrestled out anything of value. It was hard and exhausting work. Horrifying too, because sometimes gas escaped from the lungs and this made it seem like the corpse was waking up.

  A bucket of water was next to him and he tossed in tooth after tooth.

  Sometimes he stared at the dented bucket near his feet. Bits of gum floated on the surface and, as he watched a large thread of pink spin in a slow lazy circle, Zischer promised himself he would survive. He had been smart in school and he was known for his excellent memory. If he survived (and he didn’t know how on earth this would be possible), he would talk about those prisoners known as the Bahnhofkommando who opened the cattle car doors, removed the dead, and hosed out the train. He would talk about the Transportkommando who hauled suitcases and steamer trunks into Zurich. He would talk about the Goldjuden, those men who sorted watches and currency into huge piles of wealth. He would talk about the barbers who cut women’s hair and also about prisoners who had to go around camp with baby prams picking up garbage. He would talk about the Tarnungskommando who painted the wooden walls on the Road to Heaven in order to hide any traces of blood. He would talk about the Sonderkommando who pulled the dead from the gas chambers and hauled them to the Roasts. He would talk about how prisoners were tied to benches, how their buttocks were exposed, and how twenty-five lashes were meted out for stealing clothes or running too slowly or peeing when you weren’t supposed to pee. He would talk about pistols being lowered against skulls and how the guards were always killing, killing, killing, killing, killing, and killing. It was as normal to them as breathing. It was automatic. Reflexive. All of the guards at Lubizec were sadists. And he would take extra time—he nodded at this—he would take extra time to talk about the commandant of this place, how hard and flinty the man’s face was, how he went about his job with the ease of a butcher. Chaim Zischer promised himself he would survive and talk about these things. He would defy the Nazis by living. Yes. He would do this.

  As he stared into the bucket of teeth, he continued to watch a pink thread spin in a circle.

  He reached into the mouth of a pregnant woman. He couldn’t be sure but it seemed that her child was still alive inside the warm globe of her womb. With a crunch and a twist, one of her molars came loose and he flicked it into the bloody water.

  Her body was dragged away, flopping, and he reached for a new mouth.

  “Yes,” he whispered. He would survive. “Somehow.”

  Months passed. Snow fluttered down and he shivered as he continued to drop tooth after tooth into the bucket. A rim of ice had to be chipped away and he couldn’t feel the metal pliers in his fist anymore. The sun was going down and the world of Lubizec was stained a gloomy blue. Searchlights winked on like giant beasts opening up their eyes. The loudspeaker crackled.

  “Achtung, achtung. Antreten zum Appell. Jetzt antreten.”

  Zischer tightened a scarf around his neck and ran with the other prisoners through hard snow until he reached the Rose Garden. He stood at attention and realized his feet were numb. Some of the men in Barack 14 had frostbite so bad their toes had turned black and their nails had come off. Because of this, he made sure to wear three pairs of socks even though it was dangerous to do so. The guards would shoot him on the spot if they found “Reich property” being used in such a frivolous way, but Zischer believed the guards had better things to do than look at prisoners’ feet.

  Snow confettied down in fat beautiful flakes. They seemed the size of cotton balls and they landed on bare heads all around him. Everyone stood at attention with their caps off and he continued to watch these perfect flakes.

  “Antreten. Antreten.”

  Snow floated through searchlights as Guth appeared in front of them. He wore a heavy coat.

  “This man,” he shouted while pointing to a prisoner. “This man was caught stealing Reich property. He will be whipped and you will watch.”

  The naked prisoner was tied to a sawhorse and one of the guards—Birdie—stood over him with a whip that was made out of hippopotamus hide. Birdie spread his boots to anchor himself in the snow. One of the spotlights glided over and lit everything up like a macabre stage show.

  This was a common sight, one that happened several times a week, and a hard shell had grown over Zischer’s heart long ago because of it.

  The crack of leather splitting open skin filled the night, but still the snow kept falling down in magnificent flakes. Nothing would stop the whipping now. The man would get his twenty-five lashes and that would be that. The earth would continue to spin, the stars would continue to shine, and the trains would continue to come.

  At lash number eight the man begged for it to stop. He was delirious with pain and yelled out, “Please! Please, no more! I beg you.”

  Birdie paused for a drink of vodka. Then he said, very calmly, “We’ll have to start over now. Count them off for me.”

  The whip came down.

  “What was that? I couldn’t hear you. Shout it out.”

  Again the whip came down.

  “One!”

  “Good.”

  “Two!”

  “What comes next?”

  “—ree.”

  Zischer shuffled his feet to get the blood circulating and he looked at the dark horizon. The moon was plump. He wanted it blotted out because it felt obscene. Nothing associated with love and romance should be allowed to shine above the gas chambers and fire pits. No moon should be allowed to float dreamily across the warm embers of his people. It was profane and disgusting and vile. He hated the moon. He wanted to rip it out of the sky and smother it.

  The prisoner tied to the sawhorse passed out but still the whip kept coming down as if it were a snake rearing back and lunging forward. On and on it went, crack after crack, until, at last, Birdie was finally winded. He panted. He wiped his forehead. The naked man was untied from the sawhorse and he slumped to the ground like a fleshy rag. Zischer doubted the man would live. Birdie had a nasty habit of aiming for the same spot on the spinal cord, as if he were trying to sever it.

  Guth stepped forward once again. The searchlight followed him as he paced back and forth. “Cold or no cold, you Jews will wear one coat in this camp. One. This isn’t a holiday resort.”

  Zischer wondered for the millionth time about climbing over the barbed-wire fence and sprinting into the woods. He glanced at the central tower and saw guards with their machine guns. They stomped their feet for warmth and, when they did this, snow fluttered down from their little platform high above. Beyond them, in a field, a thousand corpses would soon light up the night. Heat would come to Lubizec at last.

  Zischer knew he needed to escape. But how?

  *One of the least talked about aspects of Lubizec is the high suicide rate. Even if a prisoner survived the first hour of arrival into the camp, there was a good chance he would take his own life before the month was out. This was true for all of the Operation Reinhard death camps, and we can only guess how many prisoners committed suicide unde
r such dire circumstances, but the number must be in the thousands.

  16

  PASSOVER

  When asked why there was so much cruelty at Lubizec, one of the guards, in an interview that was secretly taped by a journalist in 1971, said it was necessary to keep things in order. He explained that without the whippings and the beatings, chaos would have swallowed the camp.

  This type of justification is not only difficult to hear but it also sidesteps the real reason why the guards were so brutal: People were humiliated, degraded, and tortured because the guards needed to reinforce their own warped belief system. Put another way, they wouldn’t have been able to kill if they thought the prisoners were human beings, and this meant cruelty existed in the camp precisely because the guards needed to convince themselves they weren’t killing people at all, but subhuman creatures unworthy of life.

  It was also a question of power. It was much easier to feel like a true member of the master race if you were able to kill anyone you wanted to. The guards only had to pull out their guns and shoot. There would be no court trial. No jail time. There would be no ramifications whatsoever. The guards could do whatever they wanted and whenever a body dropped in front of them—falling to the ground, lifeless—it reminded them who was in charge. They held the power of life over death and this made them feel like little gods strutting around the camp.

  Like any other environment though, Lubizec also had its share of petty rivalries. If one guard saved a prisoner or showed an iota of favoritism, another guard might beat that prisoner all the harder. If one guard relied on a prisoner to sort clothing, another guard might shoot that prisoner just so Guard #1 would have to find a replacement. These small rivalries among the SS had very real consequences on living breathing human beings and this meant the prisoners were always trying to read the guards in order to understand the political landscape of the camp. Which guards were friends? Which guards were enemies? If I am allowed to visit the latrine while Guard #1 is on duty, what will Guard #3 do about this later on?