The BBC interviewed Chaim Zischer about this massacre in the snow, and he speaks bluntly about what it was like to lie on the ground as a guard walked up and down, randomly shooting first this prisoner, then that prisoner.
“It was Birdie. He lowered his pistol at one head and crack, he took a long drag on his cigarette before moving on to the next person. He passed through us like an angel of death. One hand was used for the gun, the other to smoke. First kill with the right, then smoke with the left. His mouth and his pistol were both smoking that morning.”
Zischer also mentions how Rudolf Oberhauser and Sebastian Schemise patrolled the perimeter of the camp with machine guns and stomped their feet for warmth. Folk music blared out from the central guard tower and Birdie hummed along to the tubas. He went about killing as though he were a carpenter driving nails into wood.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Each body jumped slightly as a bullet slammed into its skull. Expanding shock waves liquefied memories and whole universes went black as shell casings pinged onto the frozen ground. Blood splashed and pumped onto the snow. The shootings continued and there were so many prisoners murdered that morning that Birdie had to pull out several clips of new bullets. When one ran out, he pulled out a fresh clip and slapped it in with the butt of his palm.
Slowly, randomly, terribly, he moved towards Zischer. The sun was nearly up and a rooster from somewhere nearby called into the morning. Birdie stepped closer and closer. Zischer concentrated on a snowflake not far from his cheek.
So this is the last thing I’ll see, he thought. This snowflake. This useless beautiful thing.
It sparkled like a diamond and it was so individual, so unique. Birdie’s black boots scrunched next to Zischer’s head. The man’s boot was gigantic and spattered with blood. So this is how I’m going to die. He held his breath and imagined a clean room full of light and love. He saw his mother’s face. She was folding linen and humming a tune.
Something warm hit Zischer’s face. A ringing filled his ears and he fluttered his eyes open.
An unbelievable amount of blood pumped out of Josef Bau’s head. It looked like ruby motor oil and Zischer wanted to push himself away from the growing pool, but he lay there with his cheek flat against the numbing snow. The hole was the size of a silver coin and he couldn’t look away because that hole could have been in his head. Bau was alive three seconds ago, his lungs inflating and deflating, his heart valves fluttering, but now he was gone. A whole world was once living in Josef Bau’s head but now it was leaking all over the ground. Nothing could stop it now. A widening pool of childhood memories and learning and love and thousands of meals and loose baby teeth and learning to tie shoelaces and running after balls and dreaming and walks in the forest and playing with a dog and getting chicken pox and picking bark off a tree and writing a poem and a first kiss and running with friends and watching sunlight come through a window and dancing and drinking wine and laughing—it was all spilling out of Josef Bau. Part of the universe was dying. A tiny corner of it was being drained of light.
Birdie moved down the line, firing here, firing there, creating new holes, draining memory, blackening the universe, killing the future, and his pistol needed to be reloaded every now and again. He continued on, humming.
We should pause to consider that one man and one gun created all of this devastation. Birdie pointed, squeezed, and the gun spoke, bullet after bullet. It was just a standard issue collection of oiled metal parts, gunpowdery chemistry, flint and spark, velocity and unstoppable physics. Yet the gun itself becomes unique at this point and it should be in a museum somewhere under glass, its hammer locked shut—muzzled—so that we can gaze upon it safely and consider how it was used. We know what became of this man who killed these prisoners, but what became of this gun, this Sauer 38H semi-automatic pistol? It was only slightly larger than a fist and it punched out death. Maybe it’s hanging in a collector’s case in Los Angeles or Dublin or Moscow right now. The fingerprints on its trigger would have been wiped away by time long ago. The collector who owns it probably isn’t aware of its history. It’s just a thing. It’s just something from World War II. It’s just a gun.
“It could have been me,” Zischer told the BBC. “Bau was shot but it could have been me if Birdie moved a bit differently or if he decided to aim his pistol to the right instead of the left. When I think about this for too long, I feel like a corpse on vacation. Why did I survive when so many others did not? Why was I saved?”
On and on the killings went, rhythmic and terrible, until Birdie flicked his cigarette onto a freshly dead body and complained about his hand cramping up. He holstered his weapon and massaged his palm.
“Ouch,” he laughed. “That hurts.”
Somewhere in the distance, a rooster called out into the pale morning light. It sounded like laughter. Like cosmic laughter.
Of the three hundred prisoners that ran into the Rose Garden on February 21, 1943, nearly half of them were shot. An exact figure can never be known but these random executions, these sluggish killings, they haunted Chaim Zischer for the rest of his life and he often woke up screaming as the shadow of Birdie crept closer and closer.
“Why does this stay with me?” he asked the BBC. “Thousands of people were killed at Lubizec every day. But when I think about this I feel like an old jug cracking apart.”
Maybe it was the helplessness of lying on the snow, or maybe it was the haphazard way Birdie moved the pistol first here, then there, but one thing is certain: When it was all over, the escape plan was in tatters.
Heinrich Niemann made a megaphone of his hands and yelled out, “If you’re alive, stand up. Move it, move it. Quickly. There’s no breakfast this morning for you filthy fucking Jews. Move it.”
The living hauled away the dead. It took twenty minutes of grunting but all of the bodies were eventually dumped into a wooden cart. Their clothes were stripped off and they were stacked onto the Roasts where they, like everyone else that filed into Lubizec, were doused with gasoline. These men who once dreamed of escape had names like David, Jechiel, Aryeh, Josef, Kazimierz, Scmuel, Omet, Ravid, Joshua, Levi, and Malachi. They were little bits of the universe, and now they were gone.
“When I saw these men stacked up and ready for the flame,” Zischer told the BBC, “I thought about hanging myself. I did. Really, I did.” In the video his chin starts to quiver and he waves his hand. “Turn off your camera.”
While the bodies were being cleared away, the door to Guth’s office swung open. He walked across the crunchy snow with a letter in his hands. It flapped in the breeze.
“They’re coming home,” he said triumphantly. “Jasmine and the kids, they’re coming home next week.” He grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll need some champagne and caviar. And oh!” He snapped his fingers a few times. “I’ll need some of that chocolate. The thick bars. From Belgium. Remember? Can you organize that for me, Schemise? I need to get home and do a few things.”
Prisoners continued to haul away bodies. They shoveled red snow into wheelbarrows.
“By the way, what was all the shooting about?”
Birdie stiffened. “Discipline. We had to crack a few eggs.”
Guth nodded, then went back to talking about cakes, and balloons, and bottles of wine, and a nice big ham—one that was thickly marbled with fat. He and the other guards strolled away towards the gas chambers. They laughed and pushed each other playfully, like boys at a bright carnival.
No one, not even Guth, could have guessed that within two short weeks Lubizec would be in flames. And it would happen in a way that surprised everyone.
*One solution: use it on the footpaths to keep people from slipping. The same thing was done at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
18
BEFORE THE STORM
Guth drove to Lublin to pick up his family. Although we don’t know what he was thinking at the time, we do know that two massive swastika flags flapped above the cream-color
ed train station and that Guth stood on Platform 2. He wore his leather trench coat as heavy snow fluttered down onto the tracks. It covered grease and dirt and spent cigarette butts. It prettied up the world and made everything look unsoiled. Huge flakes stuck to him as a whistle pierced the horizon. A yellow ball of light slowly emerged from the cottony distance, and he straightened the visor of his SS hat as the train chugged closer and closer. Railcars clattered and squealed to a stop as he looked for his family. He stood in front of the first-class section amid signs that said GERMANS ONLY.
The reunion was full of hugs. Guth crouched down and gathered Sigi and Karl into his arms. He kissed them lavishly before standing up and embracing his wife. He kissed her twice on both of her cheeks. The four of them stood in a little circle and talked excitedly over one another about their long journey. A porter grabbed their luggage and they all walked to a black Mercedes in a GERMANS ONLY parking area, one that was right in front of the station. Guth drove his family to a café near Adolf Hitler Plaza where they got sandwiches and bottled blueberry juice for the road. Because it was such a long drive back to Lubizec—at least two hours—Guth brought along some books and toys for his children. As they drove over the frozen road, husband and wife held hands. Her fingernails were painted red; his were clipped short. They both wore their wedding rings. The windshield wipers squeaked back and forth as snow continued to fall and, before them, the road unspooled in a long white ribbon.
Guth hired two more servants to make life at the Villa easier for his wife: A new maid was brought in to tidy up the place and a handyman was added to shovel snow from the driveway as well as keep the furnace stoked with coal. It was dark when they pulled through the front gate, and the headlamps of the car cast beams onto the Spanish-style house. The front door opened and the servants came out to greet the family. Luggage was taken off the back of the car and everyone rushed inside where they laughed about the cold and stomped snow off their boots. Scented candles were lit, while in the blazing fireplace, logs crackled and spat sparks.
Many decades later, when Sigi was an old woman looking back on the topography of her life, she said this was a glorious moment and that it was one of her favorite memories. She kept touching her father’s arm to prove that he wasn’t a dream, and when she hugged him, his Iron Cross pressed into her cheek. She fingered the silver lightning bolts of the SS on his lapel and noticed the smell of cologne. It was a woodsy vanilla citrus and she pressed herself into him to sniff it deeply. The fabric of his uniform was soft against her face.
“My little baroness,” he said, cupping her head. “It’s good to have you home.”
Sigi devotes a whole chapter of The Commandant’s Daughter to this reunion, and it is very difficult to read, not just because she writes with such effervescent joy about seeing her father again, but also because there is no mention of the death camp at all. Even though a kingdom of murder was only a few kilometers away, she never mentions it. It’s like the place never existed. When she was eleven-years old she might not have thought much about Lubizec during this welcome home party (she was, after all, a young girl absorbed in her own little universe), but as an adult Sigi makes absolutely no reference to the camp during this long chapter of homecoming. This is a problem. A rather large problem. It’s as if Sigi has blocked it out because she didn’t want to see her father as a man who turned people into ash. She writes instead about how good it was to see him, and we read about giggles, sweetened orange juice, honey-cured ham, and how Guth pulled out a long string of pearls for his wife. These pearls almost certainly came from the cluttered warehouses of Zurich, but Sigi never makes this connection. Instead, she talks about how nice it was to see her father lean over and snap these pearls around her mother’s neck.
“It was beautiful,” Sigi writes. “They were rare blue pearls and there was a silver clasp on the back that was just exquisite. My mother wore it every day after this and she often stroked it with her fingers when she was deep in thought.”
In other parts of her book, Sigi does examine her father’s role in the industrialized genocide of the Holocaust, but in this particular chapter, she is mute, tight lipped, in obvious denial. While we should be critical of this oversight, it does reflect the general mood that settled over the Guth household by early 1943. That is to say, it had been decided that no more questions would be asked about Lubizec and that the family would carry on as if the place wasn’t a place at all. The camp became negative space. It became a void in the woods. It was unknown and unknowable. As far as the family was concerned, Guth went to work each morning and he returned home each night smelling vaguely of campfire. Whatever happened in between was off limits for discussion.
“It was just so wonderful to be home,” Sigi glows in her autobiography. “I loved the grand wooden staircase and the huge marble fireplace where I could read my books in peace. I loved that old home. I was very happy, very happy indeed.”
As the weeks passed, the family settled into a familiar routine. Tutors drove down from Lublin to teach Sigi and Karl such subjects as German literature, German history, geography, mathematics, and race theory. On Sundays they had piano lessons. Sometimes a snowstorm kept them indoors, but whenever it was nice outside, they went sledding down a nearby hill. Other times they went ice skating on their private lake. German bombers often cut long gashes of white across the cold blue sky and their desynchronized engines sounded frightening. Whur-a … whur-a … whur-a. They sounded like a plague of insects droning towards Russia. A few hours later they returned. Whur-a … whur-a … whur-a. There were always fewer of them on the return journey. Some of them had streaks of inky smoke trailing from their engines. Once, the children saw a bomber break apart in flight and fall like a meteor.
It would be good to pause at this point and consider the war raging beyond the rail tracks of Lubizec. The Nazis invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, and it remains one of the largest military invasions in the history of warfare. The army, however, was unable to take Moscow before winter and they suffered enormous causalities. Men were cut to pieces as the snow howled around them. Another attempt at smashing the Soviet Union occurred a year later during the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 to February 1943) and this too was a crippling disaster. At least five hundred thousand Germans were killed and the Soviets suffered causalities in excess of one million men. It was the bloodiest battle of the twentieth century, and it was quite possibly the bloodiest military engagement in all of world history. Stalingrad was a meat grinder. Men were chewed up and spat out. The ground was littered with their frozen contorted bodies, and daily newspapers had trouble printing the obituaries for so many men. By March 1943, it was obvious to most Germans they were losing the “war in the east.”
And yet, although the Nazi Empire was losing ground and finding its status as a master race challenged, it still channeled precious resources towards the destruction of the Jews. Trains kept on rolling towards the death camps even though they were badly needed for the war. Troops were also used to round up the ghettos when they too could have been sent to the front line. Gasoline, which was always in short supply, was reserved for the death camps. All of this makes no sense from a military perspective, but we need to remember that, for the Nazis, they may have been losing one war but they were determined to win the “race war” against the Jews. It was one thing to lose ground to the Soviets but it was another matter entirely to wipe the Jews off the map of Europe. As far as Adolf Hitler was concerned, the first war could be lost, but not the second.
And so, each morning Guth buttoned up his greatcoat and adjusted his peaked officer’s hat in the mirror. He left at seven and returned at nine in the evening. Sometimes he came home for lunch and helped his children with math homework. They used a slide rule to figure out addition and subtraction. He was especially gifted at division. Trains whistled in the pine trees and, at night, a dull orange glow warmed the sky above the camp. Flecks of soot mixed with falling snow but no one asked what it was. And still the trains
kept on coming.
Although Guth was busy oiling the machinery of destruction, he usually took Sundays off. He rested. He slept in. And it was during a glorious afternoon in early March, when spring was waking up from hibernation and they were snowshoeing in the woods as a family, that he talked about going to Barcelona.
“I’d like to see the place. We should take a holiday,” Guth said, passing a shiny metal thermos to his wife.
“But why Spain?”
He opened up his arms and looked around. “Because there’s no snow there, my dear. We can go swimming in the Mediterranean and eat seafood until we burst.” He puffed himself up and waddled over to Karl. “Crab cakes. I want to eat crab cakes until I’m the size of a zeppelin. Give me some of your crabby cakes.”
Although we can’t be sure why Guth was drawn to Barcelona, it seems reasonable to assume he became interested in the city because he saw a travel poster for it several times a day. As train after train rolled into Lubizec, he saw fake advertisements for trips to Berlin, Athens, and Barcelona. This travel poster almost certainly made him want to crack open shellfish and walk the tangled medieval lanes of a grand city. Maybe he studied this poster for Barcelona and imagined himself sitting under the sun, his shirt off, his eyes closed. Next to him is a tall drink with a little umbrella in it. He dozes, his conscience unhaunted.*
“I’d love to see the place,” he said, taking back the thermos. He stuffed it into his backpack and looked up at the leaden sky. “Let’s go someplace warm.”
Jasmine was full of excitement. “Why wait? Let’s go on a family holiday now. We could stay in a hotel and go shopping in Kraków.”
Guth scrunched away on snowshoes. He took long strides and glanced back. “Good idea. I haven’t had a vacation since we came to this place so I’ll ask for a seventy-two-hour pass. What do you kids think? Should we go to Kraków?”
The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 19
