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

by Patrick Hicks

  “Ready?” Moshe asked, picking up a cigarette lighter. There were hundreds of them in a wicker basket and he underhanded several to David Grinbaum. “Here. Take these.”

  Machine guns continued to rattle and pound outside as the three prisoners put tongues of flame to wood. Blue and orange-yellow flared up the pine shelving. Shirts and caps and tables were soon burning. The three men (for in that moment they felt like men again) ran outside and left the front door open. Fresh air moved into the building and the flames grew and grew. Smoke began to cloud the windows.

  They ran into another barrack and splashed yet another hidden can of gasoline onto piles of socks, corsets, dresses, and children’s clothing. It was also set on fire and they went into a third barrack—this one was packed with enormous burlap sacks of human hair—and the men stopped in their tracks.

  They looked at each other, wondering what to do.

  There was an odd smell hanging in the space and the noise around them fell away as they stared at the harvest of hair. It was unsettling. There was something intimate and private about this. They had gotten used to dead bodies and sizzling corpses, but here were the last tangible remains of the living. Cells and roots. Tresses of black and blond and gray and red. There were long braids that had been snipped off close to the base of the skull. And it was all going to be woven into fabric, made into blankets. Each sack was the size of a file cabinet and they stood in ordered rows like huge cancerous tumors. The words REICH PROPERTY were stamped onto each of them.

  “Come,” Moshe Taube said.

  He clicked one of his cigarette lighters. It was an older model that stayed lit until the hinged top was snapped back into place—only then would the flame go out—and he leaned it against a sack. The bag began to smolder as orange worms of light ate into the burlap.

  Zischer and Grinbaum reached for their own lighters and they too rested little flames next to the dried hair. They went down the line, placing lighters here and there. The sacks grew into smoky balls of acrid flame.

  The men ran outside and heard machine guns strafing into the woods. The first warehouse was now a raging fire, windows cracked and shattered, and a huge cloud of filthy smoke billowed out the front door. It lifted into the night like a dark tornado.

  When the guards saw this, there was a slowing in the camp. A pause.

  The machine guns stopped firing into the night and the searchlights rested on the tree branches.

  Silence.

  A moment of hesitation. Only the soft roar and crackle of the fire could be heard.

  And then the searchlights wheeled around and illuminated the whole camp. Prisoners scurried away as bullets chewed up the Rose Garden. Clumps of wet dirt hopped into the air and prisoners began to shout.

  “Stop!”

  “Don’t shoot!”

  The men still had three more barracks to torch but if they wanted to kill Guth they needed to do it now. Time was running out. Moshe Taube had a sharpened knife in his jacket while Zischer and Grinbaum had screwdrivers. The moon was a dirty white rag rising on the horizon, and they ran towards an area of camp they had only seen from afar: the private barracks of the SS. A light was on in Guth’s office.

  Bullets splintered wood around them as they threw themselves into the wet, sandy muck to protect themselves. They breathed hard and wondered what to do. They spat sand from their mouths and looked at one another. Was Guth in there? If so, for how long?

  Machine guns swept the other side of the Rose Garden. Everyone was shouting and moaning and screaming, the whole camp was a swirl of chaos, and that’s when someone with a deep voice got on the loudspeaker.

  “Achtung! Achtung! Jetzt antreten zum Appell!”

  The voice ordered the prisoners to line up in the Rose Garden, but everyone knew there would be no salvation or mercy if they did such a thing. They would all die. Zurich was in flames and the guards would reap a terrible vengeance. Whether they were shot by machine guns now or whether they were lined up before the Roasts later didn’t matter because, come morning, everyone would be turned into corpses. In that moment every prisoner in Lubizec knew what waited for them. They scattered from the searchlights. They ran. They hid.

  “Antreten, antreten.”

  As Zischer, Taube, and Grinbaum ran towards Guth’s office, a string of SS sprinted towards them, their legs working hard. One of these officers was Birdie Franz and when he saw the prisoners in an area of camp that was strictly off-limits to them, he pulled out his pistol. He lowered the snout of his gun and took a few steps forward.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  His green eyes were hard and piercing. Shadows of hellfire danced on the visor of his SS hat and this made the little death head’s emblem seem bright and alive. He took another step and repeated the question.

  “I said, what are you doing here?”

  Moshe Taube clicked his wet shoes together and came to attention. “Sir,” he said with a little Hitler salute, “I wish to report we have been sent to get buckets.”

  “Buckets?”

  “To put out the fire, sir.”

  Birdie looked at the sooty cloud pouring up into the sky. It was a volcano of ash and spark. He lowered his gun, cocked his head back and forth as if weighing a thought, and then took off running with the other guards towards Zurich.

  “Get those buckets,” he yelled back. “Hurry!”

  We should remind ourselves that Birdie was in charge of these buildings, and he was probably worried about how he would explain the fire. Was it arson? An accident? Did he do it on purpose to hide the true extent of things he had stolen? These are all questions Berlin would have asked, and since he had already been investigated once before for missing inventory, he must have been anxious to put out the fire. No wonder he didn’t shoot any of the prisoners. This is almost certainly why he spared them and told them to get buckets.

  “Antreten, antreten,” came the voice over the loudspeaker again. It sounded nervous and human.

  The machine guns weren’t popping so often now, and Chaim Zischer took a moment to notice the bodies scattered around the camp, how the moon shimmered in invisible waves of heat, and how the barracks were being eaten alive. Something primal was devouring Zurich. The wooden walls were greased with fire and orange sparks drifted up. A window shattered and there was a sudden roar of flame.

  “Antreten, antreten.”

  The three men ran towards Guth’s office. A light was on and they moved down a brick path. Zischer was full of adrenaline when they came to the little wooden building. Two large flowerpots filled with melting snow and cigarette butts were on either side of the door. There was a sign that read, SS Obersturmführer Hans-Peter Guth. The prisoners looked at each other and got out their weapons. They turned the handle.

  Avrom Petranker and Dov Damiel were happy to be under the engine when the machine guns began showering bullets into the camp. Their fingers danced on the cold metal until they found the plug. It was easy to unscrew because the oil was changed so frequently and because nothing was allowed to get rusty. If the engine went down for repairs it meant transports would get backed up on the line, and this in turn would make the higher-ups in Berlin furious. As a result, this engine, which ran for hours at a time, was in immaculate condition.

  Petranker unscrewed the bolt and felt thick oil dribble onto his fingers. It threaded its way down to the hair of his forearm.

  “Good,” he said, wiping it onto his trousers.

  Even in the murky dark with searchlights slashing all around them, Dov Damiel could tell his fellow prisoner was smiling. They were supposed to start the engine but it was now so black they couldn’t find the ignition switch. Damiel slapped the instrument panel in frustration because they were running late to meet up with the others.

  “Wait, wait,” Petranker said, holding up a finger.

  Wordlessly, he went around to the gas tank and began to unscrew the cap. Two guards huffed past them with guns but they didn’t pay any attention, nor di
d they see the body splayed out on the concrete pad beneath the engine. Petranker threw the gas cap on the ground and went over to Oberhauser’s body. He pulled off a leather boot and yanked on the man’s damp sock—he stretched it out like taffy—and when it finally snapped free he bent down to sop up the oil. He stuffed it halfway into the gas tank.

  “Got a lighter?”

  Damiel shook his head. The men looked around for something to light the sock, and after a few seconds of cursing and patting their pockets Petranker glanced back at Oberhauser’s body. He searched through the man’s bloody clothes until he found something: a silver cigarette lighter.

  “You okay with this?”

  Damiel knew exactly what he meant. When the gasoline was ignited, the tank would blast apart and shrapnel would shred everything. Men on the other side of the camp would be knocked off their feet and an explosion, like a smoky exclamation point, would rise gently into the sky.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  Once again, it is important to remember that Lubizec was a place without hope or mercy, and because none of the prisoners expected to survive the escape we shouldn’t view Damiel or Petranker as either heroic or fatalistic. They were just being realistic and they acted accordingly.

  In an interview that was conducted in 1988, Damiel looks down at his gnarled hands and says about this moment, “It wasn’t that I wanted to die. Who does? If I was killed in an explosion, so be it. If I was shot, so be it. Sure I wanted more minutes of life, everyone wants such things, but I thought my body would be on the Roasts that night. We all did. And if I died in an explosion or if I died later at the hands of the SS, what did I care? Dead is dead. It was a matter of how I died, not if.”

  Avrom Petranker flicked the thumbwheel of the cigarette lighter. A few weak sparks appeared in the dark. He tried again and again, but still nothing. He shook it next to his ear.

  “Damn it.”

  When asked about this in 1988, Dov Damiel smiles. “Ironic, no? A fire is eating the warehouses of Lubizec but we can’t light a stupid sock.”

  The two men stood there and watched five more guards run towards Zurich. All of the prisoners were ordered over the loudspeaker to scoop snow into buckets and toss it onto the blaze. The machine guns slowed down and the searchlights were no longer making wild figure eights over the camp. It was during this time that a shaft of milky brightness cut over their heads and landed on the Road to Heaven just behind them. Damiel and Petranker weren’t in this beam but it was close enough to lift the darkness around them. Damiel saw the instrument panel on the engine and there, hanging above the keyhole of the ignition switch, was a little box with a white skull painted on it. He snapped it open and found a key tethered to a chain. The searchlight flicked away and the air around him was again doused with night. Damiel felt the instrument panel like a blind man until a little notched slot appeared under his fingertip. He pushed in the key. It clicked home.

  “Stand back!” he yelled.

  When he turned his wrist, the engine shook to life. The ground beneath his feet began to vibrate as pistons and valves clattered faster and faster. The moving parts inside the engine block were still bathed in oil but it was only a matter of time before the greased metal parts would shriek against each other and then, when this happened, everything would seize up. The whole crankcase would be torn up, destroyed.

  “Do you have the clippers?” Damiel shouted over the noise.

  Petranker nodded and they ran for the barbed-wire fence.

  The door to Guth’s office wasn’t locked and when they stepped inside it was noticeably warmer. A song about homesickness was murmuring on the radio and the three men glanced sideways at one another. Where is he? they asked with shrugging shoulders.

  A large oak desk, the very symbol of power, stood before them but they weren’t sure what to do. It was odd being in a place that reminded them of their former lives because it was like entering a lost world where everything felt civilized and polite. They could have been standing in a banker’s office or an accountant’s, but instead, this place belonged to a serial mass murderer. There was a typewriter along with a stack of carbon paper. There was a slide rule, a dictionary, an ashtray, a teapot, a fern, a desk calendar, a potbelly stove, a series of file cabinets, and a wicker basket overflowing with toys. Framed photos huddled beneath a lamp, and it was very strange, wholly bizarre, seeing Guth’s family. His wife looked like a movie actress with her long beautiful hair that splashed down around her shoulders, and his children smiled up from what looked like a camping trip.

  So this was the epicenter of the camp?

  Moshe Taube, Chaim Zischer, and David Grinbaum held their knives and screwdrivers. They stood on an expensive carpet and couldn’t remember the last time they had done such a thing. Their shoes were muddy so they backed away to keep it clean. There were books on a shelf with titles like Old Shatterhand, Applied Management & Systems, and A Short History of Barcelona. Guth’s diploma from the University of Hamburg was on the wall along with a photo of Hitler.

  A machine gun sounded close to the window and this made them all turn around.

  “We should go,” Moshe said, getting out a pocket watch. “It’s almost time.”

  When writing about this in The Hell of Lubizec, Chaim Zischer mentions something worth repeating. In his typically blunt fashion he states that “This escape is not an adventure story and our revolt should not be read as entertainment. Do not focus on what we did. Focus instead on those who died.”

  Later, in a 1985 interview, he added, “Hundreds of thousands were sealed into gas chambers and they watched a door swing shut on their futures. Whole villages died. Whole cities disappeared. That is the true history of Lubizec, not a handful of men running around with sharpened screwdrivers. People focus on our story but it is the story of nonescape that matters. I’m …” He stops here and waves his hand as if searching for the right word. “I’m such a tiny part of a much larger whole. I am nothing. I am like dust.”

  And so, as we turn our attention back to the camp and back to the sparking machine guns, we should remember that what comes next should not be given greater attention than the days of annihilation that came before it. The real story of Lubizec is “Gas and Burn.” Not the wire cutters. Not the knives. Not the cigarette lighters. Not the running. No, none of it. The real story of Lubizec is about an engine coughing to life.

  Before they left Guth’s office they ripped out the telephone cord and looked around for any guns that might be lying around. There were none, so they turned back into the night.

  The Rose Garden was full of slashing lights and voices by this time. The men skirted the barracks and made their way to the fence. Bodies were slumped over in odd positions—many of them had been shot while running away. The fire from Zurich was enormous now and flames towered up from walls that were bright orange and white. Roofs collapsed in and jets of crackling sparks shot high into the sky. The guards held machine guns.

  “Quickly, quickly! Throw the snow on it!”

  The escaping men had gambled that a fire would distract the guards because they knew it was a major weakness of the camp; they knew there were no water pipes to douse these flames and, although there was a huge water tank next to the SS canteen for cooking and cleaning, there was no way to get this precious fluid over to Zurich. The idea that Jews might set fire to the camp never crossed the minds of the SS, and now because of this blinkered oversight based upon bigotry, the prisoners of Barrack 14 had the diversion they needed. They sprinted for the fence.

  What happened next happened very fast.

  Avrom Petranker was already snipping the wire when the others arrived. He worked quickly and grunted as first one strand was cut, then another. The metal was shiny and when it was cut it made a dull noise. The searchlights were on the main entrance and a murky orange from the fire danced all around them. The smell of burning wood hung in the air and it seemed almost like perfume because it was so different from the meaty bonfires the
y were used to. These flames were not made from burning fat and bone.

  The strands of barbed wire fell. Petranker grunted his way forward.

  “Two more,” he whispered. It was a triple-layered fence and he got down on his belly to clip the last strand. The ground beyond the camp was covered in untrampled snow.

  “Hurry,” Damiel hissed.

  Zischer’s hands were bloody as he pulled at the spiderwebbing of barbed wire. It ripped his coat and he got hung up in it. After a few tense moments they created a hole. Petranker crawled towards freedom and motioned for the others to follow.

  “Let’s go,” he half shouted.

  A group of prisoners throwing buckets of snow at a warehouse saw what was happening, and they backed towards the fence. Within a few seconds a steady stream of men were leaking out of the camp. The searchlights paced the front gate but, so far, the guards in the watchtowers hadn’t noticed the shadows leaving the camp. All eyes were on the fire.

  This changed when a tremendous geyser of sound blasted up from beyond the barbed wire. It was a landmine, one of the hundreds that had been sown into the ground after Guth’s arrival in May 1942. The current prisoners of Lubizec knew nothing about the so-called “moat” because they arrived long after the explosives had been planted by previous prisoners. When one of these discs detonated, a cloud of fleshy dirt spewed into the air, and the searchlights immediately craned their necks towards the fence. Machine guns began shooting bullets into the night.

  The men of Barrack 14 kept running. Zischer covered his head when falling clumps of dirt showered down onto him. The snow was soft and he tried to put his feet where others had stepped but it was hard to see with the searchlights following first this man, then that man. Zips of yellow flashed all around him and prisoners fell as if the machine guns were merely tripping them up. He was breathing hard and he expected bullets to spear his chest at any second. Someone next to him—Moshe?—Petranker?—stepped on a mine and was blasted into mist. A wet spray hit Zischer’s face but he kept on running. Another mine went off—Damiel?—but he couldn’t be sure. Dirt and body parts rained down onto his shoulders and he was certain, absolutely certain, that David Grinbaum had been turned into jagged tissue. Bullets winged around him and he knew men behind him were being shot dead at a dizzying speed. It was total confusion, naked fear, and as he ran deeper into the woods, it felt like he was running through wax.