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

by Patrick Hicks

  After several long minutes, he pushed himself against a tree and tried not to breathe too loudly. His tongue was dry and, while panting, he peeked around the trunk to look at the camp. Bullets flitted from the towers in strange slow arcs and a second later he heard their sound.

  The voice on the loudspeaker echoed as if underwater. “Attention. Attention. Return to your barracks immediately. Any prisoner not in his barrack will be shot. Repeat. Any prisoner not in his barrack will be shot.”

  The snow around him was slushy and he bent down to wet his lips. He chewed, he swallowed. It felt good to have something in his belly and he glanced around the woods before he broke into a wild run once again. Another explosion went off far behind him, and again there was the distant rattling of machine guns.

  Zischer tumbled down a hill, hitting a large rock at the bottom, and he wondered where the others were. He paused to listen and during this moment he heard something behind him. It sounded like snapping branches and he flattened himself against an oak tree. The bark dug into his back. Blood pulsed in his eardrums.

  “… m?”

  Footsteps crunched over the snow.

  “Chaim?”

  It was Dov Damiel. They embraced and allowed themselves to weep for a few seconds. They were alive, they were free, and they weren’t wounded. They slipped to the ground and held each other.

  What sounded like an air-raid siren came from the camp. They sat there for a long moment wondering what to do. They buttoned their wet coats and adjusted their hats as the wind made the branches sway and clack overhead. The air-raid siren whined on and a little farmhouse on the horizon snuffed out its lights.

  “What now?” Dov whispered.

  Zischer shrugged.

  They crouched behind a tree and spoke with their hands.

  Let’s go this way.

  No, this way.

  Is that a road?

  I think so.

  The night was salted with stars as they trudged through sloppy wet snow. Their ankles were numb, they were shaking, their stomachs popped and gurgled, but they kept moving away from the camp, always away from the camp.

  They found a dirt road and whispered about what to do next. It angered Zischer that he had to remain motionless behind an evergreen bush as they discussed their next move. All he wanted to do was run and run. It felt like he was stuck in a world of slow motion. It felt like a thick moony paste was weighing him down.

  The headlights of a canvas-topped army truck came toward them. It slid down the road and squealed to a stop just beyond where they were hiding. A door opened and a guard stood on one of the running boards. The yellow headlights illuminated the road ahead and the engine thrummed. Exhaust hung in the air.

  “Prisoners of Lubizec,” the guard shouted to the surrounding landscape. “Come home to warm food. We won’t hurt you.” A pause and then, “Prisoners of Lubizec, are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Zischer and Damiel lowered themselves deeper into the snow.

  “My Jew friends, where do you think you are? This is the Third Reich. The whole country is a prison for you. We will find you.” The guard pulled out his gun and fired blindly into the woods ahead. The crack echoed through the trees like dying thunder.

  “Do you hear me, prisoners of Lubizec? The whole country is a prison for you fucking Jews. The whole country!”

  He climbed back into the truck, and as it gear-shifted away, a few more shots were fired out the window.

  The yellow headlights rounded a corner and felt their way through the woods. A moment passed and an invisible blanket of silence settled back onto the road. High above, a shooting star burrowed through the night and an owl called from somewhere far away.

  The two former prisoners stood up and brushed snow off their clothes.

  They were free, but now what?*

  *Now what indeed? Perhaps it is good to pause here and remember that successful escapes like this one also happened at Sobibór and Treblinka in 1943. Hundreds and hundreds of prisoners escaped from these two camps. A year later, there was even a doomed revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau where prisoners managed to blow up Crematoria IV. In each of these cases, the prisoners staged an uprising because they saw themselves as part of a larger whole and they didn’t expect to live. It wasn’t about heroics. It was about making a statement and trying to slow down the genocidal gears of killing. Those that managed to escape were deeply surprised to find themselves still alive, so is it any wonder that Chaim Zischer and Dov Damiel glanced at each other, uncertain what to do next?

  20

  SHIFTING TO AUSCHWITZ

  The buildings were still smoldering when the sun came up the next day and everyone was coated in a grimy layer of soot. Guards and prisoners alike looked like chimney sweeps because the whole camp was up all night shoveling snow and bending into the blazing heat. The gas chambers hadn’t been set alight—they were made of brick—but immediately behind them, in a part of the camp the prisoners were never allowed to go, the guards found a pool of oil beneath the engine. The crankcase was bled out, it was dead and harmless, and when they couldn’t find the plug Heinrich Niemann went into a rage.

  “Go around until you find a goddamn engine like this one and take that oil plug. I’m not going to be slowed down because we can’t find a stupid fucking part. Now go!” he barked. “I want to know if this fucking machine still works!”

  The mood in Lubizec was now different. Not exactly free or changed, but the air was plump with a strange new feeling of hesitation. This camp, which had run on a strict timetable of gas and burn, was now as lost as a demagnetized compass needle.

  Shoes and boots were everywhere because as the prisoners tried to get away from the bullets, many of them sprinted out of whatever they were wearing. In the landmine field, shoes lay higgledy-piggledy and a few of them still had a foot inside. Splotches of red mist dotted the snow. Jagged meaty pieces were near the blackened craters where the mines had detonated. It was, as one guard put it, “An unbelievable mess.”

  At least 130 prisoners escaped from Lubizec that night, and of that number, 70 were either cut down by machine-gun fire or they were blown up by landmines. Another 150 inside the camp had been killed by flying bullets or they were shot for moving too slowly with buckets of snow.

  And of Guth? What of him?

  He was at home enjoying a meal. We only know about his reaction that night thanks to Jasmine’s unpublished diary, and according to her, he was enjoying cheesecake dripping with cherries. He had consumed an entire bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and was working on another schnapps when a knock came on the door. He glanced at Jasmine and walked down the hallway, steadying himself with his fingertips.

  “The Jews did what?”

  There was a low murmuring.

  “Show me.”

  He arrived to find much of his camp in flames. His face became a slab of concrete and he ordered the barbed-wire fence to be fixed immediately. He spoke to his guards through clamped lips. “I want no more prisoners shot tonight. One of these sons of bitches knows something,” he said, looking around. “Find out who started the fire. Question them all.”

  The amount of damage couldn’t be assessed until morning. Guth paced up and down the wooden platform of the train station and laughed.

  “Ha! Everything looks fine here. Good, good.”

  He jumped down to the tracks and walked between the rails. The smell of creosote lifted up and he kicked a few pebbles. He pulled himself back up to the platform like a swimmer getting out of a pool, and he marched beneath the WELCOME sign.

  “Follow me.”

  He breezed up the Road to Heaven, walked past the flowerpots, and looked into each of the four gas chambers. A smile and then, “No damage here either.”

  “Sir,” Heinrich Niemann offered. “There’s a bullet hole in Chamber #4. That’s where Wagner was shot in the head.”

  “Paint it.”

  Guth walked around to the back of the building and spent a long time stu
dying the engine. He put his hat on one of the protruding temperature gauges, got down on his knees, and looked at the hole.

  “Can this be fixed?”

  “We’re searching for a plug now.”

  He stood up and slapped bits of sand off his trousers. “Did they ruin it?”

  “We’re not sure yet.”

  Guth rubbed his eyes with both hands and let out a long exhale. “Right. Okay. Listen. I want this machine tested before lunch and after that—” He cut himself off and started over. “Scratch that. Just bring me a new engine. Make it the largest one you can find, and I want it installed in the next twenty-four hours. Go. Do it now.”

  As for Zurich, most of it had been turned into cinders. Smoke from blackened stumps lifted lazily into the sky, and the charred warehouses looked like burnt rib cages from some prehistoric creature. As Guth walked through the smoldering mess, he picked up a blackened spoon. It was hot to the touch, so he dropped it. There were crinkled wallets, scorched coins, and a lumpy pile of melted eyeglasses. Jewelry had been fused together in glittering blobs. Whole steamer trunks of paper money had become nothing more than fibrous ash.

  “It’s not my fault,” Birdie kept saying in a daze. “It’s not my fault.”

  Guth was chain-smoking by now. “What a fucking mess,” he said, walking across the scorched wasteland. His boots crunched over burnt wood. “It’s like something out of Dante’s Inferno.”

  “It’s not my fault. It’s not.”

  “Well, Birdie … someone has to pay.”

  Hans-Peter Guth saw the uprising as somehow linked to the larger lie of a global Zionist conspiracy to rule the world, and he went around the camp yelling about how he was “stabbed in the back.” This of course was the fuel that made him a Nazi in the first place, and the fact that his prisoners were not going to their deaths passively was, in his mind, somehow linked to a secret Jewish council that wanted to control the world. What is astonishing about the escape, even mind-boggling, is that Guth felt like a victim. As he later noted to his wife, the rebellion happened on the Ides of March, and he thought of himself as Julius Caesar because he had been stabbed in the back.

  “How could this happen?” he asked her. “It’s like lice bringing down a healthy man.”

  Lubizec was temporarily shut down because the camp needed to be secured, damages needed to be assessed, new warehouses needed to be built, and the engine attached to the gas chamber needed to be replaced. Guth locked himself in his office and began to calculate how much voltage was needed to electrify the fence, and he ordered new slabs of concrete poured behind the gas chambers. He commandeered three tractor engines from local farmers.

  “This won’t slow us down,” he told his men one morning as he walked past the ashy remains of Zurich. “On the contrary, these new modifications are going to speed things up. This little misadventure has hidden lessons in it. Hidden lessons, I say.”

  Over the next few days, a number of prisoners were found in the woods, and they were brought back to Lubizec with their wrists bound in barbed wire. A huge gallows was erected on the north end of the Rose Garden, and these men were all hanged with piano wire. It was a slow and painful death, made all the more heartbreaking by Guth’s decision to have piano music played over the central loudspeaker. As the men dropped, one by one, Chopin’s “Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor” floated and danced around the camp. The music waltzed on, spritely and light, as the throats of these men were cinched shut.

  Avrom Petranker died in this way. He had been found hiding in a hayloft, and a farmer turned him in for two bags of sugar. According to eyewitnesses, Petranker said something before the stool was kicked out from underneath him, but no one knows exactly what it was. Some heard him say, “Free Poland.” Others heard him say, “I am going to Israel now.” We don’t know exactly what he said before the piano wire cinched his airway shut, but since he chose to fight the Nazis when they first invaded Poland, and since he was a key organizer of the escape, it stands to reason that his last words were full of defiance.

  Moshe Taube, the same man who stood up during the mock Seder and sang about his murdered wife, was also captured. It happened in a field and he was badly beaten as they dragged him back to Lubizec. He too yelled out something before the stool was kicked away, but this too has been lost to the ether of history.

  Equally, we don’t know what happened to David Grinbaum. His body was never found and he wasn’t hanged, so maybe he escaped. Maybe he wasn’t blasted into mist by a landmine and maybe he survived the war. Maybe he started life over again and erased the word Lubizec from his vocabulary. This is possible. Anything is possible. Is it very likely, though? How we answer this question says much about our sense of hope.

  As for Guth, he had to write a report about the escape. He went into his office, rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter, and stared at it for a long time. He lit a smoke and rubbed his forehead. He started biting his fingernails again.

  Thanks to the Nazi mania for documentation, we have this report today. It is brief, very businesslike, and the first page is in paragraph form. The second page (marked “Addendum”) is a long list of damage to the camp. Guth suggests that no one could have foreseen the escape and he writes that “all culprits have been caught and hanged.” There is a short paragraph praising the guards who were killed in the escape, and he mentions that Christian Schwartz was “ambushed with a knife” and that Gustav Wagner was “shot in a cowardly surprise attack.” He also talks about how Rudolf Oberhauser was “murdered while defending a vital sector of the camp” and that Kurt Hackenhold was “beaten to death by unknown enemies.” Guth concludes the report by saying, “They died in service to the Führer.”

  There is one final line before his signature. We can almost imagine Guth sitting in his oak chair and staring at a wall calendar for March 1943. Sunlight flitters through a dense haze of cigarette smoke as he leans forward and types the last sentence. His fingers work quickly and the snapping keys sound like bullets being fired into a wall.

  “Lubizec must temporarily cease operation.”

  What isn’t mentioned in the report is what Guth told his wife later that night. He fully expected to be taken to Lublin Castle, and shot.

  Chaim Zischer and Dov Damiel hid in the forest for three days. They crouched in a ravine and listened to truckloads of Germans searching for them. Dogs were sent into the woods, but they always seemed to sniff in the opposite direction and round up other prisoners. The newly freed men tried to sleep during the day and follow the milky moon at night. They shivered with damp and fantasized about eating huge meals in front of a roaring fire. After several nights of walking southwest towards Kraków, they felt as if they had finally moved beyond the gravitational field of Lubizec, and they began to see things, normal things, things they had almost forgotten about, things like cars on the roads, and farms, and trains loaded down with something other than people.

  Hunger gnawed at them. It nibbled at their bowels and made them burp ceaselessly. They produced an unbelievable amount of saliva, as if their mouths were working on invisible chunks of food. Zischer and Damiel marched through sloppy wet snow and talked about eating loaves of rye bread with fat squares of melting butter. They licked their lips at visions of grilled cod and potatoes. They talked of mutton and carrots. Their stomachs were fleshy sacks of emptiness, and these unfilled gurgling spaces at the center of their being finally got the better of them when they stood near a farmhouse and watched a woman feeding chickens. They dreamed of drumsticks, wings, and warm yolks. They still had the diamonds from Lubizec and they held out their hands as if these precious rocks might turn into eggs.

  Dov wanted to wait until nightfall and steal two chickens but Zischer said they couldn’t cook it with a campfire.

  “We can’t risk the light,” he said.

  They argued in whispers about what to do and decided to approach the farmhouse at dusk. If the woman agreed to help, great. If she didn’t agree to help, they could always
run into the woods and zigzag through the trees.

  They crouched behind a large bush and watched the sun go down. A blanket of ink was pulled across the land and when it was completely dark they gingered their way towards the farm. The road was rutted and pools of melting snow reflected the stars above. A light was on and muffled music came from the kitchen. The two men were soaked. They shivered and smelled of the outdoors.

  Dov knocked on the door with a single knuckle.

  Nothing happened, so he knocked harder—this time, using his fist.

  There were footsteps and the sound of a lock being undone. The door opened an inch and a woman with thick wiry hair, glasses, and a worried face stood before them.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re soldiers, in the former Polish Army, and we’re wondering if you have something to eat.” Dov put his fingertips to his mouth and pretended to chew.

  Before the woman could answer, a car came down the road and they all turned to look at the headlights. She adjusted her glasses as the car got closer and closer.

  “Wait here,” she said, shutting the door. A deadbolt snapped shut.

  The car rolled over the dirt road. Puddles splashed up into its wheel wells and the radio blared out a German song about farming the land. It came over a low rise with its headlights reaching into the air and it slowed as it passed the farm entrance. It kept moving away, dragging the music behind it.