The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (2 page)

Bodies were everywhere. They were dumped beside the rail tracks, scattered around like rag dolls. A thick meaty stench filled the air, but still Fischel drank on. His men called him “The Pickled Hermit,” and word got back to high command that there was a problem at Lubizec. Whole trainloads couldn’t be processed because the camp was so disorganized, and this infuriated
SS Hauptsturmführer
Odilo Globocnik who was in charge of exterminating the Jews of Poland. He drafted an order to replace Fischel with someone else, someone who knew how to manage problems—someone who was loyal to the Party and understood what it meant to have an ordered system.

Hans-Peter Guth arrived on May 27, 1942. He was in his early forties, handsome, in shape, and well rested. His copper-blond hair was misted with gray, and he liked to keep it clipped short. It was raining softly when his Mercedes pulled into the village five kilometers
outside of camp. The dirt roads needed to be graded smooth, and the car bumped along through deep puddles of brown water. He ordered his driver to slow down so that he could see everything.

“Good Lord,” he said, making a sour face. “What’s that
stink
?”

The car lurched through ruts as they turned down a narrow road towards the camp. Old-growth pine trees launched themselves into the sky and rabbits darted away from the car—they scurried over decaying needles as Guth pulled out a cigarette and tried to light it. The wind made this difficult, so in frustration, he flicked it onto the road. Train tracks ran beside the car in blurry parallel lines of steel, and he saw what looked like sacks of wheat every few yards. He squinted and realized they were bodies.

“What a fucking mess,” he said, shaking his head. “It looks like a war zone.”

The car continued down a tree-lined road. Sunlight and shadow flickered on the dashboard, the springs bounced and creaked, and as they rounded a corner, the bodies increased. Flies were everywhere. They drove through huge banks of them. Once-beloved humans were putrefying in various stages of wet decomposition and the smell of rotting flesh curdled the air. Guth covered his nose. The smell of aftershave was still on his fingertips and he breathed in.

“Astonishing,” he said, shaking his head. “Just astonishing.”

His car—long, shiny, the color of coal and midnight—turned and drove next to the tracks for another kilometer. The bodies increased and they looked like cast-aside marionettes, as if their strings had been cut. The camp hove into view and Guth looked through the windshield as they bounced down the unpaved road. The Mercedes came to a rolling stop in front of a red-and-white pole barricade that looked vaguely like a huge candy cane. Inside the camp, men shuffled around with shovels and Guth watched as a guard hit them with a rubber truncheon. The stink was overpowering. It crawled into his nose and made him blink a few times. He cleared his throat and tried to focus.

The driver got out, ran around the black snout of the car, and opened the door with a quick snap and a Hitler salute. “Welcome to Lubizec, sir.”

The commandant got out and stretched.

Sunlight glinted off the chrome of his car and the engine clicked as it cooled. Guth did a slow turn on the sandy gravel and glanced at the dead—the inconvenience of them—and he wondered how to solve the problem of their presence. Flies circled his head in a buzzing peppery cloud and he shooed them away with a leather glove.

“Fischel ought to be hanged for this.”

He looked down the rail tracks, which disappeared like a long iron needle into the trees. Swollen bodies were everywhere. Maggots jittered in open wounds. Ravens orbited overhead; they cawed as dark clouds began to roll in. Rain was on the horizon.

“It’s like a battlefield around here,” he said, using his foot to nudge an arm out of the way. “Or like something out of Dante’s
Inferno
.”

An SS guard stumbled around the corner with a bottle of vodka and wobbled on unsteady legs. His uniform wasn’t buttoned properly, it was cockeyed, lopsided, and this made Guth angry for the first time all morning.

“You there.”

The man with the bottle tried to come to attention but he stood like a wet shirt on a hanger.

“Are you drunk?”

There was a burp, then a giggle.

Guth’s face hardened into marble. He turned to his driver and said, “Take my things to the office and telegram my wife. Tell her I’ve arrived safely.” There was a brief pause as he looked around. “There
is
an office in this place, yes?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Good. Now send that telegram.”

The drunk realized who was in front of him and dropped the bottle. He offered up a sloppy Hitler salute as clear liquid glugged and flopped onto the sandy ground. The candy cane pole barricade was still down, and although Guth had not yet entered the camp, he could see inside.

Another guard came out of a wooden building and yelled at a prisoner who was moving too slowly. He had the gray man in dirty
clothes lie on the ground as he pulled out his pistol. The guard took careful aim at the man’s head—he straightened his arm and locked his elbow.
Crack
. It was a cool and clean shot, echoing. The guard was as dispassionate as if he had kicked a stone down the road and was pleased to see its trajectory. The guard holstered his weapon and began to stroll away.

“You there,” Guth half shouted. “Yes, you. I’m talking to you.”

The guard adjusted his SS cap and walked over as if he had all the time in the world. It began to rain and large splats of water darkened his gray uniform. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“What are you doing?”

The guard looked at the swollen bodies dumped everywhere around them and began to stammer. “I was—I was—sorry, sir. I—I don’t understand the question.”

“If you’re going to shoot these creatures, don’t leave their bodies lying around. Clean that mess up.”

The guard paused.

“Do it now.”

The guard turned on his heel but Guth whistled for him to stop. “One more thing.”

“Sir?”

“Shave your face. This isn’t a holiday resort.”

And with that, the barricade was raised and Hans-Peter Guth entered Lubizec.

During the next few weeks the bodies of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, students, rabbis, shopkeepers, musicians, and poets were gathered up. A long trench was dug. Guth stood back as exhausted, thirsty, and ragged prisoners shoveled down into the sandy soil. Limp bodies in various stages of decomposition were fitted like herrings into the raw earth. Lime was scattered onto their chests and heads as still more bodies were dragged over. Guth sometimes pointed at prisoners who worked too slowly or paused to wipe sweat from their foreheads, and whenever this happened they were tossed into the trench and shot.

While it is tempting to speculate on what Guth was thinking during all of this, we should never lose sight of the prisoners working at a fever pitch around him. We need to imagine a thin man (perhaps, let us say, a man who had been a doctor before the war) and we need to imagine him stumbling around over chests and arms and legs. His shoes sink into the layered dead. He trips often and has to hold out his arms—like a tightrope walker—to balance himself. Now let us imagine that his job is to arrange these bodies just so, and he knows that if he slows his frantic pace for any reason, or if he stands up to stretch, or if he pauses to catch his breath, he will be shot. What would this man think as Guth strolls along the lip of the trench, ledger in hand, the blue sky framing his silhouette? What would he think as Guth yells out, “I want everything clean and tidy. Ordered, yes? Good. Good.”

We can only guess what this hypothetical prisoner was thinking because no one survived this early period of Lubizec’s history. They were all murdered. This is a problem because when historians talk about the early days of Lubizec the only testimony we have comes from the Nazis themselves, and this is what makes the beginning of Lubizec so heartbreaking to bear. We want a character we can believe in, we want some nugget of truth to ponder, we want a glimmer of light amid the overpowering darkness of this extermination camp, and, more than anything else, we want to hope.

These are all perfectly reasonable desires for a world living safely beyond the gravitational field of Lubizec, but we are talking about a death camp and our expectations of narrative arc have to be readjusted and retooled in the face of so much murder. The year is 1942 and the war is far from over. In fact, the Nazis are in total control and they are tossing lives into the abyss at breathtaking speed. Although we may want the story of Lubizec told from the perspective of the victims, at this early stage in the camp’s history this is impossible to do. Stories of survivorship will come later, but for now, we can only approach this death camp through the eyes of the perpetrators. All other viewpoints have been erased. Snuffed out. Covered in lime.

We therefore know that Guth wanted everything “made cleaner” and that he banned alcohol in the SS canteen until “after 2100 hours.”

“This isn’t the front line,” he told his guards one night. “Here you have it easy because no one’s shooting at you.” He paused and raised a finger. “Write home to your mothers and sweethearts tonight. Tell them you’re safe. Tell them you love them.”

Guth had the wood line widened to create better fields of gunfire as well as strategically defined boundaries of left and right vision for the guard towers. He put distance markers out in the forest so that his men could see how far their bullets might travel if an escape ever happened. He reinforced the barbed-wire fences and put a solid guard rotation into place so his men would get proper amounts of sleep. He ran drills. He inspected weapons. He laid out clear expectations of on-duty and off-duty behavior. He also made sure his men ate decent food, he got them beds instead of cots, and he had a wide moat of landmines placed around the camp. The prisoners were forced to dig these holes, and on ten separate occasions landmines went off killing inmates, but it was never determined if these were accidents or suicides. To the guards who ran Lubizec it hardly mattered, though. Dead prisoners were dead prisoners. We can only imagine what it must have been like to sow these angry explosives into the earth, but for the prisoners, it must have felt like they were building an invisible wall around themselves, that they were burying hope itself deep in the ground. We have no account of what these men were thinking because, after this wide moat of landmines was completed, they were all shot. Students, rabbis, shopkeepers, musicians, fishmongers, tailors, doctors, and poets. Every single one of them. Shot.

Guth spent more time in his office, but unlike Wilhelm Fischel, he wasn’t a hermit. Far from it. He was on the phone constantly, drafting blueprints and making sure building materials were delivered to the camp on time.

One detail that horrified Guth about Lubizec was his discovery that whores were brought in every weekend. Apparently under Fischel’s command, local women and huge cases of champagne were brought into camp.

“We’re not running a brothel here,” he said to his guards one morning on the parade ground. The sky was salmon pink, smudged with blue clouds, and his men stood at rigid fixed attention with their shadows stretching away from them. They looked like a packet of bullets. Crows cawed and a tractor puttered in the distance. Guth took in the smoke of his cigarette, held it inside his chest for a long moment, and then spewed it out into the world.

“Things are about to change around here,” he said, pointing to the empty rail tracks. “See that? In one hour a train will arrive with pallets of bricks. These bricks have a very special purpose. Since the world began spinning, no one has done what we are about to do in this place. It will be a triumph of logistics, and when you’re all old men sitting around talking about the great war in the east, you’ll be able to look back on this moment of your life with pride.” He raised a finger and smiled. “With pride.”

Exactly one hour later a train huffed through the forest. It pulled up to Lubizec with steam erupting from both sides. After it squealed to a stop, prisoners were beaten out of the gates and ordered to unload bricks—
“Schneller, schneller.”
The sun was out and everyone felt their hair follicles open up with sweat. Guth handed a rolled-up blueprint to his subordinate, Heinrich Niemann. He was a giant of a man with a weird meandering scar on his chin. His fingers were meaty and Guth found this in keeping with the boxing information that was in Niemann’s file. Apparently in the early 1930s he was a regional Bavarian champ. He certainly had the fists for it.

“When it arrives we’ll install it over there,” Guth said lighting a cigarette. He puffed and marched over to an imaginary X. “Right here.” He tapped his foot in the patchy grass. “Here. This is where the engine will go. And I want you to erect the showers just there. It all needs to be done in a week, but if you get it done in six days I’ll throw in a crate of champagne. Get it done in
five
days and you’ll get another crate. Understand?”

He walked across the sandy earth in his polished boots and didn’t pay any attention to the prisoners who were straining to move impossibly heavy loads of bricks. One prisoner with a shock of
black hair and long gangly legs—huge kneecaps—lost control, and his bricks spilled to the ground in a clattering clunk. A guard came over and began beating him until the man was hunched into a ball. The blows sounded like a carpet being smacked clean of dirt.

Guth looked around and did a quick calculation about what still needed to be done. He walked over and spoke without anger.

“Stop that.”

Years later, when one of the guards was asked about Lubizec, he cited these few seconds as an example of Guth’s mercy. He said his commandant “didn’t like to see the Jews suffer.” Whether this is true or not is for the reader to decide, but we do know that Guth returned to his office after this incident and emerged often to make sure the gas chambers were built properly. He got out a level and made sure the brick walls were plumb. He made sure the cement was mixed into a thick paste that resembled oatmeal and he made sure prisoners smoothed out the concrete floors with long metal skims. As promised, the engine arrived the next day and it was pulled into place by a large bulldozer.