The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (23 page)

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?

16

W
hen 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?

The guards, however, mostly acted in unison and they took their blood oath to the SS very seriously. They delighted in acts of group brutality because it fortified their own beliefs while simultaneously reminding them they were members of an elite squad. As every German citizen knew from the newsreels and newspapers, not everyone could join the SS—only the best men with the best blood were accepted. The guards at Lubizec wanted to prove their place within the SS, and this often meant they became wild agents of destruction.

One story highlights this in a particularly awful way. It happened sometime in the winter of 1942 when a group of women were beaten down the Road to Heaven. It was −30°C and the wind was howling. Tendrils of snow snaked through the air and it was hard to see more than a few meters. When the women arrived at the gas chamber, the door was shut, and the guards watched them, naked and shivering. They laughed at the women and watched them stand storklike first on one foot, then the other.

“Please let us in.”

“We’ll f-f-freeze to death out here.”

They covered their chests and leaned into each other for warmth. Jets of hot breath escaped from their mouths as they danced around, but still the guards wouldn’t let them in.

They stood outside for thirty minutes as the men smoked cigarettes and talked about potbelly stoves. One of the guards, Rudolf Oberhauser, opened the gas chamber door and shut it quickly.

“Whew. It’s
hot
in there. Like a sauna.”

The other guards laughed as these women rubbed their goose-pimpled flesh. Their jaws chattered as they danced around.

“Please let us in.”

They tucked their fingers into their armpits and hunched into little balls.

“P-p-please.”

When the door was finally opened, the women pushed into the brick building as a funnel of flesh. The engine was started and thirty minutes later their bodies were tossed into a snowbank. Later that night, as their flesh burned and popped, the guards joked about how these women were warm at last.