The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (35 page)

Zischer stood before the stone monument for a long time. He touched it with an outstretched hand and he let out a long, low gasp. His shoulders bobbed up and down as he wept, openly and loudly. His family circled around him and placed their hands on his back.

This is where a happy ending should be. This is where all the lost threads are supposed to be woven back together. A story of the Holocaust cannot end with the dead coming back to life—we know this, we accept this, but we still want mothers to be reunited with their sons. We still want people who were separated in the Rose Garden to see each other again and weep for joy at their reunion. It would be wonderful to imagine the dead being sucked back towards
the camp, back into the hot womb of the Roasts, it would be pleasing to imagine their bodies being unburned and the gas chambers gifting them with the breath of life, it would be glorious to watch them climb back onto the trains and roll back towards their lives, unharmed and beloved. Millions upon millions of people would be reborn, and the Nazis would march out of Poland, picking up their bombs and bullets as they went. If the Holocaust ran in reverse like some kind of old and magical newsreel, it would be the most beautiful moment in history. Beautiful.

But that is not the story of the Holocaust.

The story of the Holocaust can only run in one direction: toward the watchtowers, the gas chambers, and the fires. This might be why Lubizec isn’t visited by many people today. Perhaps its pain is too raw and full of too much weeping.

Meanwhile, as the years tick by and the snow continues to fall, we are lulled into believing that peace has finally found the camp. On a winter’s day, everything looks so innocent. A heavy blanket of white allows us to pretend none of it happened. And still the snow keeps on falling down, down, down. It gets caught in branches and shrubs. It covers the nameless memorial stones on the Road to Heaven, and in that moment, the world seems so gentle, so pure, so cleansed of wickedness. But hiding beneath the snow is a thick layer of human ash. It hides there as a silent reminder of what we are capable of doing to each other. It cries to us from the ground and haunts our understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be civilized.

T
his is a work of fiction. Lubizec never actually existed, but it easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a synthesis of such real death camps as Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka where at least a million and a half souls perished between the years 1941 and 1943 under what was known as Operation Reinhard. Virtually all of them were Jewish.

The genesis of this novel sprang from a class I was teaching on the Holocaust, and it startled me—deeply—to learn that my students had never heard of the camps mentioned above. I believe most Americans see no fundamental difference between the camps listed above and the more “ordinary” concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. The reason for this has much to do with Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka resting far behind Soviet lines after the war. These death camps simply weren’t as well known as the camps in the American and British sectors. Auschwitz is a special case, as well it should be, because even though it was behind Soviet lines, it was both a death camp
and
a concentration camp; it was also unforgivably massive, and we have testimonies from a number of survivors about what the place was like. The Operation Reinhard camps were only slightly larger than three football fields, and they were designed to murder thousands of people a day. Such factories of death had little need for prisoners, and this meant few survived to bear witness, which of course is why we know so little about them. By late 1943, these death camps were all plowed into the ground in an attempt to hide their existence, and this, too, has contributed to a general lack of knowledge. Hardly any photographs of these places exist, and there is no known video footage whatsoever. The arithmetic of loss at Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka is so vast, so painful that it’s hard to grasp what happened there. These tiny spots of earth extinguished life at a breathtaking speed, yet for most people today, these camps reside in shadow. This strikes me as very wrong. I hope
this narrative might in some small way shed light and act as a kind of remembrance. More than anything, I hope it might nudge readers to find out more about Operation Reinhard.

A number of books have shaped my understanding of the Holocaust over the decades, but for the purposes of this novel I am particularly indebted to Chil Rajchman’s
The Last Jew of Treblinka
, Yitzhak Arad’s
Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka
, Gitta Sereny’s harrowing interviews with Franz Stangl in
Into That Darkness
, Jean-François Steiner’s
Treblinka
, Richard Rashke’s
Escape from Sobibór
, Samuel Willenberg’s
Revolt in Treblinka
, as well as Laurence Rees’s
Auschwitz
, and
“The Good Old Days”
:
The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
, edited by Ernst Klee. A number of documentaries have brought the Holocaust into sharper focus for me over the years, but for this book I am most grateful for Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour masterpiece,
Shoah
. I first watched this as a teenager in the 1980s, and it has continued to burn in my imagination ever since. It is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the Holocaust better. (Finally, I suppose I should mention I learned much from Rudolf Höss’s memoir,
The Commandant of Auschwitz
; however, I simply cannot bring myself to say that I am indebted to this mass murderer in the same way I am indebted to the others mentioned above.)

The quotes that appear in the chapter entitled “Evidence” are authentic. They really were said by Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Josef Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler on the dates specified. Equally, Odilo Globocnik really did oversee the genocidal gears of Operation Reinhard, and while I have fictionalized his words, the spirit of his hatred was very genuine and very real. This man was responsible for a tremendous amount of pain, and yet he is just a footnote in most history books. For the minutiae of Hitler’s life and what he was like in private (that information which appears in “The Visit”), I am indebted to Ian Kershaw’s exhaustive and brilliant biography,
Hitler
.

The escape in this novel was inspired by those at Sobibór and Treblinka, but it is important for me to mention that the orphanage
director in “Numbers” is based upon Janusz Korczak. A compassionate and gentle man, Korczak turned down several offers to save his own life, and instead, he accompanied nearly two hundred orphans to their deaths in Treblinka. We don’t know exactly what happened when they got to the camp, but we do know that he told the boys to dress in their best clothes, and he told them they were all loved. Sometime in early August 1942, he stepped into one of the gas chambers with them. A memorial stone bears his name at Treblinka today.

This novel could not have been written without the generous financial support I received from the Bush Artist Foundation. This grant allowed me to spend considerable time in Kraków as well as many, many, hours in Auschwitz. I am also grateful for the ARAF grant that allowed me to spend time in Lublin (known as the “Jewish Oxford” before the war began), and from there, I was able to conduct extensive research at Majdanek, Belzec, and Sobibór. The latter camp played a key role in how I envisioned what Lubizec might look like today. A National Endowment for the Arts grant via the South Dakota Arts Council allowed me to visit Warsaw, study the uprising of 1943, and spend time in the rocky wasteland of Treblinka. Although no place shook me to my core as deeply as Auschwitz-Birkenau, there is something about the jagged desolation of Treblinka that has never really left me. To visit these sites of mourning made the Holocaust rise out of history and become something very physical, colored, and real. It is one thing to study these places. It is quite another to walk their soil.

This project was very difficult to write—it gave me frequent nightmares—but I am unfairly blessed with family and friends who asked about it, kept me on track with their gentle questions, and offered suggestions on how to make it better. This includes the English and Journalism Department at Augustana College, the good people at the South Dakota Humanities Council, Saint John’s University, Lynne Hicks, Jim Hicks, Sheila Risacher, Erin Crowder, Jayson Funke, William J. Swart, David O’Hara, Joe Dondelinger, Geoffrey Dipple, Jan Brue Enright, Christine Stewart, Jim Reese,
Jeannie Wenshau, Nick Hayes, David McMahon, Jon Lauck, Jeffrey Gustavson, Michael Trudeau, Kent Meyers, and Brian Turner. I’m totally beholden to Roland Pease and Chip Fleischer at Steerforth for believing in the project, nudging me with editorial questions, and helping me to tell this story—thank you so very much, gentlemen. My additional thanks to Peter Black at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as the many anonymous souls who answered my questions throughout my time in Poland (I am particularly grateful to the man who gave me his umbrella at Belzec because he didn’t want me to get wet; such a small act of generosity in such a terrible place). I am also thankful to Murray Haar for his guidance with Judaism, Stephan Lhotzky for his help with German, and Philip Gans (#139755) who survived Auschwitz and was enormously gracious not only with his time but also with access to his painful memories.

Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Tania. She offered insightful comments, gave me unwavering support, and understood my need to write as well as my need to visit Poland so many times. Thank you, Tania. Thank you for this and for so very much more. Without you, none of this would have been possible. None of it.

Patrick Hicks is the author of several poetry collections, most recently
Finding the Gossamer
and
This London
. His work has appeared in some of the most vital literary journals in America, including
Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Briar Cliff Review
, and many others. He has won the Glimmer Train Fiction Award as well as a number of grants, including ones from the Bush Artist Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. After living in Europe for many years, he now lives in the Midwest where he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College and also a faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.