The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (5 page)

BOOK: The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard
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The men were gassed first. And while they were being sealed into concrete airtight rooms, their wives, daughters, and mothers were being pushed into wooden barracks to have their hair cut off. The barbers had strict orders to make only three snips with the scissors. No more, no less. The women were rushed in naked, they were forced to sit down on benches, and then these barbers would snip in quick rapid jerks. Curls fell to the floor, like a carpet of leaves.

Dov Damiel, a survivor, was interviewed about this in 1977. He says when groups of women rushed in, he was forbidden to say anything. Not a word. The only sound in the room was the furious clipping of scissors. These women knew something horrible was going to happen and many of them asked how they would die.

“By firing squad? Electricity? Tell me.”

When these women spoke, their voices sounded like powder. They stood around, covering their nakedness as best they could with their arms. Many of them had pale skin and varicose veins. Some wanted the barbers to slow down so that they might have a few more minutes of life. Many sobbed.

The guards paced the floor and shouted, “
Die Haare schneller schneiden. Schneller, schneller!

When interviewed about this in 1977, Dov Damiel said he tried to pat the women’s shoulders and offer one last act of kindness but, as he says, “The Nazis, they make us move so quick. One woman, she sits down and I have to cut, cut, cut, and then another takes her place. Blond hair, black hair, gray hair, red hair, curly and straight, it all falls when the scissors go to work. It was such a violation taking these women’s hairs and I still hear their cryings in my head. ‘Please cut slowly. Please … I want to live.’ They begged me these things but what can I do? I am only one man caught in a web.”

We don’t have a single story about what it was like to run into this room naked, to have your hair cut away, and then to be pushed back out into the sunlight. Hundreds of thousands of women went through this at Lubizec, but none of them survived to tell us what it was like. Their stories have all been erased.

Anyone unfamiliar with a death camp may wonder why the Nazis were gathering their hair in the first place, but the answer is simple as long as we are satisfied with a technical response like: “It was useful for the Third Reich.” Enormous sacks of hair were gathered up and shipped to Hamburg where they were made into blankets. These blankets were then given out to submarine crews. Hair, like gold or wheat, or life itself, was just a commodity to the Nazis. It was there to be harvested.

“Schneller schneiden,”
the guards yelled.

From this room of flashing scissors, the women were then herded down that walled dirt path called
Himmelstraße
(the Road to Heaven). They were forced to run so they didn’t have time to absorb where they were going. Running meant they were always on edge and it meant they couldn’t think of escape. The guards whipped them, constantly. They used heavy leather cables and took sloppy aim at shoulders, heads, and buttocks. If someone tripped and fell into the sand, a guard would flail away until that woman staggered up and joined the others. In this way, fear and speed drove everyone into the gas chambers because they all wanted to escape the hail of whippings. Once the door was screwed shut, it hardly mattered if a revolt was planned. By then it was too late.

Guth, however, didn’t want his guards behaving like “silverback gorillas.” Brutality was necessary to keep everything in order, but he didn’t like to watch it, possibly because it reminded him of the trenches of World War I. So, after he delivered his speech at the train platform, he strolled back to his office with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t like watching the victims undress, nor did he like the haircutting, but he usually appeared when the naked masses were driven up the Road to Heaven. Guards later said it reminded them of cows or pigs being pushed into pens.

The gas chamber was the only brick building in camp and Guth had it painted white because he thought it might appear less threatening, more medical. There were flowerpots near the entrance and immediately above the door were the words,
Bad und Desinfektion
(Shower and Disinfection). Inside the building were four separate
chambers and they were rotated so that at least one was in constant use. Behind the whitewashed building was a massive engine with an elaborate system of pipes that was connected to the bunker. The gas chamber doors were heavy and required two guards to push them shut. Three winged screws (one on top, one in the middle, one beneath) were spun home quickly. A glass peephole was in the middle and the last thing many victims saw was an eye looking at them—it glanced left and right. A moment later, carbon monoxide spilled into the room and a cloak of heavy poison fell upon them.
*

Chaim Zischer, who managed to survive all of this, said that screaming happened all the time at Lubizec.

“It was constant from the moment a transport arrived, until the moment it was processed. There was always screaming at Lubizec. It was horrible. Horrible. These cries were made from deep within the lungs and it kept on going and going. This noise only stopped in the gas chamber. It was like a switch had been flicked, and then the silence was total. You could actually
hear
the silence. Imagine all that noise and then … nothing.”

When the mass killing ended, the prisoners of Lubizec became busy with other tasks. A “camouflage unit” was ordered to rake footprints out of the Road to Heaven as well as clean up any blood that might have been splattered onto the wooden walls. Other prisoners were forced to inspect clothing for diamonds that might have been stitched into seams. Another group pulled gold teeth from corpses, and lastly, some one hundred prisoners began hauling bodies to the graves. They laid them out—head to foot—and when the bodies were all knitted together in the earth, quicklime was caked onto them.

Guth was pleased with the clockwork motion of his camp, and whenever he had a free moment he disappeared into his office. He put on a little Mozart and lost himself in numbers. If a problem was
particularly sticky, he might sit back and twirl his wedding ring. At other times, he pulled out a slide rule and did math on a large piece of paper. When the sun began to set over the guard towers, he loaded up his briefcase and drove home. Trees swayed in the wind. Rabbits darted out from the murky woods. Guth followed the dirt road away from camp and felt his heart swell with love for his children.

He wondered, vaguely, what was for dinner. He pressed down on the accelerator.

*
Unlike Auschwitz, which used Zyklon-B (hydrogen cyanide) to murder the innocent, the death camps of Operation Reinhard used carbon monoxide from engines. We will discuss this more in the following chapters, but for information on the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, please see two harrowing eyewitness accounts from survivors: Filip Müller’s
Eyewitness Auschwitz
(1979) and Shlomo Venezia’s
Inside the Gas Chambers
(2007).

3
THE VILLA

C
ommandant Guth took up horse riding at the end of the summer. He first learned to ride in the early 1930s to impress the higher-ups in the Party and, to his great surprise, he ended up enjoying it. Living in the heart of Berlin made this new hobby difficult because there were so few places to ride properly, but the Polish countryside was lush and wide open. It was built for a man and his horse. He didn’t like galloping through tall, wet grass or jumping wooden fences but he did enjoy the lazy pace of a horse threading its way through birch trees.

He bought a muscular white animal from a local breeder and got himself a saddle—an American one that seemed very cowboy. It had fine leatherwork, strong cross-stitching, and he paid to have his name embossed in heavy gothic lettering. HP GUTH. It cost a small fortune but money was flowing into Lubizec. It was like a money pump had been turned on because gold, diamonds, and currency from France, Norway, the Netherlands, and Russia were funneling into his camp. It was tempting to skim off the top, of course, but he always bundled everything up and made scrupulous records of what had been found. The Reich Office gave him a huge raise because they were pleased with how much he was sending back to Berlin. This new salary, along with the massive country house at his disposal, made him feel like a feudal lord or baron.

“These are good days,” he wrote to his mother. “I haven’t been this happy before.”

Thanks to Jasmine’s unpublished diary, we know Guth rode to work most days and that he enjoyed the solitude. It calmed him, it soothed him, and he liked how the rolling motion of his horse brought him home at dusk. Sometimes he looked down at the leaf
rot and pinecones beneath him, and other times he studied the circling hawks overhead. Misty sunlight surrounded him as he plodded home, unbuttoning his SS collar. Sometimes he stopped by a bubbling creek and watched the crystal-clear waters.

We might wonder how Guth could oversee the machinery of mass annihilation and then go home to his family. It’s easy to use words like
monster
or
beast
when we talk about him but we should remember he was a human being that walked the earth. By calling him a monster we remove him from our species, and although this might be precisely what we want to do, to dismiss him as an aberration, we need to remember that a man committed these crimes. Not a monster. A man.

It’s hard to understand people like Guth. We imagine that for him coming home from Lubizec was like taking off a great woolen cloak of wickedness and hanging it on a peg. There it hung until the next morning when he robed himself in it again. He opened the front door, stepped back into the world, and returned to killing. Guth went to work with the same indifference as a butcher or exterminator. No doubt he slept well at night. He worried about his kids and was affectionate with them. His worldview was crystal clear and he saw absolutely nothing wrong with mass homicide. He went to work, he did his job, he came home and hung up his uniform.

The path beneath him was firm and sure as he rode through the trees, his conscience unbothered. The leather saddle creaked beneath him as he clomped up the cinder driveway towards the house and sauntered into the stable, where he turned the reins over to a Polish boy (he never could remember the kid’s name) and he muttered something about buffing the brass until it sparkled.

“Like a diamond.”

He jogged up his small hill and came to a patio. Huge banks of sparrows were wheeling and tumbling through the air in choreographed bursts of speed and peppery black. His wife sat in a chaise longue watching the sun dissolve into the lake. He joined her. A band of oily pink simmered on the dark water as he sat in a pinstriped deck chair. Fireflies came out as burning green dots. They winked like little stars in a shifting constellation.

Guth pulled out a silver cigarette case, one that had someone else’s name on it. A Jewish name.

“Hans. What
is
that smell?”

He lit a match and ignored her. The flame illuminated the lower half of his face.

“It’s been two months since we arrived and that stink’s still in the air. What’s going on in that camp of yours?”

He rubbed his forehead and exhaled slowly. “We don’t have water pipes installed yet and the prisoners need to bathe. We’re at war … remember? I can’t snap my fingers and make copper pipes appear.”

She made a face. “That seems like more than unwashed bodies.”

“Well then,” he said, pointing to a lilac bush, “do you want more of these around the house?”

“No, I’d like the truth.”

They watched the fireflies glow and fade for a moment. The world beyond the patio was shadowed in dark but a large carpet of warm light spilled out of the house. It was inviting.

The wind batted Jasmine’s hair and she removed a few strands from her mouth. “It’s just that …”

“What?” He was obviously annoyed but he took a little breath and asked the question again, this time with more patience. “What?”

“I’ve heard things. In the village. People say horrible things about what’s happening in that camp.”

BOOK: The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard
6.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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