The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (18 page)

Guth shrugged as if to say,
It dropped into my lap
. He leaned in to kiss her but she stepped back.

“We really need to talk, Hans.”

“No.
You
need to go home,” he said pleasantly, while walking back to his car. He paused and snapped his fingers. “By the way, my men walked the perimeter of the camp last night searching for … oh, I don’t know … anything suspicious. They found these.”

He tossed a pair of opera glasses to her and she caught them, clumsily.

“They look like yours.”

“No. They aren’t.”

“They also found this.” He held up a hunting cap. “It’s strange, but it looks just like mine. How did it get in the forest next to your opera glasses, I wonder?”

“I have no idea.”

He dropped his cigarette and scrunched it beneath his boot. He looked up and smiled. “Now who’s lying, Jasmine? Look, be a good wife and go home. Stay away. This place is beyond you.”

A train huffed in the distance and a curl of smoke lifted up from the trees.

“I have to go,” he said, walking around the snout of his car. His shadow stretched across the chrome headlights.

“I’m leaving. For Berlin,” she blurted out. “I’m taking the kids with me.”

Something caught his eye and he pulled out a pure white handkerchief. He spat on it and began rubbing. Jasmine watched this and realized he was buffing bird shit off one of the car windows. He rubbed and rubbed. He spat and continued erasing the little
spot that annoyed him. The train blasted its whistle and the engine grunted to life. Guth didn’t notice the jet of black soot rising up into the sky, nor did he see birds wheeling away in a peppery sprinkle. His whole body was focused on his Mercedes. He kept rubbing and rubbing.

“Berlin. I mean it,” Jasmine yelled over the approaching train. “We’re leaving tonight.”

The train came closer. The engine gathered speed. Fifteen wooden cars were pulled behind, and each one of them had arms sticking out of barb-wired openings. A face floated up in one of the windows and sank away. There were screams for help, screams for water and, as these 1,700 souls traveled down a final kilometer of greased rail, husband and wife said nothing more to each other. They got into their cars and turned in opposite directions. Huge clouds of dust were left in their wakes.

A minute later, the forest was silent again. The circling birds settled back onto the trees. Dust settled back onto the road.

It was as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

12

J
asmine took her children and drove up to Lublin the next morning, where they caught a train to Warsaw and then, from there, an express to Berlin. When Guth found out about it, he calmly told her to return home, immediately. She refused and said that if he wanted to talk about the matter further she’d be at her parents’ house in the district of Charlottenburg. They came from good money and they had a huge stockpile of tinned food, jam, sugar, and flour. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was hunkering down with people that she loved.

When she hung up, Guth stood beside his desk and stared out the window. A breeze kicked up some leaves and they skittered away in a small tornado of wind. He replaced the telephone in its holder and snapped wrinkles out of his uniform. He had other problems to deal with. Rather large problems, as it turned out.

The machinery of the camp moved along with unstoppable terror and the killing took on a rushed, frantic schedule all its own. It didn’t matter if it was blazing hot or if a thunderstorm crackled overhead—the timetable of murder never changed and Guth had gotten used to it. He liked how predictable everything was. It made him feel calm. Soon a week passed without his family, then two weeks, then three, and he adapted to life without them. He let Lubizec absorb him so completely that he began to sit in his office thinking up new ways to streamline the slaughter and make everything more cost effective. Even though Guth was a skilled bureaucrat who snuffed out innocent life, and even though he was responsible for implementing the Final Solution with no moral qualms whatsoever, his superiors in Lublin and Berlin began to ask questions about his leadership. It had nothing to do with the gas chambers or the number of Jews he was
killing—not at all—not that. It had to do with a small area of camp we have not talked about yet.

“Zurich” was located in Camp I and it was made up of eight long, wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire. On each door were painted signs that either read
Bekleidungslager
or
Effektenlager
, but no one ever used these labels. Each barrack was stuffed with items stolen from the transports and it all needed to be sorted and tallied before being sent on to Berlin. One barrack held nothing but folded trousers and jackets. Another held nothing but shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. It was possible to walk into one barrack and see piles of jewelry as tall as a desk, as well as barrels full of wedding rings. There was an enormous pile of glasses in one barrack because, if someone entered Lubizec with poor eyesight, they were, as a rule, immediately sent to the gas chambers. It made no sense to have prisoners bumbling around in the rain if they couldn’t see properly, and the guards quickly realized that hitting a prisoner on the head often resulted in eyewear flying off and breaking anyway. Why save someone with poor eyesight when they were only going to be a burden later on? It was therefore decided that no Jew with glasses would ever be saved at Lubizec. As a result of this camp law, there were now so many glasses that Guth had them stored in a barrack until he could figure out what to do with them all. There were also thousands of wallets, purses, and photographs. The guards called this area of camp Zurich because it was like walking into a Swiss bank. Anything you could possibly want was there: clothes, booze, hats, watches, gold, silverware, money, diamonds. It was a place of unlimited wealth.
^*

Thanks to Chaim Zischer’s book,
The Hell of Lubizec
, we know a surprising amount about this area of camp, as well as many of the guards. Names like Rudolf Oberhauser, Christian Schwartz, Sebastian Schemise, Gustav Wagner, and Heinrich Niemann have
become synonymous with the brutality of the place. Zischer’s role as a dentist (that is, a prisoner who extracted gold teeth from the dead) meant that he was under the command of
Unterscharführer
Peter Franz, who was called “Birdie” because he had the odd habit of saying, “I’ve got you now, birdie,” before shooting a prisoner in the head. He ordered them to lie on the ground with their faces turned away and then he pointed his pistol at that little spot above the ear. Before he fired he always said that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.” It had become such a scripted line that other guards would often ask him, “How many today?” Birdie would hold up three fingers or maybe seven to show his tally.

“He was short,” Zischer says in his book. “His eyes were hard green marbles and you didn’t want his attention for too long because you might hear that dreaded phrase, ‘I’ve got you now, birdie.’ Then it was off to the Roasts with you.”

Things that made Birdie angry ranged from stealing, to yawning, to slapping mosquitoes, to having your tummy rumble, to needing the toilet, to hiccupping, to passing wind, to wearing a watch. Any one of these infractions could make him bring out his pistol and then a prisoner would hear that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.”

Peter Franz was directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of prisoners. Maybe thousands. He was also in charge of Zurich and it was his job to make sure everything was sorted, labeled, weighed, boxed, catalogued, tracked, and placed onto railcars. Faceless men in the halls of Berlin seemed to think the amount of gold and money had gone down at Lubizec even though the number of transports had gone up. They wanted to know why profits had declined when traffic into the camp had become so brisk.

A stern letter was written telling Guth that his guards were under investigation and that special attention would be given to Peter Franz. It was made known that an SS judge was on his way to Lubizec. A review was going to be carried out but the letter also stated that “under no circumstances should the resettlement of the Jews slow or stop. The primary function of your camp must continue while the secondary, more economical function, is under scrutiny.”

Guth was furious.

After yet another transport of human beings had been turned into a truckload of ash, he ordered his men into the Rose Garden and snapped them to attention. This was designed to knock them off balance because this was where the Jews were ordered to separate; it was a place where husbands and wives were torn apart, it was place of shrieking violence. Above all else, it was a place where the SS were in total control but, now, Guth made them stand there, uneasy and scrutinized.

Dov Damiel was stunned to see his tormentors fixed at such attention. He worked all the harder because forty guards were watching his every move.

“It was terrifying,” he later said. “Guth lined them up in the Rose Garden and I had never seen such a thing. It was like he was reminding them who was the chief bully at Lubizec. He was saying, ‘This is my camp.’ He was saying that everyone, Jew and gentile alike, was under his fist. No one was allowed to disobey him.”

Guth paced. He said nothing at first but then he started shouting.

“I mean really shouting,” Dov Damiel said in a 1977 interview. “We had never heard him shout before. No one had. His whole face, it becomes a purple beet, and then this killer, he holds up a single finger and that’s when the shouting really begins. No matter where you stood in camp you could hear this raging. I thought he was going to pull out his pistol and shoot a guard. I really did.”

Guth stood in front of his uniformed men like a thunderhead. He paced and said this was no way for the SS to act and that stealing from Zurich must stop immediately. He said he wouldn’t have his camp taken away from him because he had worked too goddamn hard to become commandant and he’d be damned if someone took away his camp,
his
camp. Any guard caught stealing was a “miserable fucking thief” and he would be sent to the Russian front.

“You assholes better shape up! I expect you to be as hard as Krupp steel!”

Dov Damiel and Chaim Zischer also worried about an SS judge nosing around the camp because they wondered if all the prisoners
would be shot beforehand. It would be easier for the guards to shoot them with machine guns and then repopulate the camp with fresh prisoners who had never seen the stealing firsthand. Why take any chances? Liquidate everyone. Purge and start over. Wipe the slate clean.

Zischer was certain he would die. “Why keep me alive when I had personally seen Birdie steal suitcases of gold? Suitcases, I tell you. Huge leather suitcases that took two hands to carry.”

As for Guth, his anger cooled like cracking lava. He adjusted his peaked hat with both hands and there was a long ragged sigh as if he were dealing with stupid children.

He lit a cigarette, walked across the sandy ground for his office, and yelled out one final command.

“Birdie. My office. Now.”

13