The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (22 page)

Posters were glued to shop fronts that ordered all Jews into a ghetto and this was followed by beatings, the closure of all twelve synagogues, and endless demands for money. Medical equipment was taken out of the Jewish hospital on Lubartowska Street and hardly a syringe or stethoscope was left behind to treat its hundreds of patients. Even the beds were stripped away. Many of the windows were broken out of spite.

Other things began to happen. If a German was strolling down the sidewalk it now meant everyone else had to walk in the gutter. Zischer saw a young boy—no more than ten or eleven years old—who didn’t get off the sidewalk quickly enough. A German officer pulled out his pistol, pushed the boy against the wall, and shot him. It was as fast as a car accident. One minute the boy was walking along and the next he was dead. It was shocking, yes, but what really haunted Zischer was the sound of it. There was a loud
krumpf
as the
bullet cracked into the boy’s skull, like a melon being split open. Zischer stumbled away when he saw this and he went home to hold Jakob close to his chest. How could he protect his child from such wild beasts? The Germans were not men. They were animals dressed as soldiers. He kissed his son’s forehead and tried not to think about that sound, that splitting.

They lived in the ghetto for two years and he became resourceful at smuggling in bread and tinned goods from someone on the outside. Snow fell. The seasons changed. Random shootings and beatings continued to happen. The old were shot against brick walls. Children that had been newly orphaned begged in the street and people went around selling whatever they thought would make money—toffee, books, boiled eggs, candles, matches, Star of David armbands. One man walked around with a huge tray of sliced bread. It was covered with barbed wire to keep thieves from snatching a slice and running around a corner. Another sold milk by the glass. But there was never enough food in the ghetto. Stomachs rumbled and it became popular to talk about extravagant meals no one could possibly afford. Men and women dropped dead of hunger and people walked past their bodies, no longer horrified by the sight of death.

Somehow life carried on and underground theatres popped up. Music was played in backrooms and it was easy to delude yourself that everything was still normal. You could sip coffee at a table and talk with your friends as if you hadn’t a care in the world. The Star of David armbands became so commonplace that no one gave them a second thought and there were even times when Zischer walked around the ghetto, lost in a world of his own fanciful making. He imagined strolling the countryside and having a picnic. He twisted and turned down the streets with this pleasant image in his head when a wall suddenly appeared in front of him. Whenever this happened, he remembered that little boy being shot. The horrid realities of the ghetto immediately came rushing back and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, telling himself it would all be okay in the end.

Such moments of mental freedom happened to everyone in the ghetto but they were always interrupted by a brick wall, or a dead body, or the sight of a Nazi strutting imperiously down the street, and in these horrible reawakenings to Hitler’s World, everything felt so much worse. Zischer ran up the steps to his small apartment and held his wife. They rocked their son and listened to the distant rattle of machine guns.

“We’ll be fine,” Nela said. “I don’t know how but we
will
.” She nodded, as if placing a period onto the sentence with her chin.

And then one morning, when the sun was hardly up, Zischer and his family were rounded up on Furmanska Street along with hundreds of others. The sky was an ugly sulfurous yellow when they were marched away under heavy guard. Guns crackled in the streets as motorcycles with sidecars revved around corners. Dogs snapped and barked. Near the sooty rail yards the air stank of coal and iron. Some of the men rocked back and forth, praying to God.

The journey to Lubizec lasted two days, and when they finally arrived he watched the commandant stand on a wooden box. It was raining slightly. There were travel posters on the walls. And then—

He had no words for what happened next.

One minute he had his arm around his wife and the next he was plucked from a running group of men because he looked strong and healthy. Of the 1,400 people that arrived into camp with him, he was the only survivor. He was the only one to be spared, and it happened when a guard ordered him to unpack suitcases while, one hundred meters away, his mother, father, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, his wife and his son, they were all shoved into the unknown. His whole world was snuffed out—Nela, Jakob—everyone—and it happened so fast. It only took thirty minutes to wipe out everything he knew and loved. Only thirty minutes.

Zischer was so stunned by the overwhelming scope of this crime that he kept looking around, waiting for the universe to stop it, but the rain kept falling down, and the wickedness was allowed to continue. Days passed, then weeks, and still the trains kept on
coming. Clothes were dumped into ever higher piles of fabric and still the universe did nothing to stop the murders. He watched it all. It was like being handcuffed to devastation.

Sometimes it didn’t seem possible that Nela was really dead. Maybe he imagined it all? Maybe she was somewhere back in Lublin with Jakob and it was all just a bad dream? But there were other times, especially when he saw the Roasts being lit at night or when he saw a toddler with black hair, then he knew that her ashes, and the ashes of his boy, were scattered somewhere in the fields.

As Zischer makes painfully clear in his memoir, the first three days at Lubizec were the worst, and if we are to understand what happened next in the history of the camp, we first need to understand what it meant to be a prisoner. Zischer’s account is generally considered to be the best and he says it was possible to look at new prisoners and tell if they would last more than twenty-four hours at Lubizec.

“It became a sixth sense to us,” he said during one interview. “There was a vacancy in their eyes. They looked right through you.”

He goes on to explain how one such prisoner, a Hasidic Jew from some remote corner of Poland, had been plucked from a new transport. His forelocks and beard were snipped by the guards and he was told that his entire family (indeed, his whole village) had been gassed. He was then forced to carry their bodies to the Roasts. It was nearly midnight before this man was whipped back to Barrack 14. He took a bunk near Zischer and began to wail. He rocked back and forth, reciting the Kaddish in great broken sobs. The other prisoners told him to shut up before the SS came in to beat them silly, but this man kept on weeping and rocking.

He shouted out, “May his great name grow exalted and sanctified in the world he created as he willed.”

Another prisoner—a man with sharp features and a huge Adam’s apple—was slapping mosquitoes when he heard this. He threw a shoe at him.

“Why are you reciting the Kaddish, idiot? Look around. Does it look like God lives in this place?”

The weeping man paused for a moment. His eyes were bloodshot and full of tears.

The prisoner who threw the shoe continued slapping mosquitoes. He held up something between his fingertips.

“Do you see this? This is what we are in Lubizec. Bugs. Pests. Something to be thrown into the fire. Now stop your weeping and your prayers. We all need sleep.”

“Hey,” someone laughed a few bunks down. “Do you know why God isn’t in Lubizec?”

It was an old joke, so another voice called out the answer. “God isn’t in Lubizec because he ran up the Road to Heaven.”

The new prisoner stared at the dirt floor. His voice was weak. “They made me touch the dead. I carried my own daughter to a gigantic fire. My own daughter.” He began to murmur again. “May his great name grow exalted and sanctified in the world he created as he willed.”

“Shut up,” another prisoner shouted. “There’ll be more trains tomorrow and we need our rest.”

“More trains?”

“Plenty more. They’re killing all the Jews of Poland in this place. Now go to sleep.”

The new prisoner hugged his knees. He continued rocking back and forth. A searchlight roved across the barrack window and this cast eerie shadows on the floor. When it moved away, the shattered man began to sing a new prayer. The other prisoners did not interrupt him.

And then this man who witnessed the destruction of his family, and his village, and his entire way of life, fell into a deep silence. Sometime during the night, he hanged himself with a belt.

Zischer quickly realized that Lubizec could be boiled down to one simple and undeniable truth: the day was for killing, the night was for burning. The guards called it “Gas and Burn.” It was as reliable as gravity. It was fixed, permanent, and habitual.

The day started at 0600 hours when folk music blared out from the central tower and a single guard came into the barracks with a rubber hose. He beat it against the wooden bunk beds and yelled out,
“Antreten zum Appell. Antreten!”
(Fall in for roll call. Fall in!)

He walked across the dirt floor and smacked his hose against the bunks.

“Antreten! Antreten!”

The prisoners spilled out of their barracks and assembled in the Rose Garden where other guards walked the perimeter and smoked cigarettes. Many of them yawned. Some munched on bread or they held steaming cups of coffee. A jaunty tuba sounded from the central loudspeaker and it conjured up images of a beer hall. It made Chaim Zischer think of lederhosen, long tables, and mustardy, greasy bratwurst. Sometimes he could almost taste the fatty seasoned beef juice running down his chin.

“Antreten! Antreten!”

The polka music blasted out as three hundred prisoners ran into the sandy parade ground. When they were all standing at attention and panting heavily, the guards ordered a small group of them to collect the buckets of shit and piss that acted as toilets. They also brought out the dead. No one was allowed to move or speak as the ragged limp corpses were dragged by their legs and heaved into a wooden cart. Many bodies had a belt around their neck because they had decided to hang themselves from the low rafters inside the barracks.
^*

Zischer stood at attention with his hands on the seams of his trousers. He always tried to be in the center of the parade ground because it meant being farther away from the guards. Men on the edges were often hit, but being in the middle offered some degree of protection.

Zischer stood there—ramrod straight, cap off, chest out—and he watched leaves skitter across the parade ground. They blew in from under the fence, they flipped and tumbled and danced across the sandy ground, and they slipped away beneath the opposite fence. They were free. Bewilderingly free. A rooster sang out in some nearby field. Surely, Zischer thought, that farmer could hear the folk music, the gunshots, and the screaming. Who was this man that lived so close to a portal of death and was able to turn away from it? How did he get on with his day? Zischer hated this Polish farmer living so close to the camp. It was a pure hatred, more pure even than what he felt for the Nazis, because this Pole was a fellow countryman and he was doing absolutely nothing to help. Zischer hated this man down to the marrow in his bones.

Breakfast was served at a long wooden table held together by rusty nails and they had to file past “Quickly! Quickly!” in order to get their rations. They got a crust of rye bread, some thin oatmeal, and a cup of coffee that tasted suspiciously like dishwater. The metal ladle clicked and clacked against an enormous soup pot as the prisoners filed past, one by one. Coffee was slopped into cups while the guards yelled, “
Schneller. Schneller
.” Still the ladle clicked at a furious pace.

“Schneller. Schneller.”

Through Zischer we gain a deeper appreciation of what it might have been like to be a prisoner at Lubizec. All of the official documents, train schedules, and interrogative army interviews with camp guards offer us strong historical information but we would be wise to remember that these are Nazi sources. Zischer describes what it was like to watch people run down the Road to Heaven with truncheons and whips flailing at their naked bodies. He witnessed the sandy path covered in blood and diarrhea. He watched one group of prisoners rake the sand while another group furiously applied white paint to the walls.

“They did this to cover up the spatter,” Zischer said in 1985. “The whole thing was magic. One minute you see people and the next you see corpses. It was hocus-pocus.”

Thanks to Zischer we know about moments in camp that would have vanished into time and never been known about by anyone. We know, for example, that the guards liked to see how many people they could cram into a single chamber. We also know the steel doors were lined with green felt in order to keep the poison from leaking out. We know that Rudolf Oberhauser yelled out the phrase “Time to die” shortly before the carbon monoxide was pumped in. The inflection in his voice was always the same, almost like a song he liked to sing at a beer hall. “Time to
diiieeee
.”