The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (26 page)

“All empires die.”

“Yes. This is true.”

“Guth is like a golem for the Nazis. He is a mindless follower. A dumb monster. He can be destroyed.”

Other prisoners were asked about escape and the idea made everyone itch with hope. As they went about the business of hosing out the gas chambers or stacking warm bodies into the pits, a strange idea began to take root in their heads: Maybe they would live to bear witness about what was happening in Lubizec?

These men had names like Jechiel, Aryeh, Josef, and Scmuel. Omet, Ravid, Joshua, Levi, Kazimierz, and Malachi. No one bothered with last names and, unlike Auschwitz, where a number was tattooed onto everyone’s arm, in Lubizec there were no such numbers. The guards referred to the prisoners as “rags” or “pieces of shit.” They did this because they saw no need to learn their names. Why bother? In a few months a fresh batch of prisoners would take their places. These prisoners were just shapes that dragged bodies from the gas chambers and yet, as much as the guards wanted these prisoners to be faceless and anonymous, the very opposite was true. The prisoners were all individuals. Some had freckles. Others had crooked teeth. Some were tall. Others short. One had bitten fingernails while another had a scar. One was bald. Another had pimples. One needed to trim the hair that sprouted out of his nose and another had large workmanly knuckles. Many of the prisoners had ghostly pink indents on their fingers where a wedding ring once sat. Such a thing proved that they were beloved, once. Most were married, once. Further back, they had all been rocked to sleep, once. At some point in time, the hot words of love had been whispered into their ears, and once, long ago, in what seemed like another life, they had all been the center of someone else’s universe. They were the sun. They were the stars and light. They were the molecules of God himself.

These men with names like Chaim, Dov, Avrom, David, Moshe, Jechiel, Aryeh, Josef, Kazimierz, Scmuel, Omet, Ravid, Joshua, Levi, and Malachi, these men who had once been cradled by loving mothers, these men who wondered what the world might be like when they grew up, these men looked at each other and decided to escape. It was dangerous but they agreed it was better than the oiled mouth of a gun being pressed into their foreheads. If they stayed in Lubizec, it was only a matter of time before they were tossed onto the Roasts.

But to go against what was expected—there at least was something, something to try. Even failure would bring a scrap of success.

The escape would take place after breakfast because they wanted
their stomachs full of rye bread. Once they finished eating, that’s when they would turn on the guards. Guns would be taken away from the SS and they would shoot their way to the garage where they would hijack one of the “ash trucks”. They would then crash through the front gate and drive out towards freedom.

One of the prisoners, Josef Bau, used to drive buses before the Nazis declared that Jews could no longer run public transportation. Bau would be protected by the others as they ran in groups of three to the garage. The guards in the watchtowers would fire their machine guns—that couldn’t be stopped or avoided—but Avrom Petranker, the former Polish military officer, told his fellow prisoners to aim at a specific tower and, in this way, covering fire might allow a few men to reach the garage. No one expected to live. They all hoped to live of course, but it seemed more likely they would be gunned down. It was better than doing nothing, though.

“The world needs to know we
did
something,” Moshe Taube said. “Let’s die for a reason at least.”

On the morning of the escape, Chaim Zischer woke up early with a knot of fear in his stomach. He had been startled awake by a terrible nightmare of gunfire and he couldn’t fall back to sleep. He wondered how long it might take to die from a bullet wound. Thirty seconds? A minute? His eyes grew heavy and he dreamed about drowning in a lake of blood.

Sometime later, the wooden door of Barrack 14 was thrown open and Birdie yelled,
“Antreten! Antreten!”

The rubber hose smacked against the bunks.

“Get up, you pieces of shit. Up, up, up!”

Again the hose whistled down.

The world was dim in the bluedawn sunrise and Zischer jumped down from his bunk. His muscles were stiff and he watched clouds of breath leak from everyone’s mouths. It reminded him vaguely of horses in a stable. They sprinted outside and Zischer pushed himself to the center of the group in order to keep away from the truncheons and whips. Folk music blared out from the central guard tower as
the soft thunder of shoes filled the air. All three hundred prisoners formed up in the Rose Garden, and when they were called to attention, they snapped off their hats in one fluid motion. Zischer’s toes were cold and he wiggled them inside his shoes. Soon, he told himself. Soon. In twenty minutes he would be either free or dead.

He smelled the crisp air. Wind flapped against his trouser legs.

Up ahead, Heinrich Niemann paced back and forth. He nearly slipped on a patch of ice but righted himself just in time before falling down.

“You rags need to be taught a lesson!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Look behind you.”

A low whispering filled the cold as the prisoners turned around. There, in the blue murk of morning, were three bodies tangled up in the barbed-wire fencing. They hung like fish in a net. One of them was so badly shot, most of his head was missing from the eyes up. Zischer thought about his own body pumping blood and how the liquid gears beneath his rib cage were going about the silent business of life. His veins were full of blood. His nerves sparkled with electricity. His cells were knitting new cells. His lungs grew big, then small, then big again. He was regenerating into a new person every second, and he wanted this to continue for years to come.

He studied a birch tree in the distance and wondered what it would be like to walk through a world without barbed wire always in front of him. It had been so long, but now the sun was coming up in a ball of orange, and he saw himself walking far beyond the perimeter of the camp. What would it be like to be free again?

“Eyes front!” Niemann shouted.

The prisoners faced the barracks in a rumble of noise. Their long shadows stretched across the trampled snow.

“Those sons of bitches thought they could escape,” Niemann said, pacing again. He held up a finger and laughed. “They thought they could cheat destiny. Stupid.”

Zischer realized the nightmare he had last night—the one with gunfire—wasn’t a dream at all. It must have been real machine guns shattering the night. Bullets really had zipped through flesh and
bone. That’s what he heard. That’s what woke him. That’s what made his eyes pop open.

“We’re the masters of life and death around here. We decide when you Jews will die. And so, my lovely rags, get on your stomachs.”

They all lay down quickly because it would be dangerous not to. The snow was cold against Zischer’s cheek and he felt a frozen mound of sand press into his chest. He caught the eye of the man next to him. It was Josef Bau, who was supposed to drive the getaway truck.

What’s going on?
they asked each other without words.

Fear washed over Zischer and adrenaline fireworked in his muscles when he heard the first shot. There was a pause, then another shot. The sound echoed into the trees. He wanted to lift his head to find out what—
crack
—was going on but if he jumped up now he would be shot for sure. But if he lay still, maybe, yes maybe, he would
—crack
—survive whatever was happening.

On the horizon, a few stars were still out. The sun was the color of a cantaloupe and he found himself thinking about the last time he ate a slice of melon.
Their seeds are so slippery. So these are the things you think about before you die? Cantaloupe seeds?

The BBC interviewed Chaim Zischer about this massacre in the snow, and he speaks bluntly about what it was like to lie on the ground as a guard walked up and down, randomly shooting first this prisoner, then that prisoner.

“It was Birdie. He lowered his pistol at one head and
crack
, he took a long drag on his cigarette before moving on to the next person. He passed through us like an angel of death. One hand was used for the gun, the other to smoke. First kill with the right, then smoke with the left. His mouth and his pistol were both smoking that morning.”

Zischer also mentions how Rudolf Oberhauser and Sebastian Schemise patrolled the perimeter of the camp with machine guns and stomped their feet for warmth. Folk music blared out from the central guard tower and Birdie hummed along to the tubas. He went about killing as though he were a carpenter driving nails into wood.

Crack
.

Crack
.

Crack
.

Each body jumped slightly as a bullet slammed into its skull. Expanding shock waves liquefied memories and whole universes went black as shell casings pinged onto the frozen ground. Blood splashed and pumped onto the snow. The shootings continued and there were so many prisoners murdered that morning that Birdie had to pull out several clips of new bullets. When one ran out, he pulled out a fresh clip and slapped it in with the butt of his palm.

Slowly, randomly, terribly, he moved towards Zischer. The sun was nearly up and a rooster from somewhere nearby called into the morning. Birdie stepped closer and closer. Zischer concentrated on a snowflake not far from his cheek.

So this is the last thing I’ll see
, he thought.
This snowflake. This useless beautiful thing
.

It sparkled like a diamond and it was so individual, so unique. Birdie’s black boots scrunched next to Zischer’s head. The man’s boot was gigantic and spattered with blood.
So this is how I’m going to die
. He held his breath and imagined a clean room full of light and love. He saw his mother’s face. She was folding linen and humming a tune.

Something warm hit Zischer’s face. A ringing filled his ears and he fluttered his eyes open.

An unbelievable amount of blood pumped out of Josef Bau’s head. It looked like ruby motor oil and Zischer wanted to push himself away from the growing pool, but he lay there with his cheek flat against the numbing snow. The hole was the size of a silver coin and he couldn’t look away because that hole could have been in his head. Bau was alive three seconds ago, his lungs inflating and deflating, his heart valves fluttering, but now he was gone. A whole world was once living in Josef Bau’s head but now it was leaking all over the ground. Nothing could stop it now. A widening pool of childhood memories and learning and love and thousands of meals and loose baby teeth and learning to tie shoelaces and running after balls and
dreaming and walks in the forest and playing with a dog and getting chicken pox and picking bark off a tree and writing a poem and a first kiss and running with friends and watching sunlight come through a window and dancing and drinking wine and laughing—it was all spilling out of Josef Bau. Part of the universe was dying. A tiny corner of it was being drained of light.

Birdie moved down the line, firing here, firing there, creating new holes, draining memory, blackening the universe, killing the future, and his pistol needed to be reloaded every now and again. He continued on, humming.

We should pause to consider that one man and one gun created all of this devastation. Birdie pointed, squeezed, and the gun spoke, bullet after bullet. It was just a standard issue collection of oiled metal parts, gunpowdery chemistry, flint and spark, velocity and unstoppable physics. Yet the gun itself becomes unique at this point and it should be in a museum somewhere under glass, its hammer locked shut—muzzled—so that we can gaze upon it safely and consider how it was used. We know what became of this man who killed these prisoners, but what became of this gun, this Sauer 38H semi-automatic pistol? It was only slightly larger than a fist and it punched out death. Maybe it’s hanging in a collector’s case in Los Angeles or Dublin or Moscow right now. The fingerprints on its trigger would have been wiped away by time long ago. The collector who owns it probably isn’t aware of its history. It’s just a thing. It’s just something from World War II. It’s just a gun.

“It could have been me,” Zischer told the BBC. “Bau was shot but it could have been me if Birdie moved a bit differently or if he decided to aim his pistol to the right instead of the left. When I think about this for too long, I feel like a corpse on vacation. Why did I survive when so many others did not? Why was I saved?”

On and on the killings went, rhythmic and terrible, until Birdie flicked his cigarette onto a freshly dead body and complained about his hand cramping up. He holstered his weapon and massaged his palm.

“Ouch,” he laughed. “That hurts.”

Somewhere in the distance, a rooster called out into the pale morning light. It sounded like laughter. Like cosmic laughter.

Of the three hundred prisoners that ran into the Rose Garden on February 21, 1943, nearly half of them were shot. An exact figure can never be known but these random executions, these sluggish killings, they haunted Chaim Zischer for the rest of his life and he often woke up screaming as the shadow of Birdie crept closer and closer.

“Why does this stay with me?” he asked the BBC. “Thousands of people were killed at Lubizec every day. But when I think about this I feel like an old jug cracking apart.”

Maybe it was the helplessness of lying on the snow, or maybe it was the haphazard way Birdie moved the pistol first here, then there, but one thing is certain: When it was all over, the escape plan was in tatters.

Heinrich Niemann made a megaphone of his hands and yelled out, “If you’re alive, stand up. Move it, move it. Quickly. There’s no breakfast this morning for you filthy fucking Jews. Move it.”

The living hauled away the dead. It took twenty minutes of grunting but all of the bodies were eventually dumped into a wooden cart. Their clothes were stripped off and they were stacked onto the Roasts where they, like everyone else that filed into Lubizec, were doused with gasoline. These men who once dreamed of escape had names like David, Jechiel, Aryeh, Josef, Kazimierz, Scmuel, Omet, Ravid, Joshua, Levi, and Malachi. They were little bits of the universe, and now they were gone.