The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (33 page)

“You are such beautiful creatures,” he sang. “You are sunrises. Sunrises.”

When he died in 1999, his funeral was attended by over 1,500 people, and as his obituary suggests, we can only hope that he has finally “found peace beneath the shade of a date palm.”

Although many survivors fell into a deep silence about what they saw and never spoke about it, others, like Chaim Zischer, tried to put their pain into words. In
The Hell of Lubizec
, he reminds his readers that their families are not in any immediate danger nor do they have to worry about being shot. He also reminds us that, when we read, we shed our bodies and travel elsewhere. Reading is essentially an out-of-body experience, but Lubizec, by contrast, was firmly rooted
in
the body. Because it was a place of physical pain, what does it mean to read about crippling thirst? What does it mean to read about standing at attention for hours or to feel the heat of a thousand burning corpses on your face? How can anyone understand what it means to wake up in the middle of the night because you’ve just heard a gunshot that was fired in March 1943?

In his book, Zischer explains that the past is never really over, and he writes about living in multiple time zones where the past, the present, and the future all get spun together like rope. One minute he is strolling through New York and the next, when a car backfires, he is immediately back in Lubizec again. A clattering subway train becomes the 8:00 a.m. transport chugging into camp. Children screaming with laughter on a playground are suddenly in the Rose Garden. A police officer reminds him of Birdie. The past, Zischer reminds us, is not about clocks and dead years. It isn’t about dust and documents. It isn’t about looking backwards. No, not at all. The past spills out of memory and demands a future.

Zischer spends several pages thinking about the ashfields of Lubizec. As he imagines a grassy expanse stretching out before him, all of these ghosts begin to climb out of the ground. It is worth quoting
the entirety of this dream passage because it hints at two things: 1) Zischer’s attempt to make the interior landscape of his skull real for the readers and 2) his obvious feelings of survivor’s guilt.

Zischer goes on to explain that literary and artistic mediums break down when we approach the Holocaust. He reminds us that words like
appalling
and
horrible
only take us so far when we try to understand these camps. It is a story without hope because people came in one end and truckloads of ash came out the other. But how can we explain such things through words? Whenever we try to do this, we find ourselves in a world where the old ways of storytelling do not apply. Any Holocaust story that makes us smile at the end is full of the false belief that something can be learned from all of the murder, that there is some scrap of goodness amid the ash. Perhaps this is human nature, this search for the good, but to focus on acts
of kindness or on moments of enlightenment is to turn away from the horror of the Holocaust. It is to search for the flickering candle in the darkness when, really, the darkness itself is the story.

But as Zischer notes in
The Hell of Lubizec
, “Who wants a story like that?”

Who indeed? No one wants to sink into despair, and yet if we are to engage with the death camps in any meaningful way, we need to understand that traditional modes of storytelling fail us. The villains outnumber the heroes. Resolution cannot happen. The Nazis do not have a moral awakening, and we should not feel uplifted at the end of such stories, but wounded.

Before we move on, it is worth mentioning one final sobering fact. Of the thirty-five guards that were stationed at Lubizec, only four received jail time (a paltry 11 percent conviction rate). Most of them were never punished in any way. They became, instead, bank clerks, electricians, carpenters, accountants, insurance salesmen, and bartenders. One became a priest. Another became a judge.

As for Guth, he fled to Barcelona. He decided to go to Spain after the war because everyone else in the SS was fleeing to South America, and he thought there would be safety in isolation. Go against the grain, he thought. Go against the crowd. Be anonymous. Hide.

He ended up washing dishes in a grubby little restaurant and eventually worked his way up to managing it. He called himself “Hans Bauer” and lived in an area of the city populated mostly by foreigners. Barri Xinès was a drug den, a warren of prostitution, and it was easy to hide in its narrow streets where landlords asked few questions as long as the rent appeared on time. Jasmine and the children joined him, and after a few years of pinching pesetas, they bought a rooftop flat in a safer area of the city, on Carrer de Marlet. Guth sold jugs of sangria at the restaurant while his children became fluent in Spanish.

“I didn’t like it,” Jasmine later recalled. “Barcelona was a cold bath. There were no more parties in the evening, money was very tight, we had to keep a low profile, but I got used to the situation.
I had to. Hans got into the habit of taking long walks through the twisting streets of the city. He walked for
hours
. Ribera, Eixample, Raval. He walked every part of the city and made Barcelona home. As for me, it took much longer. Our new life was … hard.”

The world quickly moved away from the Holocaust as it began to worry about the cold war. Visions of mushroom clouds filled up the newspapers, and everyone built fallout shelters in their backyards. There was talk of whole cities disappearing beneath mighty eruptions of atomic fire. Human civilization could be wiped out by pushing a button. Rockets would then fire up from the ground and arch their deadly payloads across the globe. In a flickering pulse of time, shockwaves of light would obliterate the world, and because of this, no one seemed to care much about the ashfields of Poland. By the early 1960s, Guth even talked about moving back to Germany. After all, it had been twenty years and no one—not a single person—had knocked on his door to ask any questions.

All of this changed on November 2, 1965.
^*

The morning was cold, overcast, and Guth was caught near the massive unfinished church of Sagrada Família. Just as Big Ben symbolizes London, and the Eiffel Tower symbolizes Paris, this church symbolizes Barcelona. Sagrada Família launches itself into the sky and at night its eight steeples poke the stars like dripping wax candles. Its architect, a cranky genius named Antoni Gaudí, believed it would “expiate sin” from the city. In other words, the act of building Sagrada Família was an atonement to God, and it was designed to purify the city of evil. Whether Guth believed this or not is unknown, but we do know he visited this church every week because he liked watching the stonemasons chisel out chunks of rock. He brought along breadcrumbs for the pigeons, and he smoked cigarettes as building cranes and cement trucks went about the business of constructing something good and holy.

It was at Sagrada Família that he was finally caught. In his wallet were several thousand pesetas, a Metro pass, and pictures of his family. The famed “Nazi Hunter,” Simon Wiesenthal, spent five months tracking him down but it was worth the effort. Hans-Peter Guth, the Commandant of Lubizec, was finally under arrest. He was rushed to the airport in an armored truck and flown to West Germany where he was put on trial for the murder of 710,000 people.

The proceedings began on July 5, 1966. It was the first time he had been in a courtroom, and he looked nervous. In video footage, we can see him fretting with his tie and adjusting his cufflinks. He smoothes his graying hair with both hands and clears his throat. When asked about his role at Lubizec, he said the deaths were “regrettable,” but he didn’t see much difference between what happened in the camp and the massacre at Katyn or the firebombing of Dresden or the miniature suns that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Civilian death happens in war,” he said to the judge. “I was following orders and I never personally laid a hand on anyone. In fact, I didn’t fire a single bullet in the last war. Not one. Not one single bullet. I didn’t personally murder anyone.”

The prosecutor shook his head in disbelief.

“But Herr Guth, the genocide of the Jews had nothing to do with war. You would have happily murdered them in peacetime. No sir, war and genocide are two very different things. Let us say Nazi Germany
won
the last war. You would have carried on killing the Jews anyway, wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?”

Silence.

“The whole world is waiting for your answer.”

Guth shrugged. He looked annoyed.

It is worth quoting the remainder of this exchange as it appears in the court transcript because it sheds light on his emotions at the time.