The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (12 page)

Hans-Peter Guth rolled in a sheet of paper. He began to type.

7

O
n the same day the boys were all murdered, Guth went home early to be with his own children. The rain had slowed and he cantered up the cinder driveway on his horse. He went into the house, where he took off his dripping woolen coat. He hung it on a peg and placed his SS hat, which was sodden with water, onto a section of newspaper. Splats wrinkled the front page. The headline was about the war in the east—the Battle of Stalingrad was underway. Everyone expected an easy victory because the city had been pounded for weeks from the air. A thousand tons of bombs had rained down and there was nothing left but vast fields of rubble and burnt rafters. Resistance should be light. The war would soon be over and Germany would control all of Europe. Victory was inevitable.

Sigi and Karl were surprised to find their father home so early. Rain streaked down the patio door in thick veins of running water as Guth unbuttoned his charcoal-gray uniform and kicked off his jackboots.

“How are my darlings? Give me hugs.”

They whined about being bored and about how the rain was keeping them inside. It’s not fair, they pouted. There’s nothing to do. Even the radio didn’t have anything decent on and they were tired of their toys. They wanted some excitement. Some fun.

Guth gave them his full attention. He touched their heads and got down on the carpet to play “tanks and soldiers” with his son. Together they picked up Panzer tanks and crawled towards Stalingrad. Gunfire came from their mouths as they inched towards a shoebox that was supposed to represent the city, and that’s when Guth, getting into the spirit of the game, held up a finger as if to
pause the war. He got out matchboxes and lined them up around the shoebox.

“There’s the enemy. Go get him.”

Woompf, woompf, woompf
went the mortars.
Boom!

Guth reached over to the Soviet line and threw the matchboxes high into the air. He pointed at a small opening and yelled, “Get in there. Go, go, go! There’s the enemy’s weakness.”

Karl plowed his tank into the shoebox and threw the remaining matchboxes up towards the ceiling. Hundreds of wooden match-sticks rained down onto the floor and Karl stomped on the shoebox while yelling out a language of explosives.

“Boom, boom, boom!”

He picked up his tank and did a victory lap around the room.

“Down with the Soviet Union!
Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil
.”

Guth put his hands on his hips, nodded in satisfaction, and turned to his daughter. She was reading yet another book about Old Shatterhand and the dust jacket showed a grizzled old mountain man pointing at a valley. He held up a rifle and seemed to be rallying the reader towards adventure.

“Good book?” Guth said while tugging on both of Sigi’s pigtails.

She batted his hand away.

“Must be good,” he smiled.

She nodded towards a wicker basket on the table. “That came for you.”

“Who’s it from?”

A shrug and she went back to reading.

It was from Guth’s superior in Lublin. There was a scrawled note from
Hauptsturmführer
Odilo Globocnik that thanked him for “solving thousands of little problems at Lubizec.” The basket held chocolate bars, pickled herring, cherry jam, and a bottle of champagne. A cheap bottle, Guth noticed, but he held it up and admired the deep green.

He sat down in a leather chair and yawned. He ran his fingers through his coppery hair and smiled. “You’re lucky to live in such times, children.”

He pulled out a silver cigarette case and slouched back with one leg draped over the kneecap of the other. Rain threaded its way down the patio door as he sat in a room full of antique furniture and expensive bone china. Cigarette smoke drifted up to the wooden beams of the reading room, and hanging above the marble fireplace was a painting of Adolf Hitler.

“Lucky indeed,” Guth said, closing his eyes.

Sigi looked up. “How come you’re home so early?”

He took the next day off work. It was the first time he’d done such a thing since they moved to Poland and he decided that a hike was in order. The Villa overlooked a massive private lake and there was a little island full of trees in the middle that Guth had yet to explore. He said they should load up a wicker basket with ham sandwiches and row across the water to see what mysteries waited for them on the island. Sigi liked the idea and gathered up a pad of paper to map what they found. Karl wanted to bring his compass.

“Good. Be prepared,” Guth said.

Jasmine, however, refused to come along. We know from her unpublished diary that their marriage was beginning to strain by late August 1942 and, although they still shared the same bed, they bickered whenever their door was closed. In
The Commandant’s Daughter
, Sigi mentions how she heard murmuring deep into the night. A peculiar mood filled up the house but Sigi couldn’t pinpoint why her parents were so snippy with each other. She worried it might be her, that
she
had done something wrong, and she tried to be extra nice to the whole family. She cleaned bedrooms even though the Polish girl was hired to do such things. Sigi also cleared away dishes and tidied Karl’s room.

On the morning they decided to explore the island, her father was fidgety. Restless. His leg bounced up and down at the breakfast table and this made the coffee in his mug jiggle. Jasmine refused to look up, even though her husband tried again and again to jump-start a conversation.

“Weather looks good today …”

“Those sandwiches’ll taste good after paddling around in a rowboat …”

“We should spend more time together as a family …”

“I
said
, we should spend more time together as a family. What do you think, darling?”

She covered a bread roll with cherry jam and bit into it. “Do whatever you want.” A quick swallow and she wiped her mouth with her thumb. “But tell the kids. Do it today.”

Guth crossed his arms. It was the look of a man who didn’t like being bossed around.

“It’s one thing to hide it from me but …” she trailed off. There was a smile, as sharp as a saber cut, and she stood up. She smoothed her flowery flowing dress and looked at her children, who were eating quietly.

“Have fun with your father,” she said, reaching for her purse. Her heels clicked down the hallway and she closed the front door without slamming it. Silence filled the house. The soft effervescent bubbling of seltzer water could be heard in their glasses.

Guth tore off a bit of bread and popped it into his mouth. “So,” he finally said. He squinted at the lake. “Should be nice out there today.”

We should pause and consider the two different versions of Hans-Peter Guth that are before us in this moment. There is the man who snuffed out entire villages and towns, a man that can only be described as a serial mass murderer, and yet there is this other man, a man who obviously loved his children and enjoyed being a father. We almost want Guth to go home after killing thousands of people and inflict pain upon those he loved because it would make us feel better if he beat his wife, or sexually abused his kids, or drank too much, or whipped his horse, or had an affair with the maid, or sodomized boys. We could write him off as a disgusting human being. But this wasn’t how Hans-Peter Guth acted when he stripped off his Nazi uniform. Instead, he went about the business of being a loving father and husband. How could this man go home after watching children die in such horrible ways? How could he separate his two worlds so completely, so thoroughly, so cleanly?

It could be that Guth was in fact a monster at home and that Sigrid’s book is an attempt to whitewash history—this is certainly possible—anything is possible—and yet it is unlikely that Sigrid lied about how deeply her father cared about her. What are we supposed to
do
with this information though? What comfort is there in knowing that Guth had the capacity for love but he chose to make a fist of his heart whenever he crossed over the threshold of Lubizec? How are we supposed to reconcile Guth the Commandant versus Guth the Father? For now, that answer must be set aside, but these two different worlds will soon collide in surprising ways.

He stood up and made a shepherding movement towards the patio. “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Get your things.”

They loaded up the wooden rowboat with a picnic basket full of sandwiches that had been wrapped in wax paper. Guth told Sigi and Karl to put on their life jackets before he muscled the boat out into the water. Sand scratched the hull as he pushed it out into the clear water and then, in one graceful motion, he pulled himself into the boat. It wobbled a bit as he sat down.

“Beautiful day,” he said, squinting at the cloudless sky. He reached for the oars.

He wore plaid shorts, a white T-shirt, and he was barefoot. Sigi wasn’t used to seeing her father’s legs and she pretended not to look at them. He was tanned and toned with muscle. He was attractive. Even Sigi knew this. There was a thick, earthwormy scar on his thigh where he got hung up in some barbed wire during the last war. It happened in a trench somewhere when he was fighting the British. Back in 1917 or 1918. She wasn’t sure which. He never talked about it. She studied its long purple shape out of the corner of her eye, how it twitched and relaxed as he rowed across the lake, and it was such a beautiful day.

A train whistled deep in the woods and the sound echoed across the glassy water. The whistle came again and Guth glanced at his wristwatch. There was a nod of approval.

“Is that your train station, Papa?” Karl asked.

He said nothing. He kept on rowing.

Sigi let her hand trail in the water. She liked how her fingers split open the surface and made a soft burbling sound. A fish flapped up and she turned to see spreading ripples from where it had splashed. The water was gray and gentle. Her father pulled on the oars and she watched them dip in and out of the lake, over and over again. They were moving fast and she enjoyed the speed as well as how her body moved in rhythm to the oars. Karl held a compass and yelled out directions.

“South! Southeast!”

Oaks and pines towered up from the island and Guth rowed hard until they slid up onto a sandy, gravely beach. It scraped the bottom of the boat. All around them were pebbles and mud and minnows. The surface of the water was slick, sun dappled, and shimmeringly alive.

“We’re here,” Karl clapped. “We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”

They pulled the boat up into some weeds and Guth looked around. “Now what?” he asked.

“Indians,” Karl said, already pushing into the ferny undergrowth. He picked up a stick and brought it up to his face. He took aim and shouted, “I see three of them! Bang, bang, bang!”

Pine needles were everywhere, along with dragonflies that zipped through shafts of honeyed sunlight. In
The Commandant’s Daughter
Sigi writes about her time on the island as something she wanted to safeguard and preserve forever. For the rest of her life she would remember it as a perfect day in the Garden of Eden. Her father was out of his uniform and everything associated with Nazism was far away. There was no war. There was no Hitler. There was no Holocaust. He was simply her father. For Sigi, the island came to represent a type of lost innocence, and as she grew older and had to grapple with what her father had done, she felt that if she could have kept him there forever maybe she could have stopped him from killing all of those innocent people. For her, the island became a symbolic place where her father could still be redeemed.