The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (13 page)

“Bang!” Karl yelled.

“How many now?” Guth asked.

Karl wiped sweat from his forehead. “Twenty-three. Bang! Twenty-four!”

“Good. Good. Keep this island safe.”

Guth put an arm around his daughter as they weaved through trees. It didn’t take long to reach the other side of the island, and when they did, they circled back, slowly. Karl shouldered his imaginary rifle and ran ahead, jumping over fallen trees and stopping every now and then to look at a turquoise beetle or some wide mushrooms. When they returned to the rowboat they opened the picnic basket and pulled wax paper off their sandwiches. They bit into apples—crunching down on the juicy hardness—and they stared at the Villa. It looked tiny and fragile. Like a toy. Sunlight flashed off one of the windows as it opened. A train clattered in the wilderness and Guth checked his watch again.

“Trains are fun,” Karl said, dropping a fist-sized rock into the water. It sploshed.

When they finished eating, they packed away the wax paper and apple cores. Guth lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree. He looked happy, content. He crossed his legs at the ankles and let out a little groan of happiness.

From somewhere across the lake, a crow began to complain.
Craaaaw-caw
.

“Papa?” Sigi asked.

“Mm-hmm?”

“You’re supposed to tell us something.”

A pause. “I am?”

“Mom said you had something to tell us.”

Guth took a long drag on his cigarette but didn’t open his eyes.

“Is it what you two are arguing about?”

He dug a bit of sandwich out of his back molar and flicked it into the water. “Arguing? What do you mean?”

“This morning. Over breakfast. Mom said you’re supposed to tell us something.”

Another pause. He nodded and opened his eyes. “Okay,” he said, sitting up. “Okay. Yes. You should know.”

Sigi and Karl leaned in as a dragonfly floated past. Guth studied the far side of the lake and acted as if he were speaking to himself. He told his children they needed to be strong, that Germany was at war, and that certain sacrifices had to be made.

“I’m sorry to say that your grandmother was killed in an air raid. It was a quick death. She wouldn’t have felt much.”

Sigi and Karl began to shriek but Guth snapped his fingers for them to quiet down.

“People die in war all the time. She was an old woman and she had a full life.”

Karl continued to cry but Sigi gathered herself and wiped her eyes. Her bottom lip trembled. “When did it happen?”

“A month ago.”

“A
month
ago? But … can we go to her funeral?”

Guth stood up and waved his hand as if a mosquito were floating around him. “There wasn’t a funeral. Now help me load the boat and we’ll—for God’s
sake
, Karl—stop your sniveling. Crying won’t bring her back. People die all the time but sacrifices need to be made.”

He fit the wicker picnic basket into the rowboat and dropped his cigarette into the water. It hissed like a snake.

They rowed home in silence. Karl wept quietly, with his back to Guth, as Sigi stared out at the calm gray lake. She tried not to cry as the wooden oars squeaked against their metal locks. Beads of water ran down the oar shafts and trickled back into the darkness.

Sigi would later say her grandmother’s death made the war real in a way that nothing else had up to that point. In her book she wonders how this one death could have taken up so much space in her heart when, just five kilometers from her bedroom, thousands of people were being gassed every day. She goes on to explain that her grandmother died in a firestorm. It happened near the docks of Hamburg on the night of July 26, 1942, when the Royal Air Force set its crosshairs on the submarine pens. Due to bad weather, the bombs drifted badly off target and they blasted into residential property. A thousand homes were immediately engulfed in flame and huge tornadoes of fire lifted up to the clouds. Two days later,
a telegram was sent to Guth’s office. His mother had been found in an air-raid shelter, unburned but dead. As the firestorm raged overhead, and as oxygen was sucked up to feed the towering flames, she and many others were caught in the vacuum below. Their lungs couldn’t inflate and they were slowly asphyxiated—they panted for air until there was none left. When the door to the air-raid shelter was finally opened, everyone inside looked like they were in shock. Their mouths were open as if they were in the process of saying, “No.” The shelter had become, in effect, like a gas chamber.

What angered Jasmine was how Guth lied about it. When she first heard about the raid she asked if his mother was okay. “Was her house hit? Have you heard from her?” Guth stared at his red wine and said she was fine, just fine. Four days later Jasmine asked the same question and again he gave the same answer even though he knew—he
knew
—she was dead. Five weeks passed, and when Jasmine finally discovered the truth she was horrified by her husband’s indifference.

“Hans. She was your
mother
.”

“Lots of mothers have died in this war. Lots. What do you want me to say?”

It wasn’t just the icy way in which he talked about her death that angered Jasmine, it was also his evasiveness. Shortly after she first heard about the bombing, she sent a care package to help the old woman with her rationing cards, and Guth knew she was doing this, but still he said nothing. He watched her wrap the package with brown paper and he offered to mail it.

What made Jasmine prickle, what really made her ball up her fists in anger, was how Guth painted fib onto fib, even though she repeatedly asked about his mother.

“Did she get the package? Is she okay?”

He said they talked on the phone and that she was doing well. “She’s fine. Just fine.”

When Jasmine realized how much he was dancing around the truth, she stewed with rage—this had been an ongoing problem since Berlin—and she demanded that he start telling the truth or
there would be consequences. Serious consequences. After all,
she
didn’t want to live in Poland.

When the rowboat crunched up onto the sandy shore, Guth and the kids walked up the stone steps. Their bare feet left watery prints on the flagstones. The sliding glass door was open and Jasmine was inside, smoking. She used an ivory holder because it made her feel elegant. Like a movie star. When she saw the stunned looks on her children she opened her arms and gave them a hug. The three of them cried as Guth looked on. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.

Jasmine gave her children a few kisses. Lipstick butterflies hung on their cheeks. She smoothed their hair and said, “I’m sorry, my dears. Now … give your father and me some privacy. We need to talk about adult things.”

Karl went upstairs, dragging his feet against each tread, but Sigi slipped into the front hall and positioned herself next to a mirror. It was large and reflected what was happening in the lounge. A grandfather clock ticked out the seconds. Her parents said nothing for a long time. They looked at the floor and rubbed their faces. The heavy pendulum kept swinging back and forth.

Jasmine adjusted a bra strap and finally said, “Why did you lie?”

He turned to stare at the lake. His reflection looked back at her.

“Did you hear me?”

“State secrets are—”

“I’m not talking about stupid state secrets. I’m talking about your mother. Your
mother
, Hans. She dies five weeks ago and you go around acting like she’s still alive. Who does that? It’s not normal.”

He lit a cigarette. He turned back to her and picked a fleck of tobacco off his lips. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”

“You said the same thing in Berlin when you were euthanizing those people and it just seems that—”

“Stop. We’re not talking about that again.”

“I don’t care about that. What I
do
care about, Hans, is how you said you were involved in security at a mental hospital and how you never once said anything about putting people out of their misery.”

“It was Reich’s business.”

“No, no, no.” She got up and began to pace. “You don’t understand. You lied to me about what you did in Berlin and you lied to me about your mother. It just comes so
naturally
to you. That’s my problem. How can I believe anything you tell me if you can’t even mention the death of your own mother? I didn’t come to Poland for this.”

Guth opened his mouth as if to say something but she silenced him. She pointed to the front door. “Is that place a transit camp?”

“Jasmine.”

“Yes or no? I’m your wife.”

He took a pull on his cigarette and held it. When he exhaled, his words were made of smoke. “Don’t be like this. I need to come home to a loving wife.”

“Yes or no?”

“Stop. Stop right now.”

“Because I’ve heard rumors in this backwater hole-of-a-place and I need to know the truth. For once, can you please just share something with me?” Her voice rose but she calmed herself. She smoothed her dress and cleared her throat. “I deserve that much at least after moving here from Berlin.”

“Ah yes, marvelous Berlin. Look, I won’t be interrogated like a common criminal.”

Jasmine reached into her purse and tossed several black-and-white photos on the table. They skittered to a stop. One was of a fake train station, another of a travel poster to Barcelona, and there was one of the WELCOME sign.

Guth pointed. “See? I’ve tried to share.”

“You also shared rather extravagant lies about your mother. You’re good at deceiving people. But I’m not other people. What am I to you?”

He moved to hug her. “Darling …”

She backed away. “What are you burning in that place? The sky is stained orange every night. Are you burning bodies?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Jews are filthy creatures. When they arrive into camp, their clothes are teeming with lice. We give them fresh trousers and shirts and then we burn what’s left over. We’re burning their clothes. Their
clothes
, Jasmine.”

“You say that now but how can I believe you? How can I believe anything you say?”

“Jews are filthy.”

“I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. I need to know you’re telling me the truth though, especially after I’ve sacrificed so much by moving out here. I want to know you can trust me and that you need me and that we’ve got a shared life. A shared life, Hans. These these these killings … they’re not true, are they?”

He shook his head.

“Because I’ll march into the woods if I have to and if I find out you’ve lied to me again I’ll go straight back to Berlin.
With
the kids. I’ll pack our bags so fast it’ll make your head spin.” Her voice was full of sparks and her eyelashes were beaded with tears. “Don’t think I won’t. I’m sick to death of this.”

As Sigi watched her parents in the mirror it felt like she was in a darkened cinema watching a color movie. That wasn’t really her mother—it was a beautiful actress—but when the woman in the mirror threatened to move away, something raw and cold bristled in her chest. Would they really leave? For the first time Sigi began to wonder about Lubizec. Really wonder about it. What happened there? Was her father a bad man?

In
The Commandant’s Daughter
, Sigi writes about her mother’s thought process and how she could view his evasiveness as somehow worse than genocide. In a long chapter devoted to this topic, Sigi comes to the realization that her mother was obviously a terrible anti-Semite but that she also felt her husband was aloof, detached, and totally unwilling to have a shared life based on trust and openness. She was clearly unhappy in Poland, and she must have seen Guth’s dancing around the truth as a convenient opening to leave him, but it wasn’t necessarily what was happening in Lubizec that
got her angry—it was what was happening inside her own home. This is the only way Sigi can explain how, for her mother, lying could be worse than trainloads of people being shoved into gas chambers. Although such thinking is horrible for us to hold in our imaginations, we need to remember that millions of Germans just like the Guths were more interested in what was happening in their own homes than what was happening to the Jews. Morally speaking, we have gone through the looking glass here. Black is white. White is black. Ethics have been rewritten.

“Don’t lie to me, Hans. If I find out you’ve lied again I’m going to leave.”

“Don’t talk to me like this.”

“I’m warning you.”

“You’re warning
me
? Do you know who I am?” he half shouted. “You’re warning ME?” His whole body tightened and his mouth twisted into a volcano top. He knocked a chair aside and looked around as if a joke were being played on him. “YOU’RE WARNING
ME
?”

Sigi pushed away from the mirror, suddenly very scared. It was one of the few times her father had raised his voice.

A second passed before he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and spun his wedding ring. Around and around it went, slower and slower, until, finally, at last, he opened his eyes. There was a smile of calm. He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

Jasmine crossed her arms. She narrowed her eyes.

Guth walked across the carpet and reached for the overturned chair. He righted it and shuffled the photographs into a neat little pile. He tapped them onto the table like a deck of cards.

A train whistled from somewhere deep in the woods and he turned to the noise. He checked his watch and made a face. “I should get to work.”

“That’s right. Run away. You promised to stay home all day but that must have been a lie too.”

He walked around the perimeter of the room so that he wouldn’t have to cross her path. He jogged upstairs. A few minutes later he came down in his SS uniform. His jackboots clacked on the wooden
floor as he reached for his officer’s cap and placed it on his head as if it were a crown. He adjusted his pistol. And then, without saying a word, he patted Sigi on the cheek.

Then
SS Obersturmführer
Hans-Peter Guth marched outside and slammed the door.

8