The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (29 page)

It was Rudolf Oberhauser. “Is that you, Schemise?”

Petranker tiptoed through the deep blue light. The pistol in his hand tugged him forward, forward, forward.

“Schemise?”

The shots drilled the air but the guard didn’t fall to the ground. Instead, he ducked behind the engine and began to shout. “Attack, attack! We’re being attacked!”

Petranker followed him around and fired again.

“Attack! We’re being attacked! Sound the alarm!”

The air sizzled with confusion as other guards began to shout. Damiel found himself holding a pistol with both hands and when Rudolf Oberhauser ran around the engine towards him—he fired. The force of the gun surprised him and his ears rang.

The German who always yelled “Time to die” before the carbon monoxide was pumped into the gas chamber dropped to the ground and began to roll around. He ripped open his jacket, which sent buttons popping into the air, and patted his chest frantically. Blood leaked out of him.

“I’m shot,” he half shouted. “I’ve been … 
hurt
,” he said this in wonderment as if something supernatural had happened.

Dov Damiel was later asked how he felt about this in an interview conducted in 1988. He shrugs. “Should I grieve for this man who yelled into the peephole of a gas chamber? Should I feel sorry for this killer of children? No.”

The interviewer then asks Damiel if he wanted to say “Time to die” as Rudolf Oberhauser bled to death on the sandy ground.

Damiel’s answer is worth noting because he looks at the interviewer for a long time. He squints and shakes his head. “That kind of thing is only done in the movies. I was more interested in escape than in theatrics. Time to die? Why would I waste my breath on such words?”

As Oberhauser went about the business of dying, the searchlights snapped on, but rather than point these shafts of light into the camp, where the gunfire was coming from, something unexpected happened. The guards aimed these huge cones of light into
the woods because they assumed the Russians were attacking Lubizec. They thought the front line had somehow shifted and that the Red Army was closing in on them. It never occurred to them that Jews might be rebelling, so the guards opened up their machine guns in a hail of bullets. Hundreds of rounds were fired into the trees. Branches tumbled to the ground. Trunks were peppered with holes. Bark exploded into shreds. The searchlights jerked through the woods and this made phantom shadows seem to run across the forest floor. For the guards (at least in those first few minutes of the escape), the enemy had to come from outside of Lubizec. They just couldn’t imagine the enemy was inside the camp.

Damiel stepped over the body in front of him and began to study the engine. The metal was cold as he searched for a way to start it. Petranker crawled under the iron monster and looked for the oil plug.

“Where is it? Can you see the damn thing?”

They only had a few minutes to destroy the engine before they had to snip the barbed-wire fence and meet up with the others. Time was ticking away as machine guns rattled long threads of light into the woods. Weird shadows were cast onto the ground as Damiel and Petranker searched for the oil plug. It had to be somewhere. Their hands groped the fat belly of the machine, sand got into their hair, and it was hard to see. Once they found the plug
—if
they found the plug—oil could be drained from the crankcase and then they could start it up. The pistons would ride up and down in unoiled chambers and the whole thing would shriek to an earsplitting stop. The engine would be wrecked, destroyed. Killed.

But first, they needed to find the oil plug.

“Where
is
it?” Damiel hissed.

While all of this was going on another group of prisoners (Moshe Taube, Chaim Zischer, and David Grinbaum) ran towards the lower end of camp. It was their job to burn Zurich to the ground and if possible shoot Guth. The ground was wet as they half ran, half slid, in front of the squat barracks. Their reflections appeared on the
thin windows, and Chaim Zischer ran his fingers along the rough wooden clapboards. Keep going, he told himself.

The world was a blur of motion and he felt alive down to his nerve endings. Searchlights slashed the woods. Guards shouted. The whole world buzzed with noise and light and fear as Zischer opened a low gate that led to the warehouses. He and the others pushed into one of the buildings, and when the door was closed, when it was latched shut, they allowed themselves to catch their breath. They leaned against the wall and looked around.

Machine guns sounded like hammers knocking against a metal wall. They pounded and pounded the air.

“So this is war,” Zischer whispered to himself.

Something shifted inside his bowels and he had to tighten his asshole to keep from soiling himself. “Easy,” he told himself.

It is important for us to remember that none of these prisoners expected to live. They simply wanted to disrupt Lubizec for a few days and slow down the killing process. Yes, an escape had been planned, and yes, they wanted it to succeed, but they had no idea where they would go after they cut the barbed-wire fencing. They couldn’t go home. They couldn’t stay in the woods. Farmers would turn them in. And even if they reached major cities like Warsaw or Kraków, what then? Jews were being rounded up by the millions. The prisoners certainly hoped to live, but their primary goal was to slow down the genocidal gears of the camp. If the guards had to hunt them down in the woods, it meant they couldn’t be running the gas chambers or sending gold back to Berlin. It’s important for us to remember that the escape wasn’t about escape: It was about rebellion.

Zischer and the others walked to the wooden shelving. A metal can of gasoline had been hidden in the barracks earlier that day and now they reached for it. They splashed it onto clothes and piles of money. They splashed it onto the shelving itself. They dumped the last of it on a pile of woolen caps. They found bottles of whiskey and vodka and cognac and smashed those against the walls.

“Ready?” Moshe asked, picking up a cigarette lighter. There were
hundreds of them in a wicker basket and he underhanded several to David Grinbaum. “Here. Take these.”

Machine guns continued to rattle and pound outside as the three prisoners put tongues of flame to wood. Blue and orange-yellow flared up the pine shelving. Shirts and caps and tables were soon burning. The three men (for in that moment they felt like men again) ran outside and left the front door open. Fresh air moved into the building and the flames grew and grew. Smoke began to cloud the windows.

They ran into another barrack and splashed yet another hidden can of gasoline onto piles of socks, corsets, dresses, and children’s clothing. It was also set on fire and they went into a third barrack—this one was packed with enormous burlap sacks of human hair—and the men stopped in their tracks.

They looked at each other, wondering what to do.

There was an odd smell hanging in the space and the noise around them fell away as they stared at the harvest of hair. It was unsettling. There was something intimate and private about this. They had gotten used to dead bodies and sizzling corpses, but here were the last tangible remains of the living. Cells and roots. Tresses of black and blond and gray and red. There were long braids that had been snipped off close to the base of the skull. And it was all going to be woven into fabric, made into blankets. Each sack was the size of a file cabinet and they stood in ordered rows like huge cancerous tumors. The words REICH PROPERTY were stamped onto each of them.

“Come,” Moshe Taube said.

He clicked one of his cigarette lighters. It was an older model that stayed lit until the hinged top was snapped back into place—only then would the flame go out—and he leaned it against a sack. The bag began to smolder as orange worms of light ate into the burlap.

Zischer and Grinbaum reached for their own lighters and they too rested little flames next to the dried hair. They went down the line, placing lighters here and there. The sacks grew into smoky balls of acrid flame.

The men ran outside and heard machine guns strafing into the woods. The first warehouse was now a raging fire, windows cracked and shattered, and a huge cloud of filthy smoke billowed out the front door. It lifted into the night like a dark tornado.

When the guards saw this, there was a slowing in the camp. A pause.

The machine guns stopped firing into the night and the searchlights rested on the tree branches.

Silence.

A moment of hesitation. Only the soft roar and crackle of the fire could be heard.

And then the searchlights wheeled around and illuminated the whole camp. Prisoners scurried away as bullets chewed up the Rose Garden. Clumps of wet dirt hopped into the air and prisoners began to shout.

“Stop!”

“Don’t shoot!”

The men still had three more barracks to torch but if they wanted to kill Guth they needed to do it now. Time was running out. Moshe Taube had a sharpened knife in his jacket while Zischer and Grinbaum had screwdrivers. The moon was a dirty white rag rising on the horizon, and they ran towards an area of camp they had only seen from afar: the private barracks of the SS. A light was on in Guth’s office.

Bullets splintered wood around them as they threw themselves into the wet, sandy muck to protect themselves. They breathed hard and wondered what to do. They spat sand from their mouths and looked at one another. Was Guth in there? If so, for how long?

Machine guns swept the other side of the Rose Garden. Everyone was shouting and moaning and screaming, the whole camp was a swirl of chaos, and that’s when someone with a deep voice got on the loudspeaker.

“Achtung! Achtung! Jetzt antreten zum Appell!”

The voice ordered the prisoners to line up in the Rose Garden, but everyone knew there would be no salvation or mercy if they did such a thing. They would all die. Zurich was in flames and the guards
would reap a terrible vengeance. Whether they were shot by machine guns now or whether they were lined up before the Roasts later didn’t matter because, come morning, everyone would be turned into corpses. In that moment every prisoner in Lubizec knew what waited for them. They scattered from the searchlights. They ran. They hid.

“Antreten, antreten.”

As Zischer, Taube, and Grinbaum ran towards Guth’s office, a string of SS sprinted towards them, their legs working hard. One of these officers was Birdie Franz and when he saw the prisoners in an area of camp that was strictly off-limits to them, he pulled out his pistol. He lowered the snout of his gun and took a few steps forward.

“What’re you doing here?”

His green eyes were hard and piercing. Shadows of hellfire danced on the visor of his SS hat and this made the little death head’s emblem seem bright and alive. He took another step and repeated the question.

“I said, what are you doing here?”

Moshe Taube clicked his wet shoes together and came to attention. “Sir,” he said with a little Hitler salute, “I wish to report we have been sent to get buckets.”

“Buckets?”

“To put out the fire, sir.”

Birdie looked at the sooty cloud pouring up into the sky. It was a volcano of ash and spark. He lowered his gun, cocked his head back and forth as if weighing a thought, and then took off running with the other guards towards Zurich.

“Get those buckets,” he yelled back. “Hurry!”

We should remind ourselves that Birdie was in charge of these buildings, and he was probably worried about how he would explain the fire. Was it arson? An accident? Did he do it on purpose to hide the true extent of things
he
had stolen? These are all questions Berlin would have asked, and since he had already been investigated once before for missing inventory, he must have been anxious to put out the fire. No wonder he didn’t shoot any of the prisoners. This is almost certainly why he spared them and told them to get buckets.

“Antreten, antreten,”
came the voice over the loudspeaker again. It sounded nervous and human.

The machine guns weren’t popping so often now, and Chaim Zischer took a moment to notice the bodies scattered around the camp, how the moon shimmered in invisible waves of heat, and how the barracks were being eaten alive. Something primal was devouring Zurich. The wooden walls were greased with fire and orange sparks drifted up. A window shattered and there was a sudden roar of flame.

“Antreten, antreten.”

The three men ran towards Guth’s office. A light was on and they moved down a brick path. Zischer was full of adrenaline when they came to the little wooden building. Two large flowerpots filled with melting snow and cigarette butts were on either side of the door. There was a sign that read, SS
Obersturmführer Hans-Peter Guth
. The prisoners looked at each other and got out their weapons. They turned the handle.

Avrom Petranker and Dov Damiel were happy to be under the engine when the machine guns began showering bullets into the camp. Their fingers danced on the cold metal until they found the plug. It was easy to unscrew because the oil was changed so frequently and because nothing was allowed to get rusty. If the engine went down for repairs it meant transports would get backed up on the line, and this in turn would make the higher-ups in Berlin furious. As a result, this engine, which ran for hours at a time, was in immaculate condition.

Petranker unscrewed the bolt and felt thick oil dribble onto his fingers. It threaded its way down to the hair of his forearm.

“Good,” he said, wiping it onto his trousers.

Even in the murky dark with searchlights slashing all around them, Dov Damiel could tell his fellow prisoner was smiling. They were supposed to start the engine but it was now so black they couldn’t find the ignition switch. Damiel slapped the instrument panel in frustration because they were running late to meet up with the others.

“Wait, wait,” Petranker said, holding up a finger.

Wordlessly, he went around to the gas tank and began to unscrew the cap. Two guards huffed past them with guns but they didn’t pay any attention, nor did they see the body splayed out on the concrete pad beneath the engine. Petranker threw the gas cap on the ground and went over to Oberhauser’s body. He pulled off a leather boot and yanked on the man’s damp sock—he stretched it out like taffy—and when it finally snapped free he bent down to sop up the oil. He stuffed it halfway into the gas tank.