The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (32 page)

Dov wanted to wait until nightfall and steal two chickens but Zischer said they couldn’t cook it with a campfire.

“We can’t risk the light,” he said.

They argued in whispers about what to do and decided to approach the farmhouse at dusk. If the woman agreed to help, great. If she didn’t agree to help, they could always run into the woods and zigzag through the trees.

They crouched behind a large bush and watched the sun go down. A blanket of ink was pulled across the land and when it was completely dark they gingered their way towards the farm. The road was rutted and pools of melting snow reflected the stars above. A light was on and muffled music came from the kitchen. The two men were soaked. They shivered and smelled of the outdoors.

Dov knocked on the door with a single knuckle.

Nothing happened, so he knocked harder—this time, using his fist.

There were footsteps and the sound of a lock being undone. The door opened an inch and a woman with thick wiry hair, glasses, and a worried face stood before them.

“Yes?”

“We’re soldiers, in the former Polish Army, and we’re wondering if you have something to eat.” Dov put his fingertips to his mouth and pretended to chew.

Before the woman could answer, a car came down the road and they all turned to look at the headlights. She adjusted her glasses as the car got closer and closer.

“Wait here,” she said, shutting the door. A deadbolt snapped shut.

The car rolled over the dirt road. Puddles splashed up into its wheel wells and the radio blared out a German song about farming the land. It came over a low rise with its headlights reaching into the air and it slowed as it passed the farm entrance. It kept moving away, dragging the music behind it.

A few chickens clucked in the yard as the men looked at each other. They held their stomachs and glanced into the woods. Zischer peeked into the window and saw that it was warm and pleasant inside. A fire was going and something was steaming in a large enamel pot—the top quivered. He had forgotten that people still lived in this way. It seemed impossible, like a fantasy, and he stood there in wonderment.

The door opened suddenly and she held out a quilt. “Here,” she said. “I’ve also packed a loaf of bread, some honey, and some tinned herring. You can’t stay here, though. Leave now.”

Dov had tears in his eyes because it was the first act of kindness
he had experienced in years. Something fluttered in his throat and his knees buckled. He fell to the ground and covered his face.

“Please,” Zischer interrupted. “We’re both tired, as you can see. Can we sleep in your barn? We’ll leave when the sun comes up.”

“Are you Jews?”

“No, no. Not us.”

She studied them for a long moment. A kink appeared in her eyebrow and she finally said, “The hayloft’s out back but … if the Nazis find you … I’ll deny everything. Understand? I’ll say you broke into my barn and stole my chickens.”

They nodded.

She started to close the door but stopped. She looked at them and added, “I’ve seen things happen to your people. Terrible things and … I’m sorry. I just wanted to say that. It’s not right what’s being done to you. It’s not right.”

The three of them stood in the lemony shaft of light that spilled out from her house until, at last, the middle-aged woman closed the door. It clicked, softly.

Zischer and Damiel stayed in the hayloft for three days and the woman (who never gave her name) made up backpacks of canned vegetables for their journey.

The former prisoners of Lubizec walked at night towards Kraków. They got the idea of acquiring forged identity cards with the diamonds in their pockets, and they hoped to slip into society, where they would pretend to be gentiles. In this way, they might survive the war. They might live to bear witness.

A reply to Guth’s report came a week later, and it was from none other than Heinrich Himmler. The twin lightning bolts of the SS were embossed at the top of the letter, and beneath it were stamped the words “From the Office of the Reichsführer.” No one except Hitler was higher in the Nazi universe.

Guth sat at his desk and read it a few times before the words really sank in. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He spoke to his second in command, Heinrich Niemann.

“It’s all over. We’re being shut down,” he said.

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“That’s funny. You’re being funny.”

“Here, let me read a few lines.
Lubizec is primitive
 … 
Zyklon-B is more effective
 … 
all operations are shifting to Auschwitz. Your camp is to be dismantled
.” Guth looked up and groaned. “Plus there’s this line:
Report to Berlin immediately
. What on earth does that mean?”

Niemann shrugged.

A moment passed before Guth stubbed out his cigarette. He looked out the window and added, “Well, begin dismantling the camp. It’s all over.”

He got on a train the next day and made the long journey to SS headquarters in Berlin. He was made to wait in an enormous marble room for several hours while a bust of Adolf Hitler glowered down at him and trolleys outside the tall windows clanged on the street below. Sunlight spilled into the room and a large swastika banner rippled in light gusts of wind. He could hear the faint ticking of typewriters and the buzz of telephones.

To his great surprise—astonishment, really—he was not only promoted but ordered to Frankfurt where he would assume control of the SS stationed there. Everything happened so dizzyingly fast. One month he was in charge of a death camp and the next he was signing paperwork in a huge private office. It was his job to make sure political dissent was squashed and that trainloads of “special cargo” moved through his region of control without problem or hindrance. Most of these trains, of course, were packed full of Jews bound for the east. As for Jasmine, she was delighted to return to Germany. She began to decorate their new home in Frankfurt and her diary is full of entries about fancy parties and dresses. She writes about what was served at restaurants and who danced with whom. There is no more mention of Poland. It’s like it never happened.

Most of the guards at Lubizec were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau where murder was so routine it was clockwork. Men like
Heinrich Niemann, Birdie Franz, and Sebastian Schemise quickly rose through the ranks because they had hearts of granite and they knew how to run a gas chamber. While they were at Auschwitz they helped make it the largest site of mass murder in human history, and they were well liked in the SS canteen because they often told stories of the “good old days at Lubizec.”

As for the camp, it was plowed into the ground. The wooden barracks were knocked down and the entire area was planted with firs and lupins. By July 1943, nothing was left—even the rail tracks were ripped out. Wildflowers were sown into the ground and a farmhouse was built. Bricks from the gas chambers were used to make the foundation, and the whole thing was painted a bright pistachio green. A stone fireplace was added a few months later.

A Polish man was paid to live in this quaint little farmhouse and tell people it had been in his family for generations. And what did this man do for a living?

He raised cattle for slaughter.

21

M
ost of Poland’s Jews were gone by the end of the war, and even today, even in major cities like Warsaw, Kraków, and Lublin, their marks are barely visible. Empty synagogues line the streets and leafy parks exist where thriving communities of human beings once went about the business of life. To visit Poland today is to realize they are all gone. It is to walk with ghosts.

From a Nazi perspective, Operation Reinhard was a stunning success because it wiped out a perceived threat to Aryan blood and it made Poland almost entirely
Judenrein
(cleansed of Jews). It is frightening indeed to realize that what the Nazis learned between 1941 and 1943 in camps like Lubizec allowed them to kill at an even faster rate, and they subsequently began to streamline the process of death. Because of Operation Reinhard, Auschwitz became an unrelenting drain, and the remaining Jews of Europe were pulled toward its deadly center. Today this massive camp symbolizes a profound evil, and it defies our belief in a compassionate universe.

In an interview with National Public Radio that was conducted in 1998, Dov Damiel described what it meant to survive the Holocaust. He said whenever he should have been happy—on a warm summer day, for example—something always shook awake in his brain. The thunder of Lubizec rumbled down the days of his life, and he was never able to feel lasting joy. Laughter became a foreign language to him and horrible images echoed in his head whenever he saw trains, uniforms, or barbed wire. Movies with machine guns made him wince, the German language made him shudder, and, worst of all, he had trouble falling asleep because that’s when the demons crawled out from his imagination. Today we call this “posttraumatic
stress disorder,” but that psychological phrase only begins to scratch the surface of his deep, lasting pain.

“The nights are a torment to me,” he told National Public Radio. “Why did I survive? I wasn’t any faster or smarter or better than the others. Why me? Imagine if everyone you knew, your family, your friends, your coworkers, people you see in the grocery store when you buy eggs … imagine them all dead. But you, you survived. And how did this thing happen? How did you make it out alive when so many others did not? This is why Lubizec is an unhealable wound for me. It remains open and raw.”

It is here that Damiel stops and coughs. There is a pause before he adds, “Lubizec is burned onto my eyes. Onto my
eyes
, I tell you. The past is never going away for me. Ever.”

When pressed about this, Damiel goes on to talk about what he calls his “second life.”

“Sometimes when a man holds a door open for me, or a woman in a shop picks up some coins I have dropped, or a stranger gives me directions in a city, I walk away and think, ‘Such nice people.’ But a moment later I find myself thinking, ‘Yes, they are nice now but how would they be in Lubizec?’ Do you understand what I mean? My world is not nice and smiling as it is for other people. This is my second life, my life after Lubizec. I try to fight against this but the camp has become a part of the texture of my being. I … I have thought about suicide many times. I want my mind to stop working. I just want these memories to go away.”

Damiel moved to Israel after the war. He eventually remarried and had four children, but he rarely talked about what he saw, especially during the first few decades of his second life. He kept the pillowcase he escaped with along with the shaving kit and the little slice of yellow soap. He stockpiled enormous rows of canned vegetables and fruits. His cupboards groaned under the weight of sugar and flour. He kept dishes of sweets in every room, and he had three locks put on his front door. At night, he slept with the lamp on.

He worked with troubled teens in Tel Aviv because it made him feel useful, somehow more whole, and he had pictures of his
grandchildren scattered all over his little apartment. His face lit up whenever he saw them.