The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (6 page)

“Oh yes, the trustworthy Poles,” Guth said, picking a burr off his trousers. He stood up and straightened his uniform. “Don’t believe everything you hear. It’s a transit camp, nothing more. It’s a place of arrivals and … departures.” He pointed to the reading room and smiled. There was a bow, as if he were being a gracious host. “Shall we go inside? I hate talking about work.”

She looked at her fingernails for a long moment, as if weighing up a thought. “Yes,” she finally nodded. “It’s good to have you home.”

The Villa was lush and ornate. Antique furniture was in every room along with carpets, cabinets, and bone china. Guth moved past these collected things and called out for his son and daughter.

“Karlie? Sigi?”

He breezed past an enormous oil painting of Hitler. Flowers were everywhere and a radio murmured in the corner, its dials glowing in circles of light. Guth drew in the last of his cigarette and stubbed it into an ashtray—a puff of smoke, like a skinny phantom, floated up from his fingertips.

“Karlie? Sigi?”

A clattering of feet came from the kitchen. Karl appeared first with a handful of tin soldiers. He dumped them onto the table and began to make shooting noises. Sigi walked out in a dark swishing dress and leaned against a wall. A book was tucked into the nook of her arm. She looked bored.

Guth asked about their day. He leaned in close. He smiled.

Karl held up a soldier and talked about killing dirty Communists while Sigi stood back and waited for her younger brother to finish. He spoke quickly, with long pauses and exclamation points.

“I!… used my soldiers!… and we attacked!… the Soviets!”

“I see.”

“Yes! And … and … and … it was hard!”

“Did you get Stalin?”

“No!… He … he ran away!”

When the little boy no longer talked about machine guns or planes or bombs, Sigi stepped forward and explained her day. She was in the middle of reading yet another book by Karl May and she liked how he brought the American West to life. She especially loved his stories about Old Shatterhand and how he did everything with his Indian friend, Winnetou. Together they roamed the wilderness and sometimes they were chased by mountain lions.

“Karl May is a good German writer but”—Guth raised a finger in warning—“don’t get too dreamy about his idea of America. It is a country of mixed races and Negroes.”

Sigi nodded and walked across the carpet. She curled into a wing-backed chair and went back to reading. Karl was sent upstairs to put on pajamas while Guth sat down to roast beef, apricots, and peas. He poured seltzer water into a crystal glass and watched it effervesce into stillness.

We have access to these snapshots of domestic life thanks to Sigi’s book. More specifically, she mentions how her father ached for love and, at least from this account, we are led to believe he liked how Jasmine looked at him when he was buttoning up his uniform.
The Commandant’s Daughter
is bloated with stories of a doting father and there are many photos of Guth standing beside his children with his long arms draped around them. He looks happy. He is smiling. It is very odd seeing him in a sweater. It’s also very hard to balance these images against the murderer we know him to be and it makes us wonder how he could switch so easily between his two selves. It’s almost as if we are dealing with two different men, a Jekyll and a Hyde.

Through this book we also gain a deeper understanding of Guth’s relationship with religion. Jasmine was a practicing Catholic—we know that much—but we also know that Guth formally signed a document in 1934 stating that he was no longer a
Gottgläubiger
(a believer in God). The Party had never been too excited about religion in the first place because it believed the survival of the Fatherland was the only true faith for any good German to practice. In spite of this, Guth still attended Mass every Christmas, but he probably did so to appease his wife. Although there were several crucifixes in the house and one image of the Sacred Heart, it’s hard to imagine he gave them a second glance. To Guth they were just old icons of a dead spirit world. They meant about as much as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

“Hans,” Jasmine said. “You forgot to say grace.”

Guth opened his mouth as if to argue but he folded his hands in prayer. He made a steeple of his forefingers and pressed them against his lips. They said the Our Father together and in that moment Guth was obedient, submissive.

When the prayer was over, he picked up his silverware and went back to his undercooked beef. His knife squeaked on the bone china plate and, after a few hesitant chews, he reached for Jasmine’s hand.

“I see the Polish girl still isn’t cooking food long enough. Maybe we should replace her?”

“No. The children like her, Hans. And the dinner she made for us earlier was just fine.”

“Boooom!” Karl said at the base of the stairs. He was playing with his tin soldiers again. “Boom-crackle-rackle!”

“Why aren’t you in bed?”

Karl shrugged and went back to making explosions. A tin soldier was tossed high into the air. It hit the ceiling.

“Stop that. I asked you a question,” Jasmine said. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

A shrug.

She pointed to the stairs. “Off you go.”

“Do I have to?” he half sang, half whined.

Guth cleared his throat and this brought the boy to full attention. He gathered up his soldiers and thudded slowly, very slowly, up the stairs, one after the other.

“Faster,” Guth said without raising his voice.

The boy’s footsteps were soon moving around his bedroom. A door slammed. The house was silent except for the ticking of a grandfather clock and, from the other room, the mumbling radio. The window was open and a night breeze fluttered the drapes. A rotten-egg smell floated around the table and Jasmine made a face. She got up, latched the window, and pulled the drapes across in one fluid motion.

“Agh. What
is
that?”

He speared an apricot and used it to mop up some beef juice. “We’re back to that again, are we?”

“Don’t be dismissive. Not with me. I’m not one of your guards.”

He picked up a linen napkin and wiped the O of his mouth. “I told you,” he said, reaching for the seltzer water. “It’s a transit camp. I can’t tell you more, I’m sorry. It’s official business. You know I can’t tell you more.”

“Can I see the place?”

“Good Lord, no. No one’s allowed within a kilometer of the camp without being shot, not even you, my dear.”

The grandfather clock ticked heavily in the background.

“Are the prisoners treated well?”

Guth was confused. “Why should that matter?”

“Rumors. In the village.”

He pushed his plate away and reached for her hand. “I crunch numbers. Other men take care of discipline.”

“So these rumors are—”

“Rumors, my lovely. Just rumors. Don’t worry about all that stuff.”

“I have a right to know.”

He squinted as if to challenge her. “No. You don’t. Not when it comes to Reich’s business.”

They looked at each other for a long moment before Guth glanced at his daughter. She was still reading.

“Are you eavesdropping on us?” he asked. His tone was sharp.

Sigi shook her head.

“Don’t lie. You must never lie.” His face hardened and he pointed his chin upstairs. “Go to bed.”

She closed her book and stood up.

“You must never lie,” Guth said again. “Always tell the truth, especially to family.”

In
The Commandant’s Daughter
, Sigi mentions how her father never raised his voice. Instead, he was able to make a room tremble by speaking slowly and drilling holes into the air with his eyes. This hard gaze now followed her as she went upstairs but, according to her account of this particular evening, she sneaked back down on bare feet. She was curious to know about the smell and what her father did in the camp. These thoughts wouldn’t have concerned her at all except that her mother had been wandering around the house and was now obsessed with the tangy stench. “What in God’s name
is
that?” she asked, squirting perfume here and there. Sigi began to wonder too. It became a big mystery and she thought about creeping into the woods like Old Shatterhand to find out more. She would bring a compass and head out into the wild.

That summer was one of the hottest on record, so the stink would have been overwhelming and ghastly, especially when thousands of new corpses were stuffed into the ground each day. As the body
count continued to grow, quicklime seemed increasingly useless. “It was like throwing salt into the sea,” one guard later said. Other accounts mention how the ground heaved up and down by half a meter or more because the gasses under the soil began to expand and contract. An unholy essence lifted up from the ground and blood began to seep
up
towards the surface. It was against the laws of gravity and common sense but somehow the thick motor oil of these bodies wicked up into the sandy soil. Bloated earthworms began to appear in biblical plaguelike proportions and a low popping sound came from the ground as if the earth itself refused to hide the dead, as if it were choking on what had been given to it, as if the ground were spitting up evidence of crime. Guth worried about the water table being contaminated and he ordered crates of seltzer water trucked into Lubizec because he didn’t want his guards getting sick from bacteria in the ground. The huge number of decaying bodies stacked in the earth did much to explain the invisible stink that floated out from the camp but, as Guth stood near the mass grave with his eyes stinging from the rot of human flesh, he knew something had to be done. But what? Other camps like Auschwitz and Chelmno were experimenting with cremation. Treblinka was having a similar problem. So too were Sobibór and Belzec.

“So these rumors about the camp are …?”

“Just rumors,” Guth said again, shaking his head. “That’s all they are. Which reminds me, the groundwater has been fouled by something, so only drink seltzer water from now on. I’ll have more cases delivered tomorrow.”

Jasmine squinted. “Fouled?”

“My men are looking into it.”

“Is it from that camp?”

Guth drank until an ice cube rested on his upper lip. He slouched back and pulled out his silver cigarette case. “Reich’s business. I can’t discuss the camp with you. You know this. Just let me come home and relax, darling. That’s all I ask.”

He lit a match, but instead of bringing it to the tip of his cigarette he studied the wavering flame for a moment. He glanced at the
ashtray and spoke quietly, almost to himself. “Yes, that might be a solution.”

“Solution to what?”

“Nothing.” Guth smiled.

He blew out the match and looked at the burning orange tip of his cigarette. He puffed a few times and then, very carefully, tapped a small body of ash into the tray.

He looked up and seemed pleased. “What’s for dessert?”

4

W
hile Guth spent his days making sure the machinery of his camp was well oiled and that it hummed along with merciless efficiency, the prisoners of Lubizec were worked to the bone. They sorted luggage that had been piled as high as a house, they dragged bodies, they stacked clothes, and they did all of this on the run. At night they were locked into their barracks—the padlock clicked shut; bolts were driven home—and while they settled into the exhausted dark, they often felt as if they were floating above the camp itself. This cramped world of bunk beds was both part of Lubizec and separate from it. The SS could certainly enter these sleeping areas whenever they wanted to but they rarely did, and this made the barracks the only place in the camp where the prisoners felt a little safer, a little more at ease. The prisoners loved the night because it freed them from the nightmare of the day. To crawl into bed was to realize they had survived yet another twenty-four hours. To live was to fight. It was an act of defiance.

They lit candles without saying a word. Little flames twitched and jerked against the darkness as first one man coughed, then another. They pulled out crusts of crumbly rye bread from their jackets and stuffed them into their mouths. They chewed. They swallowed. Crumbs were picked off clothes and eaten. Flickering shadows danced on the wooden walls until they were chased away by a searchlight—it slashed through one of the windows, blinding everyone for a moment, before it went away to another barrack. The faint sound of polka music could be heard from the rear of the camp. The SS laughed. They drank beer. Sometimes radio broadcasts of Hitler’s voice could be heard.