The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (8 page)

Zischer scratches the back of his head and almost smiles. One gets the impression he is used to answering this question and, in fact, many of the sentences he uses in this interview are similar to those that appear in his memoir,
The Hell of Lubizec
. He says that like many of the innocents who arrived into Lubizec, he hid valuables in his suitcase and took the further precaution of sewing his grandfather’s pocket watch into the waist of his trousers. It was a family heirloom that dated back to the 1820s and he wanted to keep it safe. He didn’t want the Nazis stealing it and they would have because it was made of gold. It gave Zischer strength to feel the small circular disc press against his waist and he went to bed each night with the knowledge that part of his family past was still safe. Part of it lived on.

And then one of the guards, SS
Unterscharführer
Rudolf Oberhauser, discovered the watch when he saw Zischer fiddling with his trousers. The tall man with beady weasel eyes marched over, pulled out his pistol, and cocked it against Zischer’s forehead.

“What are you hiding there?”

The watch was found, Zischer was tied to a wooden sawhorse, and he was whipped twenty-five times for “hiding property that belonged to the Reich.”

The world was a blur of pain as the hippopotamus-hide whip came down onto his back. It felt like cactus needles and broken glass were digging into his spine. With each heartbeat, his skin pulsed and bled. He was on the verge of blacking out. The world moved like a kaleidoscope.

And when he was finally untied from the sawhorse, he slumped to the ground.

“You must work, Chaim,” came a voice. It was Dov Damiel. “You must work or say goodbye to this world forever.”

He somehow managed to stack suitcases and, whenever he stumbled, or fell, or tripped, the arms of the other prisoners caught him. Damiel’s voice hovered in his ears. “You must work or they will shoot you.”

When he was finally allowed to stagger back to Barrack 14, he was pushed into one of the top bunks and his fellow prisoners examined the open slash marks on his back. Pus was forming and they sponged it out as best they could with prayer shawls.

In the interview with Israel Broadcasting Authority, Zischer’s voice is steady but he is obviously on the verge of tears.

“These men, they saved my life. They hid me in a top bunk for two days and nursed me back to health. They brought me food and water and hid me under blankets. This is how Dov and I became friends. He risked his life and I will never forget this.” Zischer taps his forehead. “I will never forget this.”

He explains how he got the chills and shook so violently it made the whole bunk rattle. At night, the men of Barrack 14 gave him food and cleaned out his wounds. They wrapped him up.

Zischer adjusts his bifocals again. “I ask you, if we Jews weren’t good to each other, who
would
be good to us?”

There is a long pause and the camera pans in closer.

“I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for those men. Those men saved my life. They saved my life in a place where life was not meant to be saved.”

At this point in the interview Zischer moves off on what appears to be a tangent, but it is a useful tangent for our purposes because it opens a doorway into what we will discuss in the next chapter.

“No one slept at Lubizec. Not really. You fell into your bunk, exhausted. Shattered. I do not remember having any dreams while I was in that place. When you live in a nightmare, your brain seems to shut down during sleep. It turns itself off like a television going blank. It is the only freedom you have.”

He then spends the next five minutes trying to explain how the
barracks were a miasma of stale farts and diarrhea. Two buckets of piss were in the center of the wooden barrack and the stench of body odor, cheesy feet, and sweat saturated everything.

“It is very hard to explain the stink of Lubizec. It was atrocious. Awful. There were so many rotting bodies we had trouble breathing. When the wind changed directions, when it blew into our faces, it felt like we were drowning. Even the SS had to stop working when this happened. People today have no idea how badly Lubizec stank. No wonder Guth had the bodies burned.”

It is worth noting that even when Lubizec exhumed the dead and started burning them in massive open-air pits, even then Zischer had to sleep with a rag over his nose.

“I tell you this,” he says, leaning forward. “And I want everyone who sees this interview to think about what I am saying. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the good men of Barrack 14. We cared for each other at a time when the rest of the world did
not
care about us Jews.”

His face tightens.

“Each night I went to sleep knowing that the men in wooden bunks around me were all I had left. They were my brothers and I was their keeper … at least as much as I
could
be their keeper in a place like Lubizec. But what I don’t understand are the people living beyond the barbed wire. How could they go about their daily lives knowing that Lubizec was in their backyard? They could see the columns of black smoke. They saw the trains coming in full and leaving empty.”

He points at the interviewer, as if challenging him.

“Go to Poland. Ask the people living around Lubizec what they remember. Ask them what it was like to live next door to a factory of death. Go on. Ask them.”

5

I
t has been suggested that living around Lubizec would not necessarily mean people understood what was happening inside the camp. Some have claimed that because Lubizec was so far beyond all previous experience (and, indeed, so far beyond all previous human imagination) that those living around the camp were simply unable to recognize that an extermination center had been set up in their backyards. In other words, they didn’t recognize it because the very idea of a death camp was unknown to them. How could they understand what was happening in Lubizec when camps like it had never existed before? How could they recognize a death mill?

This, however, ignores the obvious signs that something awful was taking place in the woods and it also absolves anyone living close to the barbed wire of any degree of critical thinking. To live within five kilometers of Lubizec was to realize that something was very, very wrong. Something new and terrible had been unleashed in the woods.

We know that farmers who worked the fields routinely saw trainloads of people clattering towards Lubizec. One farmer, Józef Novodski, had clear memories of harvesting wheat while one train stopped on the tracks near his fence. He rumbled by on his tractor and saw arms reaching out of the barbed-wire mesh windows. When asked how he felt about this, Novodski shrugged. “I had a tractor and my wheat. What did I care about Jews being resettled?”

The train sat there for hours as Novodski trolled back and forth. Hands waved out of the train but he didn’t look at them. Instead, he lowered his cap and kept on harvesting.

“I would have been shot if I did anything,” he told one historian.

“It was best to keep your nose down, and, anyway, the train took off soon afterward. It returned a few hours later. Empty.”

Novodski isn’t alone because many farmers saw trains pass their fields. Hands reached out from the mesh windows and the people inside begged for water.

Farmers near the camp talked about hearing the pop of small-arms fire and everyone could see black smoke curling into the sky. It floated up like a smudge of tar. One person described it as a geyser of smoke. Another called it a black fog that dimmed the sun. Rumors began. Tales were told. The burning happened once a day—usually at twilight—and it had an odd smell, like bacon or overripe grapefruit. The villagers around Lubizec also noticed something orange and greasy coating their windows.

“It was so difficult to clean,” one woman said.

It had the consistency of wax and had to be scraped from the windows with a razor. Months later everyone began to realize they were scraping a thin layer of human fat from their windows.

By late September 1942, the bodies of Lubizec were all torched and this sent heavy oily smoke drifting across the countryside. These pyres of human flesh made the whole sky hazy. Sunsets were smeared with bright red colors because of the particulate in the air.

We know from one boy, Jerzy Mrozek, that trains crept across the countryside and that most people paid little attention to them because they had become so commonplace, so normal. In 1992, when he was interviewed for a documentary about living so close to Lubizec, he recalled how the trains usually had ten cars and how chalk numbers were scrawled above each door. His parents told him to pay no attention to these trains, but he was an inquisitive boy and he sneaked into the woods where he hid in a fallen oak. It was a shell of a trunk so he was able to climb in and peek out of a hole the size of an apple. He watched one train roll by at a slow speed and he saw frightened faces looking out from the barbed-wire mesh. As the steel wheels spun by, they sounded like two swords grinding together. He took out a small notepad and wrote down the chalk numbers that chunked past him.

124. 147. 132. 143. 157. 136. 147. 153. 150. 157. 156.

Mrozek waited inside the damp tree as the train rolled away. All
was quiet again. He watched a beetle cross his arm—its hooked legs paddling against his skin—and he looked at the bright greenery of the trees around him. Their leaves were fat; they ate sunlight. The whole world was full of bark and sap and glowing life.

A few minutes later he heard the distant screaming of German, along with several gunshots. The cracks echoed across the countryside as he continued to hide in the damp log.

Thirty minutes later the train reversed past him. It was empty and the chalk numbers had all been scrubbed off. The steel wheels spun by, faster and faster, and they made that sword-grinding sound again. The smell of chlorine filled the air.

He sneaked home through leafy bushes and added up the numbers he had just written down. The total was 1,602.

Mrozek asked his mother, “What’s happening to the Jews?”

She swatted him with a wooden spoon and told him to never, ever, go near the camp again. And he didn’t. Like everyone else he began to ignore the trains. He played with his friends as cargo of people clattered by, unseen.

But if this young boy of twelve could ask such a simple question, it only stands to reason the adults around Lubizec were also wondering what was going on.

“Trains go in full and come out empty.”

“There’s gunfire. Don’t forget about the gunfire.”

“What
are
they burning in there?”

These must have been hushed questions for the people of Lubizec as they went about the business of farming and woodworking. In the vegetable markets, and in the bars, and outside Saint Adalbert’s Catholic Church, they must have whispered about the camp. And yet, immediately after the war, they claimed to know nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like it never existed.

As the decades rolled past, and as the horror of Lubizec became a more distant point of memory on the horizon, many people who lived around the camp slowly began to open up about what they saw. This probably has much to do with their advancing age and a wish to tell their stories before it became too late, but, equally, when Poland
gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1989, the borders of the country opened up and this meant foreign scholars and filmmakers were more apt to travel there. And travel they did. They brought cameras, and ledgers, digital recorders, maps and charts, and above all else they brought a willingness to hunt for stories that were in danger of being lost forever.

Oskar Kszepicki was one of these people who never talked about the camp. He sealed his experiences deep inside the kingdom of his skull and he never mentioned Lubizec—not even to his family—until, at last, an historian from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum knocked on his door. It was January 2004. Kszepicki was eighty-five years old.

As a young boy in the 1920s, Kszepicki became fascinated with steam engines and he loved to watch them chug through the pine trees. He stood near the tracks and pumped his fist up and down in the hopes the conductor might blow the whistle. Sometimes the man did this and it filled Kszepicki with such joy to watch the train clatter faster and faster over the tracks, sending up huge banks of smoke. It surprised no one when Oskar Kszepicki (“Oski” to his friends) became a conductor, and soon he was driving trains from Kraków to Lublin. When the Nazis invaded he found himself moving tanks and troops and huge pieces of artillery around the countryside. Coal too.