The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard

by Patrick Hicks

  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

  NEIGHBORS

  It 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.

  And then one day he was asked to drive a special train to Lubizec.

  “What’s the cargo?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “More tanks? Troops?”

  “Oh God, no. No, no. Something else.”

  And so it was that Oski found himself carrying passengers in a way that stunned him. When he was interviewed in 2004 by that historian from the Holocaust Museum, he spoke matter-of-factly but occasionally he had to stop and take a long drink of water. He pulled on his left ear as if trying to block out a sound he didn’t want to listen to. The historian, David Zimmer, set up a small camera and it is clear that Oski Kszepicki is wrestling with ugly images from his past. He swings between smiling and wanting to cry, all the while pulling on his left ear. From this thirty-minute interview we know he stopped his train many times to let other freight trains loaded down with tanks and artillery pass by. His cargo of people could wait in the blazing heat or the blowing snow because they weren’t weapons for the war. They weren’t considered valuable.

  While his engine breathed quietly on a side track, he could hear screams from the back and if he turned his ear towards the wind he could hear people begging for water. The constant screams, especially from babies and young mothers, distressed him so he sat near the valves of his engine and went about the business of making sure the firebox was stoked with coal. He was pleased to have a modern engine that fed coal directly into the hopper by way of a mechanical auger. Shoveling coal wasn’t necessary because technology was making his life easier. But that didn’t mean his job was easy. Far from it. Sweat always rolled down his face and he was covered in grime. His hands were badly calloused from years of pulling stiff levers but he was content with this because it meant he could touch the warm metal without protective gloves. He knew that hundreds of human beings were trailing behind him in locked cars and he knew exactly where they were going, but he chose not to think about it. He stared ahead and didn’t think of the future.

  The Germans always gave him a bottle of vodka—“to make the job easier”—and at first Oski had no interest in becoming a caricature of a Polish drunkard, but when he pulled into Lubizec for the first time he uncorked the bottle. By the third day he was used to drinking and powering the train. It was easy to drop the bottle into a fire bucket and go on pulling levers. He only had to worry about dehydrating from the overpowering heat and making sure that he slowed the train down in time. He took a sip of water and a sip of vodka. He alternated like that. Water, vodka. Water, vodka. He’d stick his head out the side and blast the whistle when he approached a road. Sometimes he might glance back at the cars and see hands grasping the air like they were trying to squeeze water out of nothingness. This made him turn back to the bottle of vodka. He focused on the trees that blurred past him. Sometimes he worried about the Polish Underground dynamiting the line ahead and his engine tumbling off the tracks—but this never happened. He just kept going down the line.

  When he reached the woods surrounding the death camp he came to a stop and listened to the clicking huff of the engine. He let out two long blasts of the whistle to signal that he was ready to approach the platform. A green light flickered on up ahead and, when he saw this, he let the massive steel wheels spin back to life. The train rolled down the tracks and came to a grinding, hissing, complaining, stop.

  Oski Kszepicki never jumped down from the train. He cleaned the regulator rod or fiddled with safety valves or jiggled the ash grate as people were ordered out of the cattle cars. The train rocked slightly as hundreds of people jumped out at once. Shrieks of anguish filled the air and sometimes he blasted the release valve to drown out their noise. His engine had a life of its own and he went back to caring for it. The hot belly glowed with nourishing fire when he opened the iron grate. Heat pushed against his trouser legs and he felt the pores on his forehead open up. Sometimes he leaned out the window of his driving cab and watched people on the platform. They moved like bees in a box and there was so much noise. Corpses of infants were thrown out of the cars along with packages and suitcases. Ragged people held on to their children. They looked up at the gigantic WELCOME sign above the iron gate of the camp. The commandant stepped onto a specially made wooden box and delivered a speech.

  “It was always the same,” Kszepicki told the historian. “It never changed.”

  “And what did you do during this speech?”

  “I greased the rods or looked at timetables. Sometimes I cleaned my hands with a rag.”

  “Didn’t you … didn’t you feel guilty about bringing these people to their deaths?”

  At this point in the interview Oski Kszepicki shakes his head. Nothing is said for a long time.

  “I could have been replaced. Another would have done my job.”

  “But you did it. Not someone else. You.”

  Here Kszepicki stands up and leaves the room. The video camera stops recording. It starts up again later (we don’t know how much time has elapsed) and Kszepicki is back in his leather chair. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy as if he has been crying. The historian asks him to please finish the story. Kszepicki goes on to say that once Guth finished his speech everyone was marched through the gates. Guards beat people with rubber truncheons, which made them move faster.

  “They were driven on like cattle. With whips,” Kszepicki added. “They were given no time to think about their situation.”

  Luggage was strewn across the platform as prisoners in little teams began to clean everything up. Another team pulled the dead out of the cars. These corpses were thrown into a wooden cart and taken away—where to Kszepicki couldn’t say because he never went into the camp itself. Hoses were unspooled and the cars were washed out. The chalk numb
ers were scrubbed off with wire brushes and everything was made clean again. Chlorine was splashed into the cars and the terrible reek of a chemical cleaning agent filled up the air.

  At a nod from one of the SS guards, Oski Kszepicki, that same little boy who once loved trains, would pull a long lever and his train would shudder back towards the village. At a roundhouse near a vegetable market he would set off towards Lublin, Kraków, or Warsaw. The train that had been packed with human beings thirty minutes ago was now completely empty, and the cars were left open to air everything out. The stink of chlorine trailed behind it.

  At this point, David Zimmer, the historian, asks Kszepicki a simple question. “In your opinion, did the people around Lubizec know what was happening inside the camp?”

  Kszepicki speaks without hesitation. “Yes. Absolutely. The farmers, they watched my train pass with a full load and I returned later, empty. Where am I taking these souls? They must have asked that question. Where? Even if you were blind to these trains, there were those bonfires of human flesh.”

  “The people knew what was going on then?”

  “Oh, they knew. They knew. Everyone knew.”

  Guth didn’t concern himself with the villagers living beyond the boundary of his camp because for him they were simply Poles that had been conquered by the Third Reich, they were second-class citizens. Serfs. Peasants. Laborers. It’s true he wanted to hide the meaning of Lubizec—but not from those living near the barbed-wire fence. No, he wanted to hide its purpose from the arriving Jews in order to keep them calm. If they realized the true intent of the camp before reaching the gas chambers his schedule might be thrown into chaos. And he wasn’t about to let that happen.

  It slowly occurred to Guth that greater deception was needed, especially within the first ten minutes of arrival. After the victims were pulled off the train they stood on the platform and grew more nervous as each minute passed. They looked around and began to suspect they weren’t really at a train station at all. But where were they? After one particularly messy incident when a rabbi was shot for refusing to obey orders, the crowd almost revolted and Guth realized that the victims needed to feel safe, at least for the first few minutes of their arrival. But how?