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
ENDINGS
Most 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 f
or 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.
“You are such beautiful creatures,” he sang. “You are sunrises. Sunrises.”
When he died in 1999, his funeral was attended by over 1,500 people, and as his obituary suggests, we can only hope that he has finally “found peace beneath the shade of a date palm.”
Although many survivors fell into a deep silence about what they saw and never spoke about it, others, like Chaim Zischer, tried to put their pain into words. In The Hell of Lubizec, he reminds his readers that their families are not in any immediate danger nor do they have to worry about being shot. He also reminds us that, when we read, we shed our bodies and travel elsewhere. Reading is essentially an out-of-body experience, but Lubizec, by contrast, was firmly rooted in the body. Because it was a place of physical pain, what does it mean to read about crippling thirst? What does it mean to read about standing at attention for hours or to feel the heat of a thousand burning corpses on your face? How can anyone understand what it means to wake up in the middle of the night because you’ve just heard a gunshot that was fired in March 1943?
In his book, Zischer explains that the past is never really over, and he writes about living in multiple time zones where the past, the present, and the future all get spun together like rope. One minute he is strolling through New York and the next, when a car backfires, he is immediately back in Lubizec again. A clattering subway train becomes the 8:00 a.m. transport chugging into camp. Children screaming with laughter on a playground are suddenly in the Rose Garden. A police officer reminds him of Birdie. The past, Zischer reminds us, is not about clocks and dead years. It isn’t about dust and documents. It isn’t about looking backwards. No, not at all. The past spills out of memory and demands a future.
Zischer spends several pages thinking about the ashfields of Lubizec. As he imagines a grassy expanse stretching out before him, all of these ghosts begin to climb out of the ground. It is worth quoting the entirety of this dream passage because it hints at two things: 1) Zischer’s attempt to make the interior landscape of his skull real for the readers and 2) his obvious feelings of survivor’s guilt.
As I dreamed about this place that killed my former life and robbed me of all that I once loved, I was aware that my feet were once again on wicked soil. Beneath my wingtip shoes were the ashes of my people. The grass moved and swayed in the wind, and I looked around, hoping to feel the pull of my wife Nela and my son Jakob. Where were their ashes? Could I sense their final resting place as if I were divining water?
I gathered up a handful of soil and pressed it to my cheek. I wept in this dream and as my tears fell to the ground that’s when all these ghosts began to rise up. There were thousands of them and they were made entirely of ash. Their clothes were ash, their faces were ash, their skin, their hands, their lips, their chins, their eyelashes, their belts, their shoes, their dresses, and hats, their Star of David armbands and suitcases. It was all ash. They were all made completely of flaky ash.
Then these ghosts, these suggestions of happy former lives, moved around as if they were lost. What happened to us? they asked. I wanted to help but they couldn’t hear me. I yelled until my throat was sore but they paid no attention. Bits of ash flittered off one man when I tried to grab his shoulder. My hand went right through him and my palm was covered in soot. Thousands of ghosts rose up from the underworld in an endless dry birthing and I saw before me a huge crowd of these ashpeople. Men adjusted their hats. Women reached out with their gray powdery hands for their children. They walked towards the barbed-wire fence and passed right through it as they went off into the murky forest. They left crumbled footprints behind them.
Nela and Jakob had to be among these dead so I yelled out and ran through ghost after ghost. It was like running through grainy fog but I found them after much searching. My clothes were covered in ash and I wept at the sight of my family. My wife looked beautiful even though everything about her was ash. Her hair. Her lips. Her eyes were little gray cinders, and when she smiled, the corner of her mouth flaked off. When I tried to hug her, it was like embracing coal smoke. My forearms passed right through her. When I looked at my hands, they were covered in her remains.
A sudden wind swirled out of a clock (it looked like the old clock on Jateczna Street in my hometown of Lublin), and a fearsome hurricane carried away these ghosts. Thousands of powdery spirits dissolved into air and I looked around, helpless to stop it. My wife and son scattered into nothingness and I found myself transported to a bustling city. New York. Car horns blared. Buses rumbled. People ate food on the go. My body was covered in human soot, but I was not one of these ghosts. I, I was condemned to live. And the world continued on around me, unable to see that I was clothed in ash and burning with agony.
Zischer goes on to explain that literary and artistic mediums break down when we approach the Holocaust. He reminds us that words like appalling and horrible only take us so far when we try to understand these camps. It is a story without hope because people came in one end and truckloads of ash came out the other. But how can we explain such things through words? Whenever we try to do this, we find ourselves in a world where the old ways of storytelling do not apply. Any Holocaust story that makes us smile at the end is full of the false belief that something can be learned from all of the murder, that there is some scrap of goodness amid the ash. Perhaps this is human nature, this search for the good, but to focus on acts of kindness or on moments of enlightenment is to turn away from the horror of the Holocaust. It is to search for the flickering candle in the darkness when, really, the darkness itself is the story.
But as Zischer notes in The Hell of Lubizec, “Who wants a story like that?”
Who indeed? No one wants to sink into despair, and yet if we are to engage with the death camps in any meaningful way, we need to understand that traditional modes of storytelling fail us. The villains outnumber the heroes. Resolution cannot happen. The Nazis do not have a moral awakening, and we should not feel uplifted at the end of such stories, but wounded.
Before we move on, it is worth mentioning one final sobering fact. Of the thirty-five guards that were stationed at Lubizec, only four received jail time (a paltry 11 percent conviction rate). Most of them were never punished in any way. They became, instead, bank clerks, electricians, carpenters, accountants, insurance salesmen, and bartenders. One became a priest. Another became a judge.
As for Guth, he fled to Barcelona. He decided to go to Spain after the war because everyone else in the SS was fleeing to South America, and he thought there would be safety in isolation. Go against the grain, he thought. Go against the crowd. Be anonymous. Hide.
He ended up washing dishes in a grubby little restaurant and eventually worked his way up to managing it. He called himself “Hans Bauer” and lived in an a
rea of the city populated mostly by foreigners. Barri Xinès was a drug den, a warren of prostitution, and it was easy to hide in its narrow streets where landlords asked few questions as long as the rent appeared on time. Jasmine and the children joined him, and after a few years of pinching pesetas, they bought a rooftop flat in a safer area of the city, on Carrer de Marlet. Guth sold jugs of sangria at the restaurant while his children became fluent in Spanish.
“I didn’t like it,” Jasmine later recalled. “Barcelona was a cold bath. There were no more parties in the evening, money was very tight, we had to keep a low profile, but I got used to the situation. I had to. Hans got into the habit of taking long walks through the twisting streets of the city. He walked for hours. Ribera, Eixample, Raval. He walked every part of the city and made Barcelona home. As for me, it took much longer. Our new life was … hard.”
The world quickly moved away from the Holocaust as it began to worry about the cold war. Visions of mushroom clouds filled up the newspapers, and everyone built fallout shelters in their backyards. There was talk of whole cities disappearing beneath mighty eruptions of atomic fire. Human civilization could be wiped out by pushing a button. Rockets would then fire up from the ground and arch their deadly payloads across the globe. In a flickering pulse of time, shockwaves of light would obliterate the world, and because of this, no one seemed to care much about the ashfields of Poland. By the early 1960s, Guth even talked about moving back to Germany. After all, it had been twenty years and no one—not a single person—had knocked on his door to ask any questions.
All of this changed on November 2, 1965.*
The morning was cold, overcast, and Guth was caught near the massive unfinished church of Sagrada Família. Just as Big Ben symbolizes London, and the Eiffel Tower symbolizes Paris, this church symbolizes Barcelona. Sagrada Família launches itself into the sky and at night its eight steeples poke the stars like dripping wax candles. Its architect, a cranky genius named Antoni Gaudí, believed it would “expiate sin” from the city. In other words, the act of building Sagrada Família was an atonement to God, and it was designed to purify the city of evil. Whether Guth believed this or not is unknown, but we do know he visited this church every week because he liked watching the stonemasons chisel out chunks of rock. He brought along breadcrumbs for the pigeons, and he smoked cigarettes as building cranes and cement trucks went about the business of constructing something good and holy.
The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard Page 23