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

by Patrick Hicks

  It was at Sagrada Família that he was finally caught. In his wallet were several thousand pesetas, a Metro pass, and pictures of his family. The famed “Nazi Hunter,” Simon Wiesenthal, spent five months tracking him down but it was worth the effort. Hans-Peter Guth, the Commandant of Lubizec, was finally under arrest. He was rushed to the airport in an armored truck and flown to West Germany where he was put on trial for the murder of 710,000 people.

  The proceedings began on July 5, 1966. It was the first time he had been in a courtroom, and he looked nervous. In video footage, we can see him fretting with his tie and adjusting his cufflinks. He smoothes his graying hair with both hands and clears his throat. When asked about his role at Lubizec, he said the deaths were “regrettable,” but he didn’t see much difference between what happened in the camp and the massacre at Katyn or the firebombing of Dresden or the miniature suns that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “Civilian death happens in war,” he said to the judge. “I was following orders and I never personally laid a hand on anyone. In fact, I didn’t fire a single bullet in the last war. Not one. Not one single bullet. I didn’t personally murder anyone.”

  The prosecutor shook his head in disbelief.

  “But Herr Guth, the genocide of the Jews had nothing to do with war. You would have happily murdered them in peacetime. No sir, war and genocide are two very different things. Let us say Nazi Germany won the last war. You would have carried on killing the Jews anyway, wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?”

  Silence.

  “The whole world is waiting for your answer.”

  Guth shrugged. He looked annoyed.

  It is worth quoting the remainder of this exchange as it appears in the court transcript because it sheds light on his emotions at the time.

  Question: Did you hate the Jews?

  Answer: No, I didn’t hate anyone. I was doing my job.

  Question: Doing your job. I see. Weren’t you disgusted by what was happening?

  Answer: At first maybe but you got used to it. We all got numb to the realities of our job.

  Question: You keep calling it a “job.”

  Answer: It was a job.

  Question: No, Herr Guth. It was murder. It was genocide. To oversee the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people is nothing short of demonic.

  Answer: I was following orders.

  Question: Orders?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: Whose orders?

  Answer: Odilo Globocnik’s [lead administrator of Operation Reinhard].

  Question: But it was you who watched the trains come in. It was you who gave a welcome speech. It was you who made sure the engine worked and the gas chamber sealed shut. You. Not Globocnik. Not Himmler. Not Hitler. You.

  Answer: Let me ask you a question.

  Question: No, I’m asking the questions today, Herr Guth.

  Answer: That hardly seems fair.

  Question: You’re a man that’s used to being in charge, aren’t you? I think you liked being commandant because it made you feel important and puffed up. It made you feel like a god to decide who lived and who died. That’s what you liked most about Lubizec, wasn’t it? The power?

  Answer: It was a job.

  Question: A job that required you to kill 710,000 people?

  Answer: No comment.

  Question: No comment? Sir, the people you killed deserve better than “no comment.”

  Answer: It happened a long time ago.

  Question: Crime doesn’t melt away. You’re a murderer.

  Answer: I was an officer. I was doing my duty.

  Question: Doing your duty. [Long pause.] Tell me … didn’t you feel anything? Didn’t you feel anything at all when women and children were being shut into your gas chambers?

  Answer: They were cargo.

  Question: Cargo.

  Answer: I kept myself busy with paperwork, and managing the train schedule, and making sure my guards were paid, and worrying about drainage issues, and planning what flowers should be around the SS canteen.

  Question: Flowers? My God, sir. Flowers?

  Answer: Listen, I never personally killed anyone. Not a single person.

  Question: Herr Guth, you’re a mass murderer. Why can’t you see this simple fact?

  The trial lasted two weeks, and the lawyers debated about whether or not Guth fired a gun, about whether or not he watched an orphanage of boys get locked into a gas chamber, and about whether or not he slapped an old woman. To Chaim Zischer, none of these things mattered because they were missing the bigger picture. Guth was in charge of Lubizec, and these tiny moments of crime weren’t as important as the daily mass homicides he set into motion. Who cared if he whipped a teenage girl when as many as four thousand people were murdered under his command in the course of a single day? Why focus on one event when it was the landscape in which that event was set that mattered? Who cared if he pushed a lit cigarette into an old woman’s face when far worse things were happening at the wrong end of the Road to Heaven? Guth ran a kingdom of death and, surely, Zischer thought angrily, that was more important. That’s what he was on trial for.

  When it was all over, the judge sentenced Guth to life behind bars in Frankfurt Prison. Many people wished that West Germany still had the death penalty, but since it had been abolished after the war, this meant Guth would spend the rest of his days in solitary confinement. He would live although hundreds of thousands had died.

  IS THIS GERMAN JUSTICE? read one headline from an Israeli newspaper.

  Guth became a model prisoner. He kept his cell tidy and there were pictures of his wife and grown children on his desk. He folded his clothes, he read books, and he enjoyed his hour of daily exercise in the yard. He was granted a pair of binoculars and he took up bird-watching.

  In 1969 he was interviewed by a journalist about his role at Lubizec. They met in a small guarded room and sat on opposite ends of a metal table. A tape recorder was placed between them, and the journalist, Tobias Duval, took notes on a yellow legal pad. He asked about Guth’s childhood, his service in World War I, the economic crisis of the 1920s, and why he joined the Nazi Party, and then they moved on to Lubizec. Duval asked about the 710,000 people and wanted to know if Guth ever thought about their ashes.

  The commandant took a deep breath and held it. He looked at the floor and said, “In my estimation, that number is too low. The real figure is probably closer to one million.”

  “As many as that?”

  “The camp was very efficient.”

  Throughout the interview, Guth referred to himself in third person. It was like someone else had committed these crimes. Tobias Duval found this curious and he brought it to Guth’s attention.

  “When we talk about Lubizec, you say ‘Guth did this’ or ‘Guth did that’ but you’re Guth. You did these things, not some other person in history. Don’t you feel guilty about killing these people? Whole generations were wiped out because of you. You murdered the future.”

  “I’ve had a long time to think about this,” he said, lighting a cigarette. Blue smoke lifted up. “It was war, you see.”

  “No, it wasn’t war. To kill men, women, and children … children. Don’t you feel anything about that today?”

  He took a long drag and used the standard line he had been parroting for decades. “I was following orders and—”

  “No. You killed them. You killed them all.”

  Smoke from Guth’s cigarette threaded its way up to the ceiling, ghostlike. His breathing grew ragged and he swallowed a few times before he spoke.

  “Maybe I … I’ve thought about this a lot you see, and maybe I … maybe I … it could be that I’m …” His face hardened and he shook his head as if clearing something dangerous from his mind. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. The chair rumbled on the cement floor.

  “We’re done for the day. Goodbye.”

  Guth turned on his heel in military style and knocked on the steel door w
ith a single knuckle. A jailor opened up and he was escorted back to his cell.

  Hans-Peter Guth died of a heart attack twelve hours later. Tobias Duval believed that something shook awake in him during that interview and the revelation of what he had done finally overpowered him. Perhaps, in the privacy of his prison cell, he was on the verge of recognizing something terrible about himself. We can’t be sure of this, of course. All we do know is that he died in the early hours of July 20, 1969, and that he never admitted to the scope of his crime. His body was cremated and his ashes were buried in an unmarked grave inside the prison walls.

  A few months later, one of the railway signs from the little town of Lubizec was sent to Yad Vashem, that museum to the Holocaust housed in Israel. It hangs there today.

  *Appropriately, it was All Souls’ Day. When this was pointed out to Dov Damiel, he shrugged. “And so? This is a Christian idea. I do not think Christians believe it is for Jews. I do not understand Christians. They love a Jew that was killed two thousand years ago, but still they hate the rest of us.”

  22

  WINTER

  Guth’s children had different reactions to his legacy. His son, Karl, was horrified by what happened in the camp, and it so sickened him that, as an adult, he spoke out against what his father had done. He toured around high schools and colleges in Germany. He wrote articles about mass movements and hatred. He tried to help refugees. When genocide reared its ugly head once again in Europe, he decided to work for the United Nations. He went to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s and worked hard to stop the bloodshed. Later he found himself in Rwanda and Dafur. And, as he went from one site of genocide to the next, he felt the world had learned nothing at all from the Holocaust, except how to kill people faster. He especially felt this way whenever he stood before a trench that was bloated with bodies. Flies were thick in the air and mothers wailed all around him.

  “Look at this,” he told a reporter. “Look at it. How come this is allowed to happen? We say ‘never again’ but here are the dead right in front of us. When will we learn from history? When?”

  Guth’s daughter, Sigi, initially stayed out of the public eye. She turned inward and felt so polluted by her father’s genes that she married the first man she could in order to change her last name. At seventeen, she became Sigrid Matthes. It was like a magic trick, it was like her father had never existed. She erased him.

  But after he died, she went through a long spell of drinking. She began chain-smoking and her life spiraled downward as she focused more and more on the Villa and how interlocked her childhood had been to the camp. She told her therapist that her father was a loving man—he never hurt her—and that she couldn’t reconcile this man with the monster that ran Lubizec. Whenever she thought about this too much, it was like maggots were crawling around inside her brain. She wanted to scoop her hands inside her skull and dump these unwanted memories of her father’s Nazism on the ground. She wanted to walk away from them and focus, instead, on how he encouraged her and how he helped her solve thorny math problems. Her therapist suggested she write a book about these conflicting emotions, so Sigi sat down at an electric typewriter and began to peck at the keys. It took four years to write The Commandant’s Daughter, but when it was finished, in 1985, she went on a book tour around England, Germany, and France. People asked her if she still loved her father.

  “Of course, I do. Yes. He was my papa.”

  Chaim Zischer was living in New York at the time, and it renewed interest in his own book, The Hell of Lubizec, which was published a few decades earlier. When reviews of Sigi’s book began to appear, he was asked to give a presentation at Columbia University. His speech was recorded, and towards the end, he shakes his head in frustration.

  “We shouldn’t forget that Guth is responsible for mass murder. Rather than focus on him and his family, we should remember the unknowns he murdered. Where is their time before the cameras of history? Who speaks for them?”

  A student raised her hand. “Do you forgive what happened to you?”

  In the video, Zischer looks at the podium for a long time. He shuffles his feet and takes a long drink of water. When he speaks, his voice is clear.

  “I have no authority to forgive such a crime, but I have decided not to hate. Hate is a cancer. Hate will swallow you whole. Hate will haunt you. I cannot speak about forgiveness—we need to ask the dead if they forgive—but do I hate? The answer to that question is no. Resoundingly no.”

  Today Lubizec feels more like a state park than it does a site of mass annihilation. The woods are refreshing, birds chirp in the distance, and sunlight drifts down through tangled tree branches. Pine needles cover the sandy ground, and it is very hard to believe that 710,000 people died in this little rectangle of land. Nothing is left. Not even the green farmhouse, which was torn down after the war. The Rose Garden is overgrown with trees and shrubs. The barracks are long gone, and it is hard to see the layout of the camp. Pollen drifts in the air, and there is a heavy quiet hanging from the trees. Occasionally a bird sings or a pinecone drops.

  Although the Road to Heaven was demolished by the Nazis in 1943, it has since been reconstructed by the Polish government. A wide path, covered in pebbles, runs towards the site of the gas chambers, and tall bushes have been planted on either side, which gives the impression of walls. White rocks the size of skulls edge the pebbly path. A stone monument with the Star of David stands where the gas chambers once stood. THIS IS THE GATE OF THE LORD, it says in Hebrew. A wreath leans against it.

  All six roasting pits were located in the 1990s thanks to satellite imaging, and they are now marked off with concrete edging. These long rectangles have been filled in with tons of pumice (a volcanic rock that looks scorched and burnt), and the overall effect is very powerful because it looks as if the fires have only recently died away. The pumice looks warm to the touch. The ground appears charred and wounded.

  The trees around the Roasts have been cleared away because the ground is swollen with human ash, and in an effort to make it feel more like a cemetery, which of course it is, a grassy field was created. It is easy to dig down into the gray sandy soil. It is like holding charcoal dust in your hands, and it is a sobering thought indeed to realize what is stuck to the ridges of your fingerprints. Hundreds of wildflowers sway in the wind, and since there are so few visitors to Lubizec, it is often possible to have the place entirely to yourself. If this happens, you become aware of the blood flowing through the delicate universe of your body. And, as you look around at the trees, an overwhelming sorrow settles upon your shoulders.

  There is a small information center just beyond the boundaries of the camp. It shows a ten-minute documentary, and there is a display case full of barbed wire, rusty coins, bullets, and keys. In 1991, a doll was found near the gas chambers, and this little toy became something special because it was saturated with the history of the camp itself. The doll’s face is badly discolored, its eyes stare out vacantly as if in shock, and most visitors to the museum stand before it, saying nothing. Some touch the glass as if wanting to reach in and cup the soiled face.

  The last notable gathering at Lubizec happened in 2008 to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the uprising. A violin played. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Poland were there. Several reporters and historians stood in the melting snow, and Chaim Zischer, the last survivor, was the guest of honor.

  “Am I really the last Jew of Lubizec?” he asked the press.

  No one said anything as he shuffled towards the site of the former gas chambers. His sons, daughters, and various grandchildren were there holding roses. Everyone sensed it would be the last anniversary with a living eyewitness, and they crowded around Zischer. He was famous not for what he had done but because he was still alive. Somewhere far away a commuter train whistled in the woods. Then this old man, who once pulled gold teeth out of mouths and watched bodies get incinerated by tremendous flames, turned towards the sound. His face tightened. The sun
light around him seemed to have weight and substance. The air was dense with memory. For a flickering moment, it felt like two different worlds were being folded into each other.

  Zischer stood before the stone monument for a long time. He touched it with an outstretched hand and he let out a long, low gasp. His shoulders bobbed up and down as he wept, openly and loudly. His family circled around him and placed their hands on his back.

  This is where a happy ending should be. This is where all the lost threads are supposed to be woven back together. A story of the Holocaust cannot end with the dead coming back to life—we know this, we accept this, but we still want mothers to be reunited with their sons. We still want people who were separated in the Rose Garden to see each other again and weep for joy at their reunion. It would be wonderful to imagine the dead being sucked back towards the camp, back into the hot womb of the Roasts, it would be pleasing to imagine their bodies being unburned and the gas chambers gifting them with the breath of life, it would be glorious to watch them climb back onto the trains and roll back towards their lives, unharmed and beloved. Millions upon millions of people would be reborn, and the Nazis would march out of Poland, picking up their bombs and bullets as they went. If the Holocaust ran in reverse like some kind of old and magical newsreel, it would be the most beautiful moment in history. Beautiful.

  But that is not the story of the Holocaust.