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

talking about a death camp and our expectations of narrative arc have to be readjusted and retooled in the face of so much murder. The year is 1942 and the war is far from over. In fact, the Nazis are in total control and they are tossing lives into the abyss at breathtaking speed. Although we may want the story of Lubizec told from the perspective of the victims, at this early stage in the camp’s history this is impossible to do. Stories of survivorship will come later, but for now, we can only approach this death camp through the eyes of the perpetrators. All other viewpoints have been erased. Snuffed out. Covered in lime.
    We therefore know that Guth wanted everything “made cleaner” and that he banned alcohol in the SS canteen until “after 2100 hours.”
    “This isn’t the front line,” he told his guards one night. “Here you have it easy because no one’s shooting at you.” He paused and raised a finger. “Write home to your mothers and sweethearts tonight. Tell them you’re safe. Tell them you love them.”
    Guth had the wood line widened to create better fields of gunfire as well as strategically defined boundaries of left and right vision for the guard towers. He put distance markers out in the forest so that his men could see how far their bullets might travel if an escape ever happened. He reinforced the barbed-wire fences and put a solid guard rotation into place so his men would get proper amounts of sleep. He ran drills. He inspected weapons. He laid out clear expectations of on-duty and off-duty behavior. He also made sure his men ate decent food, he got them beds instead of cots, and he had a wide moat of landmines placed around the camp. The prisoners were forced to dig these holes, and on ten separate occasions landmines went off killing inmates, but it was never determined if these were accidents or suicides. To the guards who ran Lubizec it hardly mattered, though. Dead prisoners were dead prisoners. We can only imagine what it must have been like to sow these angry explosives into the earth, but for the prisoners, it must have felt like they were building an invisible wall around themselves, that they were burying hope itself deep in the ground. We have no account of what these men were thinking because, after this wide moat of landmines was completed, they were all shot. Students, rabbis, shopkeepers, musicians, fishmongers, tailors, doctors, and poets. Every single one of them. Shot.
    Guth spent more time in his office, but unlike Wilhelm Fischel, he wasn’t a hermit. Far from it. He was on the phone constantly, drafting blueprints and making sure building materials were delivered to the camp on time.
    One detail that horrified Guth about Lubizec was his discovery that whores were brought in every weekend. Apparently under Fischel’s command, local women and huge cases of champagne were brought into camp.
    “We’re not running a brothel here,” he said to his guards one morning on the parade ground. The sky was salmon pink, smudged with blue clouds, and his men stood at rigid fixed attention with their shadows stretching away from them. They looked like a packet of bullets. Crows cawed and a tractor puttered in the distance. Guth took in the smoke of his cigarette, held it inside his chest for a long moment, and then spewed it out into the world.
    “Things are about to change around here,” he said, pointing to the empty rail tracks. “See that? In one hour a train will arrive with pallets of bricks. These bricks have a very special purpose. Since the world began spinning, no one has done what we are about to do in this place. It will be a triumph of logistics, and when you’re all old men sitting around talking about the great war in the east, you’ll be able to look back on this moment of your life with pride.” He raised a finger and smiled. “With pride.”
    Exactly one hour later a train huffed through the forest. It pulled up to Lubizec with steam erupting from both