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

sides. After it squealed to a stop, prisoners were beaten out of the gates and ordered to unload bricks—
“Schneller, schneller.”
The sun was out and everyone felt their hair follicles open up with sweat. Guth handed a rolled-up blueprint to his subordinate, Heinrich Niemann. He was a giant of a man with a weird meandering scar on his chin. His fingers were meaty and Guth found this in keeping with the boxing information that was in Niemann’s file. Apparently in the early 1930s he was a regional Bavarian champ. He certainly had the fists for it.
    “When it arrives we’ll install it over there,” Guth said lighting a cigarette. He puffed and marched over to an imaginary X. “Right here.” He tapped his foot in the patchy grass. “Here. This is where the engine will go. And I want you to erect the showers just there. It all needs to be done in a week, but if you get it done in six days I’ll throw in a crate of champagne. Get it done in
five
days and you’ll get another crate. Understand?”
    He walked across the sandy earth in his polished boots and didn’t pay any attention to the prisoners who were straining to move impossibly heavy loads of bricks. One prisoner with a shock ofblack hair and long gangly legs—huge kneecaps—lost control, and his bricks spilled to the ground in a clattering clunk. A guard came over and began beating him until the man was hunched into a ball. The blows sounded like a carpet being smacked clean of dirt.
    Guth looked around and did a quick calculation about what still needed to be done. He walked over and spoke without anger.
    “Stop that.”
    Years later, when one of the guards was asked about Lubizec, he cited these few seconds as an example of Guth’s mercy. He said his commandant “didn’t like to see the Jews suffer.” Whether this is true or not is for the reader to decide, but we do know that Guth returned to his office after this incident and emerged often to make sure the gas chambers were built properly. He got out a level and made sure the brick walls were plumb. He made sure the cement was mixed into a thick paste that resembled oatmeal and he made sure prisoners smoothed out the concrete floors with long metal skims. As promised, the engine arrived the next day and it was pulled into place by a large bulldozer.
    Guth watched all of this while he smoked cigarette after cigarette. He said nothing as prisoners orbited around him in a frenzy.
    At night he closed his office door and pulled out a silver flask.
    His wife and two children were moving into a nearby house but they hadn’t yet arrived so he slept on a cot near his desk. He looked at charts, maps, train schedules, duty rosters, water table levels, food consumption rates, electrical needs, and he calculated the weight of two thousand bodies. He used a slide rule. A mound of cigarette butts sprouted up from his ashtray, and sometimes, when he was deep in thought, he sat back and spun his wedding ring. The stickier the problem, the slower he spun his ring until—“Ah, yes”—he leaned forward and scribbled the answer.
    This, we should note, is the face of evil, this studious man working late into the evening. In any other setting he would just be a building site manager, but Guth was a true believer in Nazi ideology as well as an excellent administrator. With his typewriter and pen he was able to kill hundreds of thousands of people. We must neverforget that killing took on many forms in the Holocaust and that these crimes weren’t confined to a single place like a gas chamber. Guth was very good at his job. His desk became a weapon of mass destruction.
    We have a telegram dated June 25, 1942, where Guth tells his superiors how proud he is to be associated with “Operation Reinhard” and that Lubizec is ready to join the ranks of Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka as a model camp. He called in several guards and they toasted each other with tall glasses of brandy. They sat back and smoked cigars while,