The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard by Patrick Hicks
Authors: Patrick Hicks
Tags: Historical
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across the Atlantic, but in one horrible moment he realized none of it was going to happen. None of it.
He closed his eyes and thought about his mother standing in a park. It was a beautiful cloudless day and he began to count. One … two … three …
His mother was waiting for him. He ran to her.
We can never know what it was like inside that gas chamber. We can only make guesses. We can only hypothesize and speculate. Precisely because we can never know what these victims were thinking or feeling, we bump up against the central paradox of Lubizec itself: Whenever we read eyewitness accounts from former prisoners, we know in the back our minds that at least
this
person survived, at least
this
person made it out, at least
this
story won’t be hopeless, and this means our focus necessarily shifts from death to life. The absolute unrelenting horror of the Holocaust is dulled because we know that eyewitness accounts by their very nature are stories of life. But Lubizec was not a place of life. It was a place of clockwork murder and annihilation. To understand it we need to read hundreds of thousands of stories just like David Stawczinski’s, and then we need to imagine each of them dying.
Our hearts, though, can only take so much horror.
Because of this, the victims become faceless ghosts that are pushed into gas chambers. We watch the door swing shut and we turn away. It’s easier to cope with Lubizec if we do this, but in order to understand the place in any meaningful way we need to know about women like Giesela Wilenberg and we need to imagine her worrying about what the guards will do to her naked daughters. Perhaps she draws them close and tells them everything will be okay. Maybe she wipes their tears away. It could be that she tries to be strong even though inside the secret corridors of her mind she is quaking. She holds their hands and when the steel door booms shut she leans into their ears. As the gas kicks on, she tells her daughters to look into her eyes.
“Look at me. Look at me. Are you listening? I have
loved
being your mother. Do you hear me? I love you. I love you. I love you.”
While we cannot know what these people were thinking or feeling we must not allow ourselves to see them as faceless numbers. That’s what the Nazis did—they were numbers that needed erasing. All the sunrises they had seen, all the lips they had kissed, all the shoes they had bought, all the tears and underhanded deeds and acts of generosity and presents and toothaches and music andlaughter and hugs and stomachaches and blisters and dancing, it all got snuffed out in Lubizec. Imagine 710,000 candles flickering away and then, in one gigantic storm, they are all blown out. There is a sudden intake of breath and then—
One of the more heartbreaking stories about Lubizec occurred on August 27, 1942, and we only know about it thanks to “Allied Forces Report No. 3042.” The story would have slipped into oblivion if Captain Joe Ehrenbach hadn’t interrogated Heinrich Niemann as well as he did in 1946. The fact that Niemann brought the story up at all suggests how unusual it was, even for Lubizec.
It was raining heavily that day, a real monsoon, and when the afternoon transport arrived everyone was surprised to find 150 boys stuffed into a single car. Apparently an orphanage had been liquidated near Warsaw, and as the rain came down harder and harder, Guth climbed onto his specially made wooden box. He held a black umbrella and spoke into a microphone as the boys cupped their hands to catch what was falling from the heavens. They opened their mouths and stuck out their tongues. Thunder rumbled in the sky and lightning shocked the horizon. The rain came down onto the platform so hard it looked like dancing sparks. One guard said it was like a river had been turned upside down.
“I think I saw Noah building an ark,” another guard joked. “It was a huge amount of rain.”
The boys weren’t listening to Guth so
He closed his eyes and thought about his mother standing in a park. It was a beautiful cloudless day and he began to count. One … two … three …
His mother was waiting for him. He ran to her.
We can never know what it was like inside that gas chamber. We can only make guesses. We can only hypothesize and speculate. Precisely because we can never know what these victims were thinking or feeling, we bump up against the central paradox of Lubizec itself: Whenever we read eyewitness accounts from former prisoners, we know in the back our minds that at least
this
person survived, at least
this
person made it out, at least
this
story won’t be hopeless, and this means our focus necessarily shifts from death to life. The absolute unrelenting horror of the Holocaust is dulled because we know that eyewitness accounts by their very nature are stories of life. But Lubizec was not a place of life. It was a place of clockwork murder and annihilation. To understand it we need to read hundreds of thousands of stories just like David Stawczinski’s, and then we need to imagine each of them dying.
Our hearts, though, can only take so much horror.
Because of this, the victims become faceless ghosts that are pushed into gas chambers. We watch the door swing shut and we turn away. It’s easier to cope with Lubizec if we do this, but in order to understand the place in any meaningful way we need to know about women like Giesela Wilenberg and we need to imagine her worrying about what the guards will do to her naked daughters. Perhaps she draws them close and tells them everything will be okay. Maybe she wipes their tears away. It could be that she tries to be strong even though inside the secret corridors of her mind she is quaking. She holds their hands and when the steel door booms shut she leans into their ears. As the gas kicks on, she tells her daughters to look into her eyes.
“Look at me. Look at me. Are you listening? I have
loved
being your mother. Do you hear me? I love you. I love you. I love you.”
While we cannot know what these people were thinking or feeling we must not allow ourselves to see them as faceless numbers. That’s what the Nazis did—they were numbers that needed erasing. All the sunrises they had seen, all the lips they had kissed, all the shoes they had bought, all the tears and underhanded deeds and acts of generosity and presents and toothaches and music andlaughter and hugs and stomachaches and blisters and dancing, it all got snuffed out in Lubizec. Imagine 710,000 candles flickering away and then, in one gigantic storm, they are all blown out. There is a sudden intake of breath and then—
One of the more heartbreaking stories about Lubizec occurred on August 27, 1942, and we only know about it thanks to “Allied Forces Report No. 3042.” The story would have slipped into oblivion if Captain Joe Ehrenbach hadn’t interrogated Heinrich Niemann as well as he did in 1946. The fact that Niemann brought the story up at all suggests how unusual it was, even for Lubizec.
It was raining heavily that day, a real monsoon, and when the afternoon transport arrived everyone was surprised to find 150 boys stuffed into a single car. Apparently an orphanage had been liquidated near Warsaw, and as the rain came down harder and harder, Guth climbed onto his specially made wooden box. He held a black umbrella and spoke into a microphone as the boys cupped their hands to catch what was falling from the heavens. They opened their mouths and stuck out their tongues. Thunder rumbled in the sky and lightning shocked the horizon. The rain came down onto the platform so hard it looked like dancing sparks. One guard said it was like a river had been turned upside down.
“I think I saw Noah building an ark,” another guard joked. “It was a huge amount of rain.”
The boys weren’t listening to Guth so
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