The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (20 page)

When he lowered the microphone, the guards took out their rubber truncheons and began shouting for them to move. “Faster. Faster.”

As the victims moved off in a river, bodies were pulled out of the transport and dumped onto the platform with sickening thuds. It started with the last car. Five bodies were tossed out like rag dolls, then two came from the carriage in front of that, seven were tossed from the next carriage, and so on, until, at last, the living had trooped beneath the massive WELCOME sign and the dead were left behind. There were so many of them—their limbs akimbo, their mouths and eyes open—that it was possible to walk down the platform by stepping only on suitcases, legs, and arms.

Guth motioned for Bolender to follow. The two men walked beneath the WELCOME sign and it was Guth who personally closed the iron gates.

Deep-throated and full-lunged screaming was taking place in the Rose Garden. Prayers were mumbled, love was declared, and during all of this terrible noise something odd and unaccountable happened. It hushed the entire camp and made everyone stop what they were doing. A huge cloud of butterflies appeared out of nowhere.
There were hundreds of them and they fluttered and danced drunkenly through the air. A few landed on the SS and opened their wings like little flowered books. Children held out their hands. A young girl laughed as two got caught in her hair. Everything stopped as if peace had been sprinkled onto the camp. Even the SS guards smiled at the butterflies.

And then, just as mysteriously as this orange cloud of silent wings appeared, it lifted over the barbed-wire fence and disappeared into the woods.

A long moment passed.

Then another.

The guards shook themselves awake and went back to separating the Jews. They pulled families apart, but the sticky lingering of last-second hugs slowed everything down. If seen from above, this separating process might look like a cell dividing or like dough being ripped apart. The men were marched off and the women were forced to stay behind.

“That was really quite beautiful,” Bolender said.

“What was?”

“The butterflies.”

Guth nodded. “Yes. Beautiful. I’ve never seen anything quite like that before. My kids would’ve liked it, especially my daughter.” He shook his head as if to clear away an unwanted memory. “Shall we see Zurich now?”

Bolender held up a hand. “No. I think I’d like to see the entire operation … from beginning to end.”

“It’s brutal.”

“I can handle brutal.”

“As you like. This way.”

They walked beneath a giant swastika flag that was limp in the windless air and then turned into a courtyard full of naked men. Two white walls acted as a funnel, and when the guards saw Guth appear they began hitting the men down the Road to Heaven all the harder. Rubber truncheons came down on skulls and backs. Purple bruises blossomed open on skin.

“Run, you rags. Run!”

Legs and penises and torsos stampeded down the path. Some of the older men soiled themselves and streams of shit ran down the inside of their legs.

“Faster.”

When the last of them had thundered by, Guth and Bolender strolled up the Road to Heaven with their hands behind their backs. Blood and shit peppered the sand. Footprints were everywhere and the white walls were sprayed with dark flecks of bodily fluid. A tooth was in the sand.

Bolender pointed at the Hebrew inscription above the door of the gas chamber.

“What’s that say?”

Guth scratched the tip of his nose and smiled. “This is the Gate of the Lord. That was Birdie’s idea. He’s a good soldier, our Birdie. Very decent.”

Bolender pointed at the flowerpots. “These are such a nice touch.”

They stood outside the brick building and watched the guards push the last remaining men into a chamber. They used rake handles to squeeze them all in. The steel door boomed shut and the guards spun the winged screws. A muffled shouting could be heard and that’s when one of the guards, Rudolf Oberhauser, knocked on the door with a single knuckle. He put his mouth to the eyehole and shouted cheerfully, “Time to die.” He yelled it a few more times.

“Time to die. Time to die. Time to die.”

The victims slapped the walls.

Guth nudged the young man who was his superior. “Follow me.”

They stepped outside and moved towards a running engine. It was bolted to a concrete platform and, beside it, was a massive steel tank. A webbing of vents connected the engine to the building and Guth had to shout above the tremendous noise.

“These two guards are the only ones allowed around the engine. Prisoners can’t be here.”

“What?”

“I said prisoners can’t be here. Acts of sabotage.”

Bolender nodded. “How long does it take?” he shouted.

“Twenty minutes. Sometimes thirty.”

“What?”

“Twenty minutes.” Guth held up two fingers.

They watched the machine clatter away before they went back into the building. Instead of the sound of pistons riding up and down in fiery metal chambers, they now heard screams. Horrible screams. Throaty screams. Deathly screams. There were cries for help and wild bangs on the door.

Rudolf Oberhauser smoked a cigarette as if he were waiting for a bus. Every now and then he leaned into the peephole to see what was happening. He stretched. He yawned.

As they waited for the inevitable silence, the doors on either end of the building were propped open, which allowed wind to whistle through the corridor and make everyone’s shirts flap. It was cool and refreshing. Oberhauser’s cigarette smoke was snatched from his mouth and carried away into the bright light of day.

Meanwhile the metal door kept banging and vibrating. Fists sounded like hammers.

The screams were loud, terrible, and panicky.

Bolender looked pale. “Is it always like this?” he asked.

No one answered. Prisoners in ratty suits waited with leather straps and hooks. Some of them had stretchers. One or two had pliers.

When the door was finally opened, the entire first row slumped out. Their lips were blue from carbon monoxide poisoning and their eyes had rolled back into their skulls, which made them look like they were glancing heavenward. The living began tugging at the dead. Streaks of blood were everywhere and some of the victims had lost their fingernails as they tried to climb the walls. The bodies were wet with sweat and blood and vomit. An ear lay on the floor. The living took away the first corpses that had tumbled out and they began to pull at those immediately beyond the door to make a path deeper into the chamber.

When Bolender saw this he began to choke and rushed outside
to throw up. A stream of chunky vomit poured from his mouth—it spattered his boots—and a long thread of clear snot hung from his nose. He threw up again.

Guth was emotionless. “Get him a bottle of seltzer water. We still have the women and children to do.”

Erich Bolender spent the rest of the day in front of enormous piles of jewelry. Birdie showed him around Zurich and they went into one musty barracks after another, but as these two men looked at typewritten charts full of numbers, Bolender wasn’t very talkative. He said little when they came to a table full of wedding rings. He said nothing at all when they stood before sacks of human hair. The burlap bulged out like giant tumors and they were all stamped with the inky words, REICH PROPERTY.

When Chaim Zischer delivered a bucket of gold teeth, Bolender watched them tumble out into a little heap of enameled bone.

“The sound of teeth clacking together isn’t something you’re likely to forget,” Zischer later said.

Birdie asked the young judge if he wanted to see anything else.

Bolender shook his head.

“How about the Roasts? We sometimes find diamonds in the ash. We have these huge sieves to make sure nothing gets by us. It’s worth seeing, and of course we send everything back to Berlin because it’s the—… sir? Do you want to see the Roasts?”

Bolender shook his head again, this time more slowly.

“Maybe some dinner then? The food’s not bad here.” Birdie began to laugh. “We sometimes call it Café Lubizec.”

The sun was beginning to go down when they walked back to Camp I. A chill was in the air and the wood-burning stoves were already blazing when they stepped into the canteen. The air inside was warm and pleasant. Guth was there. Niemann too. Others were hunched over chessboards or writing letters home. A phonograph was playing and the record wobbled slightly as it spun in a slow, lazy, black circle. Smoke wisped up from cigarettes and pipes. Every kind of comfort was available. Meats and cheeses. Steins of beer.
Chocolate. Loaves of bread. Raspberries. Champagne. The guards were in various stages of drunkenness because their so-called work was finished for the day. The next train wouldn’t arrive until morning so they lifted their glasses. Many of them had large forearms from all the beatings they had carried out. A few rotated their shoulders and winced in pain as if they were nursing some kind of sporting injury. They laughed and told stories. Many of them ate herring with black bread, downing it all with mugs of warm beer.

Someone gave Bolender a tall crystal glass of whiskey. The man who had come to pass judgment on Lubizec stared at it for a long moment. It was cut to resemble a pineapple and he gave the glass a slow turn in the candlelight.

When the thick molten amber touched his lips he drank it back in one quick pull. He gave a sour shudder and replaced the glass on the table.

“I’m going to bed,” he announced.

He left early the next morning and his car drove away through falling leaves. He filed his report a few days later from Berlin and, in the warped sensibilities of the Nazi justice system, he found no evidence of crime.

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