The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (15 page)

There wasn’t a crematorium at Lubizec because it had been decided to burn bodies in an open field just north of camp. After the daily gassings, the dead were dragged over to a wooden table
where their mouths were opened with crowbars and their teeth were checked for gold fillings. The corpses, which only an hour before had been living mothers, daughters, wives, husbands, sons, nieces, nephews—all beloved human beings with a rooted place in the universe—were now just carcasses tugged across a field.

They were laid out on a grillwork of truck chassis. Five such chassis were lined up in a pit (old rail lines were later used) and the bodies were stacked head to foot in order to maximize space. Women burned better than men so they were placed at the bottom. And because fat people burned better than skinnier people, large women were placed on the very first row.

“It was like building a campfire,” one guard said. “The Roasts were huge. Massive. We used to call them the Bonfires of Hell.”

One would think that burning thousands of bodies a night would require a huge number of SS guards but, in fact, only a handful were needed. As with virtually every other aspect of the camp system, the Nazis forced the Jews to do their dirty work: It was prisoners who cleaned up luggage from the platform, it was prisoners who sorted clothing, it was prisoners who pulled bodies from the gas chambers, and it was prisoners who stacked their brothers and sisters into pits. We can only imagine what this was like. Again, language fails us.
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When Guth arrived that evening, the pile was already shockingly high. The whole mass of flesh had been marinated in gasoline. Fitted between the bodies were logs that had been bathed in tar. Fat people, thin people, the old, the young, teenagers, babies—they were all formed into an enormous brick of organic matter.

At Guth’s command, the prisoners lowered torches onto the victims’ remains.

The flames licked the sky, slowly at first, but as the jumble of heads and arms and torsos began to blacken, odd colors like green and purple, mustard yellow, and gaseous blood shimmered into the night. Pyrolysis. Chemiluminescence. Oxidation. Incandescence. The whole pit began to shake with roaring heat.

Everybody stood back.

There were four such pits at Lubizec and they were each built at a slight angle so that, as the bodies burned, a steady stream of human fat might leak into the lowest corner. When it looked like the fire might need more fuel, the prisoners were ordered to scoop up this liquid fat with a smelting ladle and toss it back into the fire. The Roasts often burned deep into the morning but Guth tried to avoid this because the smudgy black smoke made the new arrivals nervous.

When Dov Damiel was interviewed about this in 1977, he said it was nightmare work. Demonic. They had to drag corpses over to the blazing pyre and it was common to see bodies move and twitch as muscles began to contort. When he mentions this in the interview, he stares at the floor and clears his throat.

“The dead, they look like they were rising back to life. Sometimes their mouths begin to open and … and the sexual organs of men … their penises they grow bigger as blood superheats inside their members. At the top of the pile, the bodies they sometimes sit up as they curl into the fires. It was horrible. Horrible. I will never forget the Roasts. Ever.”

The SS watched all of this with great amusement. They pointed at bodies that were twisting in strange ways and they drank vodka, or port, or whatever else they could lay their hands on, and Guth allowed this to happen because it made the “necessary work” easier. Laughter filled the air as the guards got drunk and fired guns into the blazing hellfire mass of human flesh. Livers, stomachs, diaphragms, windpipes, kidneys, elbows, gallstones, bunions, tongues, ovaries, fingers, wombs, eyes, pinky toes, bellybuttons, and hearts, it all
went up in flame. Little bits of the universe perished and we are still trying to understand what this means even today.

Guth stood a few paces back and took notes, which was easy to do because the fire was so intense, so bright. Shadows danced around and sparks floated up until they mingled with the stars.

The smoke was dark, like used motor oil, and granular ash swirled around everyone. Guth took off his cap and wiped sweat from his brow as the landscape baked in invisible waves of heat. The stars blurred as if underwater and a horrible crackling filled up the night as teeth exploded like popcorn. The sky became an ugly burnt copper and still the bodies continued to glow.

“If you closed your eyes,” Dov Damiel said, “it sounded like rain, like heavy rain falling on a street.”

In the interview there is a long pause. The camera pans in on Damiel’s face.

“After the first day I worked the Roasts, I had trouble eating. I kept looking at my hands, these hands, and thinking about the dead I touched. Sometimes, sometimes I am eating an apple or pear today and I think of the dead. I see them as if it happened an hour ago. My hands, they have touched such horrible things.”

Another pause. The camera comes in closer still.

“At the Roasts it was impossible to take a breath and not also take in the atoms of the dead. Their ash and smoke went down my throat. They filled up my lungs and made me cough. They coated my tongue. I would spit, and I could taste them. How can human beings do such things to each other? I ask you. Where was God on these nights?”

Among the SS that night was Heinrich Niemann, that giant of a man who beat Hanel Wallach for refusing to give up her son. He had already drained one bottle of vodka and he was on the prowl for more. His speech was slurred and he stumbled around as more bodies were dragged over to the fire. One new prisoner, someone who hadn’t yet gotten used to the casual brutality of Lubizec, moved slowly, too slowly. He held the corpse of a woman. He carried her body as if he were a groom ready to bring her across the threshold
of a new life. Her body was slack in his arms, but he kept kissing her shaved head. It was his wife. They had been separated in the Rose Garden a few hours earlier and now, at the edge of the Roasts, he finally found her again. He stumbled forward with tears streaming down his face.

“Oh my honeybee. My honeybee,” he said. The man walked up to the guards and began to sob. “How can you do this to her?”

“I’ll show you,” Niemann said, and he pushed the man into the fire.

A shriek lifted up as the man scrambled over the body of his wife. His clothes became a wick and he screeched and screeched as he pulled himself out of the pit. He ran like a torch towards the woods. The grass began to catch on fire and that’s when the SS got nervous because he might burn down the whole field. One of the guards aimed his pistol but missed because he was too drunk. There was another shot, but still the prisoner was screeching out in agony. A final shot hit home and the flaming body dropped. It stopped moving.

Guth wrote something down in his ledger. The flames licked higher and higher as he nodded to the remaining bodies.

“Faster,” he said. “Faster.”

The moon swung in its tethered orbit across the sky and still the Roasts continued to burn.

The four pits at Lubizec were rotated so that one of them was always in use. After one pile of beloved flesh was torched, the remains were allowed to cool until, like an old campfire with wisps of smoke coming off it, the ashy leftovers could be sifted. Prisoners scooped bucketfuls of debris and dumped them into giant sieves in order to find bones that needed extra attention. Guth wanted only ash left over—no bones. He was very clear about this. It was for this reason the prisoners used steel mallets to hammer down bits of skull, ribs, and femurs. Pelvis bones had to be pounded down because they were so dense. The prisoners used an anvil and they pulverized the remains until there was nothing left but dust. Occasionally they
found a diamond that had been swallowed by a victim in the wild hope it might remain hidden in their stomach, but such things were always found during the sifting process. In this way, nothing was allowed to escape Lubizec. Nothing.

When the ash was so fine it looked like it had been tipped out of a cigarette tray, only then was it carted away in a dump truck. The powder was scattered into a pond. Thousands upon thousands of lives were reduced to nothing more than dust flittering down through water. Whole generations coated the rocks at the bottom. Algae turned gray because there was so much ash, but this too was about to change, especially when Guth realized the cremains could be used as fertilizer. He sold ash to local farmers (not telling them what it was) and he invested the money back into the camp itself. He got potbelly stoves because winter was on its way and he didn’t want his guards to get cold. He also bought them a movie projector and a ping-pong table.

Dov Damiel, Chaim Zischer, and the other prisoners watched all of this in numb horror and vowed to tell the world about it somehow, someday. What they couldn’t have known is that their lives were about to take a strange new turn.

Things at Lubizec were finally about to change.

10

I
n Jasmine’s unpublished diary, she writes about Berlin before the war and how the shops were always packed with people, how cafés on Unter den Linden stayed open until sunrise, and how everyone strolled around the parks at dusk. Cigarettes and pipes flared to life in the growing darkness. She enjoyed watching blue sparks fly off the trolley cars and she especially enjoyed shopping with friends and ending up at some wild party in the back of a restaurant. True, she didn’t miss hearing gunshots in the middle of the night, nor did she miss covering the phone with a heavy blanket when it wasn’t in use; there were rumors buzzing around of men planting devices in phones and, because of this, you had to be careful about what you said in your own home. Of course
she
never said a bad word about the Party, but it was still alarming to think that another ear might be listening into your conversation. And whenever the SA had yet another parade down the street, you had to stop and give the Hitler salute or risk being beaten.

These however were just tiny annoyances and Jasmine was mostly delighted with “the New Germany,” as she called it. She liked how blackened swastikas marched down the street in huge banners of red and she also liked how her country
—her
country—was becoming a world power once again. She particularly enjoyed the 1936 Olympics and how the city was buffed clean for tourists who came from Europe, America, and Asia. It was nice to have them in Berlin but, since they weren’t exactly German, it was equally nice to watch them leave.
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She believed Hitler was a great man and agreed with his policies about the Jews (“pests can’t live in our house,” she found herself saying at a party), although she couldn’t understand why some women went absolutely mad for Hitler. She saw delirious young women scoop up dirt he had recently walked upon and she saw them place it with trembling hands into metal containers. They kissed it as if it were a holy object. They cried. They wept. One woman pulled out clumps of her hair she was so ecstatic. He was a great man, yes, but it seemed a bit odd, a bit too much really, to treat him like a prophet or a demigod. The Führer was just a man—a man with wonderful ideas about Germany’s future to be sure, but a man nonetheless.

Jasmine met Guth at a raucous, wild, over-the-top party on Unter den Linden and she was immediately drawn to his good looks and his SS uniform. She also liked how he couldn’t say where he worked. There was an air of mystery about him.