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

here and there.
    Immediately beyond the roll call area was the entrance to the camp. An iron gate had been installed and even though it was mostly locked, the hinges were well greased. Unlike places like Dachau and Auschwitz where the words
Arbeit Macht Frei
(Work Sets You Free) greeted each prisoner upon arrival, Guth wanted something else for his camp, something simple and ironic. And so, after a few days of thought, he had a large metal sign pounded out that simply read
Willkommen
(Welcome) in large black letters. It hung over the gate and faced the rail tracks, which were surrounded by a gauze of barbed-wire fencing. Beyond the camp, purple wildflowers waved in the wind.
    The living quarters for the SS were on the south end of Camp I. The guards enjoyed a well-stocked kitchen, a small post office, a barbershop, and they also had a vegetable garden full of green beans, onions, and potatoes. Beer was served in the canteen after 2100 hours, but only when Guth felt that it was deserved.
    Camp II took up the northern half of Lubizec and it was here the killing took place. It required one hundred prisoners to keep it going and there was a long wooden hut for cutting hair. The only brick building in the entire camp was also here: the gas chamber. It had four separate units, it was painted a creamy pale white, and there were huge flowerpots in front of it. Sometimes roses greeted the victims. Other times it was marigolds or geraniums.
    There were seven guard towers in total, each equipped with a powerful searchlight, and at night these giant cones of light roved the ground like animals on a leash. They sniffed here and there before moving on. Guards complained about moths fluttering around these powerful lights but there was nothing Guth could do about it.
    “Nature is nature.” He shrugged.
    As for the mass graves, they lay to the northeast, along with enormous pallets of quicklime.
    Guth was pleased with the first week of operations. “Delighted,” as one guard put it. The bodies had been buried and everything was running smoothly. He called over his second in command, Heinrich Niemann, and pulled out two cigars from his uniform. The sun was like a bullet wound. These jackbooted men stood in twilight with the tips of their cigars glowing hot, then dim. Smoke billowed from their mouths as fireflies floated above the grass. Frogs sang from a nearby creek as Guth tapped ash into the air. He nodded to the cantaloupe-colored sky.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Without waiting for a response he added, “We can go door to door in fifty-two minutes.”
    “Door to door?”
    Guth nodded to the rail tracks. “Door of the train to the door of
that
place,” he pointed to the silhouette of the gas chambers. “We can process twelve hundred units in fifty-two minutes.”
    Niemann hummed in understanding. “I see. Door to door. That must be some kind of record.”
    “I’d like to be faster.”
    “A tall order.”
    “We can do it. Imagination is the only thing slowing us down now.”
    What is striking about this exchange isn’t necessarily the callous nature of the men but that they saw absolutely no moral emergency in what they were doing. For them it was just a job, it was just a tweaking of numbers, and this is what horrifies us to the core about Lubizec and makes us want to turn away. For men like Guth and Niemann, though, mass killing was just a job. It was routine. Scheduled. There was no anger involved. There was only planning and execution.
    They continued puffing on their cigars, and when the searchlights snapped on, sending huge cones of bleached light into the air, they glanced over their shoulders. The world was a deep blue with a few stars coming out, and in that moment of approaching night, Guth said he was going home. His family had just moved into a house not far from the camp and he was keen to see them again. It was one of the perks of being a commandant: having your family close by.
    “See you tomorrow,” he