Free The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard by Patrick Hicks

echoed across the countryside as he continued to hide in the damp log.
    Thirty minutes later the train reversed past him. It was empty and the chalk numbers had all been scrubbed off. The steel wheels spun by, faster and faster, and they made that sword-grinding sound again. The smell of chlorine filled the air.
    He sneaked home through leafy bushes and added up the numbers he had just written down. The total was 1,602.
    Mrozek asked his mother, “What’s happening to the Jews?”
    She swatted him with a wooden spoon and told him to never, ever, go near the camp again. And he didn’t. Like everyone else he began to ignore the trains. He played with his friends as cargo of people clattered by, unseen.
    But if this young boy of twelve could ask such a simple question, it only stands to reason the adults around Lubizec were also wondering what was going on.
    “Trains go in full and come out empty.”
    “There’s gunfire. Don’t forget about the gunfire.”
    “What
are
they burning in there?”
    These must have been hushed questions for the people of Lubizec as they went about the business of farming and woodworking. In the vegetable markets, and in the bars, and outside Saint Adalbert’s Catholic Church, they must have whispered about the camp. And yet, immediately after the war, they claimed to know nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like it never existed.
    As the decades rolled past, and as the horror of Lubizec became a more distant point of memory on the horizon, many people who lived around the camp slowly began to open up about what they saw. This probably has much to do with their advancing age and a wish to tell their stories before it became too late, but, equally, when Polandgained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1989, the borders of the country opened up and this meant foreign scholars and filmmakers were more apt to travel there. And travel they did. They brought cameras, and ledgers, digital recorders, maps and charts, and above all else they brought a willingness to hunt for stories that were in danger of being lost forever.
    Oskar Kszepicki was one of these people who never talked about the camp. He sealed his experiences deep inside the kingdom of his skull and he never mentioned Lubizec—not even to his family—until, at last, an historian from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum knocked on his door. It was January 2004. Kszepicki was eighty-five years old.
    As a young boy in the 1920s, Kszepicki became fascinated with steam engines and he loved to watch them chug through the pine trees. He stood near the tracks and pumped his fist up and down in the hopes the conductor might blow the whistle. Sometimes the man did this and it filled Kszepicki with such joy to watch the train clatter faster and faster over the tracks, sending up huge banks of smoke. It surprised no one when Oskar Kszepicki (“Oski” to his friends) became a conductor, and soon he was driving trains from Kraków to Lublin. When the Nazis invaded he found himself moving tanks and troops and huge pieces of artillery around the countryside. Coal too.
    And then one day he was asked to drive a special train to Lubizec.
    “What’s the cargo?” he asked.
    “You’ll see.”
    “More tanks? Troops?”
    “Oh God, no. No, no. Something else.”
    And so it was that Oski found himself carrying passengers in a way that stunned him. When he was interviewed in 2004 by that historian from the Holocaust Museum, he spoke matter-of-factly but occasionally he had to stop and take a long drink of water. He pulled on his left ear as if trying to block out a sound he didn’t want to listen to. The historian, David Zimmer, set up a small camera and it is clear that Oski Kszepicki is wrestling with ugly images from hispast. He swings between smiling and wanting to cry, all the while pulling on his left ear. From this thirty-minute interview we know he stopped his train many times to let other freight trains loaded down with tanks and