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

artillery pass by. His cargo of people could wait in the blazing heat or the blowing snow because they weren’t weapons for the war. They weren’t considered valuable.
    While his engine breathed quietly on a side track, he could hear screams from the back and if he turned his ear towards the wind he could hear people begging for water. The constant screams, especially from babies and young mothers, distressed him so he sat near the valves of his engine and went about the business of making sure the firebox was stoked with coal. He was pleased to have a modern engine that fed coal directly into the hopper by way of a mechanical auger. Shoveling coal wasn’t necessary because technology was making his life easier. But that didn’t mean his job was easy. Far from it. Sweat always rolled down his face and he was covered in grime. His hands were badly calloused from years of pulling stiff levers but he was content with this because it meant he could touch the warm metal without protective gloves. He knew that hundreds of human beings were trailing behind him in locked cars and he knew exactly where they were going, but he chose not to think about it. He stared ahead and didn’t think of the future.
    The Germans always gave him a bottle of vodka—“to make the job easier”—and at first Oski had no interest in becoming a caricature of a Polish drunkard, but when he pulled into Lubizec for the first time he uncorked the bottle. By the third day he was used to drinking and powering the train. It was easy to drop the bottle into a fire bucket and go on pulling levers. He only had to worry about dehydrating from the overpowering heat and making sure that he slowed the train down in time. He took a sip of water and a sip of vodka. He alternated like that. Water, vodka. Water, vodka. He’d stick his head out the side and blast the whistle when he approached a road. Sometimes he might glance back at the cars and see hands grasping the air like they were trying to squeeze water out of nothingness. This made him turn back to the bottle of vodka. He focused on thetrees that blurred past him. Sometimes he worried about the Polish Underground dynamiting the line ahead and his engine tumbling off the tracks—but this never happened. He just kept going down the line.
    When he reached the woods surrounding the death camp he came to a stop and listened to the clicking huff of the engine. He let out two long blasts of the whistle to signal that he was ready to approach the platform. A green light flickered on up ahead and, when he saw this, he let the massive steel wheels spin back to life. The train rolled down the tracks and came to a grinding, hissing, complaining, stop.
    Oski Kszepicki never jumped down from the train. He cleaned the regulator rod or fiddled with safety valves or jiggled the ash grate as people were ordered out of the cattle cars. The train rocked slightly as hundreds of people jumped out at once. Shrieks of anguish filled the air and sometimes he blasted the release valve to drown out their noise. His engine had a life of its own and he went back to caring for it. The hot belly glowed with nourishing fire when he opened the iron grate. Heat pushed against his trouser legs and he felt the pores on his forehead open up. Sometimes he leaned out the window of his driving cab and watched people on the platform. They moved like bees in a box and there was so much noise. Corpses of infants were thrown out of the cars along with packages and suitcases. Ragged people held on to their children. They looked up at the gigantic WELCOME sign above the iron gate of the camp. The commandant stepped onto a specially made wooden box and delivered a speech.
    “It was always the same,” Kszepicki told the historian. “It never changed.”
    “And what did you do during this speech?”
    “I greased the rods or looked at timetables. Sometimes I cleaned my hands with a rag.”
    “Didn’t you … didn’t you feel
guilty
about