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

bringing these people to their deaths?”
    At this point in the interview Oski Kszepicki shakes his head. Nothing is said for a long time.
    “I could have been replaced. Another would have done my job.”
    “But
you
did it. Not someone else. You.”
    Here Kszepicki stands up and leaves the room. The video camera stops recording. It starts up again later (we don’t know how much time has elapsed) and Kszepicki is back in his leather chair. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy as if he has been crying. The historian asks him to please finish the story. Kszepicki goes on to say that once Guth finished his speech everyone was marched through the gates. Guards beat people with rubber truncheons, which made them move faster.
    “They were driven on like cattle. With whips,” Kszepicki added. “They were given no time to think about their situation.”
    Luggage was strewn across the platform as prisoners in little teams began to clean everything up. Another team pulled the dead out of the cars. These corpses were thrown into a wooden cart and taken away—where to Kszepicki couldn’t say because he never went into the camp itself. Hoses were unspooled and the cars were washed out. The chalk numbers were scrubbed off with wire brushes and everything was made clean again. Chlorine was splashed into the cars and the terrible reek of a chemical cleaning agent filled up the air.
    At a nod from one of the SS guards, Oski Kszepicki, that same little boy who once loved trains, would pull a long lever and his train would shudder back towards the village. At a roundhouse near a vegetable market he would set off towards Lublin, Kraków, or Warsaw. The train that had been packed with human beings thirty minutes ago was now completely empty, and the cars were left open to air everything out. The stink of chlorine trailed behind it.
    At this point, David Zimmer, the historian, asks Kszepicki a simple question. “In your opinion, did the people around Lubizec know what was happening inside the camp?”
    Kszepicki speaks without hesitation. “Yes. Absolutely. The farmers, they watched my train pass with a full load and I returned later, empty. Where am I taking these souls? They must have asked that question. Where? Even if you were blind to these trains, there were those bonfires of human flesh.”
    “The people knew what was going on then?”
    “Oh, they knew. They knew. Everyone knew.”
    Guth didn’t concern himself with the villagers living beyond the boundary of his camp because for him they were simply Poles that had been conquered by the Third Reich, they were second-class citizens. Serfs. Peasants. Laborers. It’s true he wanted to hide the meaning of Lubizec—but not from those living near the barbed-wire fence. No, he wanted to hide its purpose from the arriving Jews in order to keep them calm. If they realized the true intent of the camp before reaching the gas chambers his schedule might be thrown into chaos. And he wasn’t about to let that happen.
    It slowly occurred to Guth that greater deception was needed, especially within the first ten minutes of arrival. After the victims were pulled off the train they stood on the platform and grew more nervous as each minute passed. They looked around and began to suspect they weren’t really at a train station at all. But where were they? After one particularly messy incident when a rabbi was shot for refusing to obey orders, the crowd almost revolted and Guth realized that the victims needed to feel safe, at least for the first few minutes of their arrival. But how?
    The idea came to him as he studied his clipboard and paced up and down the empty platform. His boots clicked off the wooden planks and he made notes about loose nails that needed to be pounded back into place. He looked up and began to nod.
    “Yes, that might be a solution,” he said.
    He shouted for his deputy, Heinrich Niemann, and they marched off to his office where they made a long list of improvements. Later,