The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of The Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (Paperback) - Common

by PatrickHicks

The Commandant of Lubizec( A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard) <> Paperback <> PatrickHicks <> SteerforthPress

Genres: Historical Fiction, Holocaust, Fiction, War, Historical, World War II, Poland

Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was inspired by Operation Reinhardt, the code name given for the Nazi plan to murder Polish Jews and which led to two million people being sent to the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The author has used a fictional camp, Lubizec, which is representative of the three death camps and has invented a whole history for this camp – including the Commandant Hans-Peter Guth – of the title. The book is written in a documentary style, in which the author takes us through the history of the camp; Guth being appointed, his wife and children, other members of the SS who were guards, the prisoners, the methods of killing prisoners and he even creates fictional memoirs, such as that written by the daughter of the Commandant.

Guth is a strange mixture of murderer and family man and the author explores those kind of issues by asking difficult questions. How does a man wipe out other men’s families and then go home to his own? How does he stand by and watch a group of orphan children be gassed and yet be a good father? There are many difficult questions in this riveting read. Did people in the local village understand what was going on at the camp and why did everybody stand by and allow it to happen? Yet, the author is, while never totally detached, more interested in presenting the facts and gently allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the horrific statistics. The huge mounds of goods – spectacles, hair, teeth – stolen from prisoners. The personal cost; the lives lost, the callous indifference and the sheer insanity, and brutality, are hard to take in.

Of the 710,000 people who entered the gates of the fictional camp of Lubizec, only 43 survived. If those statistics are representative of other camps in Operation Reinhardt, it shows why they are less represented in holocaust literature. These were death camps, not work camps, and people went there for one reason and that was to be killed. I found the most chilling part of the book to be where Guth cuts down panic by creating the station that people expected to see when exiting the train, complete with pots of flowers and travel posters... This is an interesting, thought provoking and important read. The novel takes us through the history of the camp, from conception to interviews long after the war. I guarantee it will be a book which will stay with you and, although you may find it upsetting at times, you will be glad that you have read it. Lastly, as someone who helps run a reading group myself, I was pleased to see a Reading Group Guide at the back of the book, as well as an insightful conversation with the author about writing the book and the research he undertook.

Lastly, I received a copy of the novel, from the publisher, for review.

[Jennifer Siddiqui · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best written books about the holocaust that I have ever read. The author put a lot of time and effort into writing this book. Lubizec never existed but was based on facts that really happened. I learned a lot about the holocaust while reading this read.

[Sean Barrs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodreads winner!

Although this is a work of fiction, it feels real, it could be real. In this the author has achieved his aim. The novel is written in a documentary style, making it sound as if it is a reporting of history as it happened and not a probable situation (which it is). I didn’t realise this was a novel until around twenty –five pages in, when I studied the front and back covers more carefully, I initially believed that it was a documentary not a fictional documentary.

As the title suggests the book portrays the life of the Commandant of Lubizec. Lubizec is a death camp situated in the heart of Nazi Germany.

The author has split the narrative in two: we have third person and then the documentary tone (I’m not sure what the real name for it would be). To emphasise my point further of this novel feeling real, this duel narrative make it feel so authentic and concrete. In one part the author suggests we imagine our family members in the situation the persecuted Jew’s were in. This is an effective tool as we can see the persecuted as real people: mothers, fathers and children, rather than unfathomable numbers.

After reading this, I really see the advantages of the fictional documentary. It brings to life the situation on a scale ten-fold more than a simple non-fiction book could achieve but at the same time maintains historical credibility. I’m a big advocator of the style and would recommend this book to anybody interested in an intimate portrayal of life in the holocaust.

[Diony Borja Montoya]

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It is certainly not for the faint-hearted, very sad. I would recommend it to those who can read a story that is so drastically depressing that nobody would believe real, but they know it happened, maybe not to the characters in the book, but to other people in real life.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was hard to read, not because of being badly written but because of its very harsh content. There is some extremely horrific imagery and harsh lessons presented in this novel. The author doesn't shy away from how the Holocaust really was as he writes this fictional documentary on a fictional Operation Reinhard extermination camp.

I found the idea of a fictional documentary style of writing quite an ingenious way to present the Holocaust. It allows for the reader to become very intimately connected to the people in the book, both victims and perpetrators alike. This is something that is often absent from scholarly non-fiction. At the same time, it's able to combine multitudes of information into one volume that would be out of place in a true fictional novel. I was sucked in by this potent combination and finished this hard read in only two days.

Guth and his family, I think, were the hardest to read for me, despite some of the nightmare-inducing imagery elsewhere in the book. My mind had a very hard time balancing this man who was able to love his children in the morning and then turn around to murder other children hours later. It goes to show how deep the Nazi conditioning went that it could to this to everyday men and women. I believe this was the strongest lesson in the book for me. To recognize how that type of conditioning can happen and how easy so that it can be fought in the future.

This has been the first book in years to actually induce nightmares for me. The imagery the author chooses to include defies words, just as the Holocaust itself does. The description of the Roasts in particular were especially mind-boggling. Please definitely do keep this in mind while reading this. The imagery and the sheer horror of the proceedings will make you cry, think, and just shudder at the idea that this all really happened, just as described. I'm still shuddering just thinking of this, a week after initially reading it...

This has got to be one of those books that should be required reading for everyone. It's important not only for its subject matter, but how it presents that matter in such a way that the reader feels every emotion, sees every horror, and hears every scream and cry. This novel will leave you in tears and yet teach you some very deep lessons. This is right up there with Finding Rebecca for me in the epitome of the Holocaust novel. Highly, highly recommended and just required reading, really.

[Jamie Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Patrick Hicks was very careful in his attempts to ensure that readers more fully grasp the breadth and weight of the Holocaust. The Commandant of Lubizec, more than any documentary or other book, forced me to consider the thousands upon thousands, and then millions upon millions of precious human lives that were stolen and destroyed by the Nazis in camps built solely for the extermination of Jews.

I appreciated that Hicks made it clear that his purpose with this piece of historical fiction was not to celebrate some sort of rebirth or navigation away from evil due to the toll of the Holocaust. Rather, he acknowledges that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, positive to gain from the Holocaust. He writes, "Any Holocaust story that makes us smile at the end is full of the false belief that something can be learned from all of the murder, that there is some scrap of goodness amid the ash. Perhaps this is human nature, this search for the good, but to focus on acts of kindness or on moments of enlightenment is to turn away from the horror of the Holocaust. It is to search for the flickering candle in the darkness when, really, the darkness itself is the story."

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book about which I was a bit skeptical going in. Honestly, the only reason I started it was because the author was going to be at the South Dakota Festival of Books. I figured I'd give it a try. I was on the fence about the basic premise of the book: a fake death camp. It rubbed me wrong. I mean, there were enough real death camps, why do we need to make one up?

Within the first two chapters, though, I decided I didn't care. While Lubizec is fictional, it is based upon a synthesis of Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The events that take place in the book are based upon things that really happened. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of just how bad the Nazis were, but clearly, what I knew was only the tip of the iceberg (they use the Jews hair for rope! the ashes for fertilizer!). It's fascinating to peek into the mind of a Commandant (even a fictional one) and see how easy it was for him to slip seamlessly between killing thousands of people every day and his life as a loving father.

The book was horrifying and riveting. Highly recommended.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historian, Novelist, Commentator, Philosopher

I have read a lot of books about the Holocaust; some are memoirs or other factual accounts; still more have been fiction. Sometimes the lines between the two have been blurred, as in Thomas Kenneally's Schindler's Ark or Steve Sem-Sandberg's The Emperor of Lies, both of which take well-documented fact and present it in the manner of fiction, filling out the characters and private moments to add imaginative depth to the bare narrative. But Patrick Hicks uniquely does quite the opposite: writing a book that for the most part has all the objectivity and documentation of history, but making up the "facts" on which it is based.

More accurately, he makes up the specifics, but not the truth behind them. The "Operation Reinhard" phase of the Final Solution, between 1941 and 1943, involved a number of small extermination camps in Poland with a single purpose only: processing trainloads of Jews from railhead to gas chamber in under an hour; the only bunkhouses in such camps were for the guards and the small number of captives needed to carry out the manual labor. Hicks has studied evidence from the camps at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, and simply invents a fourth, Lubizec. He populates it with a cadre of SS guards, a very small number of prisoner-workmen who managed to survive, and above all the camp commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. Guth, like all the named characters, is made up, but most of the underlying facts are composites of things that happened at other sites.

Actually, Hicks has has three distinct approaches: those of the historian, novelist, and commentator. As an historian, his dispassionate, almost brutal, recitation of facts is undeniably powerful. At times it seems didactic, and indeed Hicks admits that part of his motivation was the discovery that his college students had not heard of any camps other than Auschwitz. He has an almost pedantic insistence on separating fact from conjecture: we know what we know only because of this inter-office memo, that personal memoir, or some later radio interview with a survivor. Even though most of his "documents" are entirely made up, he amply makes the point that, just as the smaller camps have been plowed into the ground, much of this history would be forgotten but for the painstaking collation of the surviving records. Combining the many real but vanished camps into one fictional one that can be preserved in his pages is just such an act of collation.

Then there is his work as a novelist. Through invented characters and imagined dialogue, Hicks probably hoped to explore the most baffling question about Hans-Peter Guth and the real people like him: how could it be that a man who presides over the killing of around 4,000 people a day should come home in the evening and be a loving husband and father? By moving frankly into the field of imaginative fiction, he approaches it at least side-on, by letting us into the minds of Guth's wife and two children. He avoids the easy out of portraying him as a monster; indeed he emphasizes his normality as a man. But though Hicks can state the moral paradox with admirable clarity, he cannot resolve it; it just is—and that is the most chilling thing of all.

Hicks' third mode is that of commentator, speaking directly to the reader. He is a poet, and many of these passages are very beautiful. But at the same time, I felt they undermined his historical objectivity elsewhere, and had the slight feeling of being manipulated emotionally. Here is an example:

Many of the prisoners had ghostly pink indents on their fingers where a wedding ring once sat. Such a thing proved that they were beloved, once. Most were married, once. Further back, they had all been rocked to sleep, once. At some point in time, the hot words of love had been whispered in their ears, and once, long ago, in what seemed like another life, they had all been the center of someone else's universe. They were the sun. They were the stars and light. They were the molecules of God himself.

But the commentator role slips easily into that of philosopher, and here Hicks is undeniably impressive, especially in the book's final chapters. Although he imagines a daring escape attempt (as there were at Sobibór and Treblinka) and even allows a few survivors, he totally avoids any kind of optimistic ending. Here, in his afterword, he explains why:

But how can we explain such things through words? Whenever we try to do this, we find ourselves in a world where the old rules of storytelling do not apply. Any Holocaust story that makes us smile at the end is full of the false belief that something can be learned from all of the murder, that there is some scrap of goodness amid the ash. Perhaps this is human nature, the search for the good, but to focus on acts of kindness or on moments of enlightenment is to turn away from the horror of the Holocaust. It is to search for the flickering candle in the darkness when, really, the darkness itself is the story.

He is right: this is not a story that can be told in words, only through facts. And if the author needs to invent a fictional framework to give those facts greater impact, then all strength to him.

[Jim Maffrand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great read. Though it's historical fiction, the author does a great job of making you feel like you're reading about a real camp. Lubizec could easily be Treblinka and now I want to visit some of these sites because I now feel a closer connection to the people that were needlessly "exterminated." I've always been fascinated with WWII, and now I want to read more and more about it.

[Valerie Diamond · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because this was such a compelling account of the operation of a death camp, (not a work camp - people didn't last an hour there)I felt emotionally hijacked upon realizing the location never existed. Though I was surprised I had never heard of Lubizec, having read a good deal of holocaust-related material, its remote location on the border of Poland and Russia and the fact that it was burned to the ground in 1943 and it's very existence buried by the Nazis, made it's reality seem more plausible. The author explains in the back matter that Lubizec is a synthesis of death camps like Treblinka. Ok - understood, but still - he writes as if to convince readers that the place is real. "We can't know the depths of Guth's mind...this, unfortunately is one of the many unsolved mysteries of Lubizec...the more we dig into the past, the more we are forced to stand back in mute horror and confusion" p. 125

There is even the repeated mention of a memoir by the camp commandant's daughter, whom the author often criticizes for her unbiased support of her father as a good dad, in spite of the atrocities he committed. "We only know of these private scenes of home thanks to Sigrid's memoir, "The Commandant's Daughter", published in 1985. " p. 19. But this, too, is fictional.

My only other concern is that the author draws the moral himself, and feeds it to the reader, rather than painting the picture and allowing the reader his own reaction. "This, we should note, is the face of evil, this studious man working late into the evening...With his typewriter and pen he was able to kill hundreds of thousands...We must never forget..."p. 13. Agreed, but the novel is strong and descriptive enough to evoke feelings of horror, outrage and sorrow in the reader without instructing the reader in what feelings she/he must have.

This having been said, if it had not been such a strong work I would not have had such strong feelings about it.

[Michael Anson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a fictional death camp and written documentary style, "The Commandant of Lubizec" reenacts and reimagines the events of Operation Reinhard. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he immediately set up ghettos and forced those who were Jewish to brand themselves with swastikas. As this transpired, Hitler established Operation Reinhard in the real life death camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka with the goal of murdering the Jews in Poland and indeed throughout all Europe.

How does a person address the utter banality of evil? In his novel Patrick Hicks confronts this issues head on as he creates a fictional death camp and he retraces the Nazi extermination policy aimed at the elimination of Jews. It describes the trains as they roll into what is depicted as a transit camp to placate the prisoners, and it delves into the mind of the main character, Hans-Peter Guth, the commandant. He murdered thousands on a daily basis, then went home to play with his children. This is a portrait not only of Guth, but also of the merciless machinery of the gas chambers, and it is simultaneously the story of rebellion and survival, the attempt of a few to burn the camp to the ground and flee into the woods.

To me, this fictional recounting of the Holocaust story is a powerfully accomplished work of both research and the author's imagination. It shows us evil both at its most dastardly and then in seemingly ordinary snapshots of family life. It's a powerful work, an important book.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Commandant of Lubizec is a powerful, chilling, and haunting historical account of the inner workings of a Nazi extermination camp in Poland during the Holocaust.

Relying upon fictionalized documents, including interviews with survivors, memoirs and unpublished diary of the commandant's family, government issued reports, and transcripts of court proceedings, the author paints a vivid picture of the inner workings of a death camp. Hicks delves in the psyche of how and why the commandant and his SS subordinates heartlessly ran a death camp and he explains how the surrounding town and the commandant's own wife were immune to the happenings in a death camp. Hicks attempts to answer our questions of how can people inflict such brutality on another.

But the most touching is, Hicks gives a voice to the thousands of innocent, unknown, and forgotten Holocaust victims who died in Lubizec (and all death-concentration camps) during what would be their moments of life. The author reminds us of the importance of remembering those who perished.

An absolute must read for anyone who is human.

[Lauri Rottmayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy moly what a book. I have read many books about the Holocaust but I think this is the first time I realized a difference between a death camp and a concentration camp.

The camp written about in the book, Lubizec, is a fictional death camp. As I started reading, I thought it was non-fiction even though I hadn't heard of Lubiczek before. However, it's a work of fiction based up on the camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Written in a documentary style, the story is told from the viewpoint of one of only seven men to survive mass murders over over 700,000 people, Chaim Zischer.

This detailed, fictional account of a Nazi death camp is one that should be read. I worry that people will forget the atrocities that happened in these camps as the population grows older and the survivors finally pass away.

I would highly recommend this book. I couldn't put it down.

[Jean-Paul Adriaansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I knew I was reading a "fictional documentary", this novel clawed like a wild tiger in my heart and mind.
The author gives us a deeply investigated account of the death camp (you arrive, two hours later you're dead.) Through interviews with the few survivors and villagers of Lubizec, correspondence in the German archives, letters of family members, and judicial minutes, we get a full view in the history and the inner working of the camp and the mindset of the prisoners, the guards, and the commanding officer.
Harrowing, blunt, cruel, but oh so captivating.

[Bec Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some books that you read and you know that they will come back to you in moments of pleasure as you remember a plot line or character and smile. This is not one of those books.

Set in a fictional extermination camp during WW2 the author very cleverly uses information we know about the horrors of the Holocaust and brings the world into our hearts. Written in a stark documentary style I felt the pressure of every word until my head could hold no more but it felt disrespectful not to continue reading.

I will never forget this book.

I will never forget.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this is a novel, it read like a true story. At once, the reader is captured by the story. You cannot help but be drawn into the life in the death camp and the life of the commandant outside the camp. How can a person exist in such two separate worlds? At the same time, the reader gets to almost feel what everyday life was like in a death camp. At the end, I have to say, I was drawn to tears.

[Joann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to keep reminding myself this was fiction. But then, was it?

[Peyton Loibl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book if you are interested in the Holocaust. It really shows what the Nazis did to the Jews. It does a great job of keeping you entertained at some points.

[Karen Scarborough · Rating 5 out of 5]

This compelling novel is a detail driven chronicle of the very real mass murder of a majority of the Jewish population in Poland in one of many death camps. In this account Hicks pens fiction based on horrific events that remain timeless in relevance and crucial in content. Both well-written and well-researched, this story compels the reader to empathize with innocent families as they are forced through an assembly line of manipulation and elimination. Daily trainloads of Jews are stripped of their dignity along with the clothes they are wearing and all they have packed. Following the Commandant's disingenuous welcoming speech to the arrivals, they are rushed through the "Trail of Tears" and into the gas chamber where they are left with absolutely nothing, not their lives nor their family. Their earthly bodies are unceremoniously burned as quickly as possible.
The Commandant proves to be efficient and determined in keeping the work flowing at a rapid pace. He is ingenious in his creation of a train station prop that greets the victims at their final destination. The purpose of this deception is to reduce panic in the incoming Jews, resulting in a smoother transition through the process. Through the musings of the Commandant's wife, the reader glimpses the power Hitler had as he manipulated a society into believing that a segment of the population were so inferior they were unworthy of life. Any empathy citizens had toward humanity was systematically removed. This should be a must-read for students studying the Holocaust.

[LaShana Claude]

After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they quickly began persecuting anyone who was Jewish. Millions were shoved into ghettos and forced to live under the swastika. Death camps were built and something called "Operation Reinhard" was set into motion. Its goal? To murder all the Jews of Poland.

The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide. Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp. It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children? This is not only an unflinching portrayal of the machinery of the gas chambers, it is also the story of how prisoners burned the camp to the ground and fled into the woods. It is a story of rebellion and survival. It is a story of life amid death.

With a strong eye towards the history of the Holocaust, The Commandant of Lubizec compels us to look at these extermination centers anew. It disquiets us with the knowledge that similar events actually took place in camps like Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real life events. It asks that we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands that we bear witness.

[Gary Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pat Hicks' technique of using "historical" accounts, such as books and diaries, and interweaving actual events makes the fictional concentration camp Lubizec seem all too real which, in a sense, it is. I was most struck by Hicks' attempts to convey the horrors of the death camps by asking the reader how they would feel if the people involved were their own mothers, brothers, or spouses. I am in awe of the work and determination it must have taken to write a book like this, not only because of the travel and research involved, but also the emotional toll of dealing with it over such a long period. The way Hicks presents the Nazi death camps and the way he draws the reader into this truly horrible period in history is a significant historical contribution. It is something that will resonate far beyond our lifetimes.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

three stars only b/c I couldn't finish it ... too horrific for me. It seemed so real and accurate - so I am sure some might enjoy - but this is simply a brutal read from my perspective. The horror of the event and the matter of fact attitude of the main character was just too much for me to finish. It's the first book, in a long time, that I can't finish or get through. Truthfully, reading this made me sad and sick - again, not due to the writer - but rather the subject and the course of events/detail that is captured. Warning to all - read at your own mental health risk.

[Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even knowledgeable readers of the Holocaust will be shocked after reading Patrick Hicks’s The Commandant of Lubizec. Full of suspense, information, and the inside perspective of a terrible time in history, The Commandant of Lubizec always keeps your attention. The novel is about a fictional death camp led by Commandant Guth that kills thousands of Jews. It includes stories of rebellion and hope as well as tragedy and death. Patrick’s inclusion of a great theme, wide variety of complex conflicts, and well fabricated characters resulted in The Commandant of Lubizec being a great read.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Hicks' book reminds readers that the story isn't about the survivors, but the many who died. It's not the details that survived, but the ones that don't. This book isn't so much about hope as other Holocaust books I've read. While 'Lubizec' is haunting in this aspect, it is a grim and necessary reminder of history. Worth the read and one I'll likely return to again in the future.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

I thought it was a very good book. Parts made me feel sick to my stomach. I do wonder though, why would someone want to write a fictional story about a camp like this? I was highly disappointed to read that it was a fictional story.

[Hadley Solomon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply disturbing

The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of The Holocaust and Operation Reinhard paints the picture of the Holocaust with meticulous and grotesque detail. Prepare yourself before jumping in.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I read this book it was hard to remember that it was fiction not the story of a death camp that the author created from the real stories of other camps but this camp was very real in the characters it developed and how we came to know them. That is the important part we knew them personally.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read. Believable. I had a hard time believing it was a work of fiction.

[S. Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiz my favorite book.

[Adrienne King · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

My favorite thing about this book was how much effort the author put into making sure the victims of the Holocaust became more than just numbers. He made them real people. Great read!