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

by Patrick Hicks, Steven Jay Cohen (Narrator)

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 toward 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 Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real-life events. It asks we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands we bear witness.

Audible Audio

Published June 18, 2018

About the author

Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names, Adoptable, and This London—he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which was published by Steerforth/Random House.

His work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Huffington Post, Guernica, The Utne Reader, and many others.

He has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, he was recently a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, the Dzanc Short Story Competition, the Gival Press Novel Award, and the Steinberg Essay Prize. His poetry has appeared on NPR, The PBSNewsHour, and American Life in Poetry. His first novel held company among only 20 books selected for National Reading Group Month and it was listed as a Top Pick for First Year College Programs. A winner of the Glimmer Train Fiction Award, he is also the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships, including awards from the Bush Artist Foundation, the South Dakota Arts Council, the Loft Literary Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was recently a finalist for an Emmy and is the radio host of Poetry from Studio 47.

A dual-citizen of Ireland and America, he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member at the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. He has lived in Northern Ireland, England, Germany, and Spain, but has returned to his Midwestern roots. When not writing, he enjoys watching thunderstorms roll across the prairie with his British wife and he is a sucker for playing in the backyard with his son, who was adopted from South Korea.