The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of The Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (edició 2014)

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. ( )

I had a hard time getting over that this was a story of a fictional death camp in Southeast Poland, even though it was inspired by Treblinka and Sobibor. Not that the facts or interpretation are incorrect - the author does a good job incorporating elements of Hoss' diary, the Nuremburg Trials, and other historical testimony in bringing his characters to life. What got me at the end was the author's afterword, where he notes that he was shocked that students of his had never heard of some of the less publicized death camps that contributed to the Holocaust. Creating an amalgam of these historical camps into the fictional Lubizec doesn't really resolve that issue, and left me feeling that something was missing.

The writing is good, but I strongly feel this could have been better served looking into a historical commandant's life (other than Hoss) in one of these other camps, especially if a primary motivation is to show the perspective of a camp that isn't as well known in the United States. The takeaway would have been stronger, and a better testament and tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and the horrible trials they suffered. ( )

How can words possibly exist that describe the feelings of watching the black smoke pouring from the camp chimmeys around Europe, knowing that the smoke is all that is left of your family and loved ones. Knowing that you, are a 'corpse on vacation', and most likely will be joining them in the near future. " Words fail us. Language fails us. Our own imagination fails us."

Hicks has written a novel that is so incredibly realistic that i had to check a few times to make sure that there was no Lubizec. I've read many books about the holocaust, personal stories, the evolution, fiction and non, but none....NONE take the reader inside,the way COMMANDANT of LUBIZEC does. Life on both sides of the fence. This is the story of the commandant of a prison camp as well as the story of those trapped inside. Unfortunately there are few left alive to tell the stories of the humans who went up in smoke.

Horror? Anguish? Repugnance? Hatred? No. As i said, there are no words. ( )