Patrick Hicks reads from "The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard"

The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have.

Patrick Hicks’ novel The Commandant of Lubizec 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.

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Patrick Hicks is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Finding the Gossamer and This London. He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College and also a faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.