Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (11 page)

Hershl could see the curve of the track and the single sideline that ran through the camp gates. The forest was dark and heavy all around. The Jews had no idea where they were, or even if they were still in Poland. He could hear the escorts, SS men and Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian volunteers, the so-called ‘Hellhounds’, being commanded to get off. Treblinka trains always stopped at the gate, where the escorts got off and the camp staff, usually SS camp personnel and Ukrainian auxiliaries, replaced them. No one from outside was permitted to enter the camp’s grounds.

A Ukrainian auxiliary opened the gates. For just a moment, Hershl saw what looked like a station house. The spur was very short, and the engine waited for the cars to be unloaded of their human cargo on the other side of the gate, outside the camp.

Immediately, the Ukrainians began hitting them with their rifles and clubs. They shot those who did not disembark quickly enough, mostly the elderly, the sick, and those who had fainted. Scores of Jews met their end in the freight cars or on the Treblinka extermination camp platform. The smell of death hung in the air. The living did not know for sure what awaited them; but they could smell it.

Against the advice of well-meaning staff in the Czarny Kot Hotel in Warsaw, I drove a hired car some 60 miles through a mid-February snow blizzard to reach Treblinka. This was Hershl’s personal hell and the place where I most needed my friend Sam to be with me; but he was beyond persuasion. He groaned when I first asked him, and later flatly refused when I persisted.

‘It’s not like I couldn’t go if I wanted,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, if I couldn’t go, that would be different. Then I would want to go. But the fact that I can go, well, why should I?’

His abstruse logic made me smile. It reminded me of Hershl. But I sensed that the idea of spending even a few minutes in Poland, let alone Treblinka, was abhorrent to him. It was understandable and, in the end, another friend agreed to meet me in Warsaw and make the journey to the camp. I wasn’t sure that I could face the place alone, knowing what I did and what had occurred there.

It was a journey I had calculated would take no more than two hours, but we crept for four hours along a busy, snow-packed highway behind long columns of heavy trucks travelling the main trade route between Warsaw and the Baltic states. My friend, an artist named Roy, was 62 at the time, Hershl’s age when he had taken his own life. I could see concern on his face as we proceeded through a snowstorm and the driving conditions grew steadily worse. The farther from Warsaw we travelled, the heavier the snow fell and the more the gloom descended. In 1942, when Hershl and his family went through this wild region on the death train, the woods whispered with partisans and escaped Russian prisoners of war. They blew up bridges and roads to hamper German military operations, but no attempts were ever made to disrupt the murderous deportations to Treblinka.

After the turn-off for Malkinia, the landscape suddenly became flat and completely white, as though the terrain were a large piece of bleached cloth that had been stretched and ironed. White flakes of snow swept across the car’s windshield. As far as the eye could see lay an empty land. There was not a fence in sight. I was out of season for Hershl’s journey, his deportation train had passed through here in the autumn. Now there was only a frozen plain as bleak as the Siberian tundra. The Nazis had often used the weather as a weapon against their victims, both heat and cold, to inflict suffering and punishment. Hershl had lived through a terrible Treblinka winter.

We entered the village of Malkinia at last, the railway crossroads where the Warsaw-Bialystok-Vilna track branches off to Treblinka. I knew from Hershl’s account that the camp was not far. A few elderly peasants trundled through snowy streets lined with wooden houses, some with bundles of sticks on their backs, and I wondered if it was them, or maybe their fathers, who had called out ‘death’ to the doomed passengers, or who had come to the gates of Treblinka to barter goods with the Nazis and Ukrainians. How much Jewish gold – perhaps just a man’s pocket watch or a wife’s beloved bracelet – had found its way into the possession of these peasant families in exchange for Zubrowka, the potent bison grass vodka so coveted by the Ukrainians, or meat, or bread? Perhaps these people were among those who had dug the thousands of holes on the site of the former camp in 1945, despoiling the ground into a pockmarked lunar-like landscape in their search for gold fillings and money amid the bones and ashes. Rumours had been rife among the local population after the war that some of the murdered Jews had been buried in their clothes, in which valuables were hidden.

It was difficult to fight the rising hatred I suddenly felt for these peasants. My own sense of justice wanted to reject such feelings, because it dishonours those Poles who found ways to resist the Nazi tyranny and assist the persecuted – but to my mind the courageous were too few, and Poland’s guilt is that of a nation that could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, in spite of the Germans, but did not. The peasants who made their way through the snowy streets of Malkinia that day were in all probability innocent, even if not among the courageous, but without a doubt the inhabitants here still harboured the guilty among their number. In a kind of bewilderment brought on by the overwhelming gloom in this village, Roy and I asked one another simultaneously: how could people continue to live on this blighted spot?

There were no signposts to the camp. Only the dedicated make the journey. We followed a road through Malkinia that according to our map should have taken us straight to the site, but instead carried us into a snowy, unpopulated wasteland in the opposite direction. The visibility was appalling, but the white road was as straight as an arrow. Great drifts, maybe three or four feet high, lay unbroken near the half-hidden road. After about five miles, a large four-wheel drive police vehicle came up behind and followed us closely for a short distance. I pulled over and, with map in hand, got out to ask two policemen wearing Russian-style fur hats how far to Treblinka. They were friendly enough and directed us back the way we came with the instruction to turn right at the railway line to Siedlce.

The road carried us to the Bug River, which until the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, marked the border between the Nazi-occupied General Government of Poland and the zone occupied by the Soviet Union. We crossed a wooden Communistera railway bridge, over which extended a tilting single track. Trains that rumbled over the former German bridge that had previously spanned this river could be heard from the camp. The road grew progressively narrower, and was distinguishable from the fields only by the lines of telephone poles along the sides. There was a railway embankment with no tracks. Four parallel tracks once ran along this route to death, but had since been removed. Slave labourers from an existing penal camp at Treblinka, tormented by twenty SS guards and 100 Ukrainian auxiliaries, had been used to drain the marshes near the river and strengthen the embankment into a long, raised bed in preparation for the extermination centre and the transportations that would come. At the village of Treblinka, where there was a small train station in the 1940s, I asked an old man in front of a wooden shack if we were on the right road to the site of the former camp. He told us, expressionlessly, that the ‘
muzeum
’ was just one kilometre distant.

Through the hamlet of Poniatowa, the forest suddenly became denser. It was like nowhere I had ever been before. The outside world seemed a million miles away. There was a signpost and I drove along a narrow road thick with snow and heavy overhanging trees to an empty parking area near a dilapidated visitors’ centre. An outside light went on as I stopped the car, and we got out, calf-deep in snow. The caretaker and his family lived above the half-empty museum. It was bitterly cold and an icy wind blew. There were a million ghosts here.

It was already late afternoon and the light was fading rapidly. Perhaps only half an hour of daylight remained. The mile-or-so walk toward the site followed the route of a rail line, which had not survived. The path beside the rail route had once been paved by the Nazis with Jewish gravestones and those had also been removed. Some of the gravestones were on display in the visitors’ centre. About a quarter of a mile before the camp, concrete railroad ties had been laid as part of the monument to this factory of death. Nothing remains of the original camp. I stood upon the first railroad tie and, driven by an impulse I could not comprehend, began walking them in long strides, one after the other, block by block, toward the camp, advancing at the pace that Hershl’s slow-moving train probably inched along the track half a century earlier, further extending the agony of those being carried to their death. Roy did the same, but not a word was spoken between us.

I became impatient and defiant. I jumped off one of the concrete blocks into the snow and, in spite of the deep drifts, strode toward the symbolic stone gates of Treblinka, where a separate concrete track spurred sharply on to a sidetrack and into the camp toward the platform ramp. It was the act of a free man, and I felt, absurdly, I was doing it on behalf of all those whose existences had been blotted out here. The symbolic concrete track continued toward the separate and little-known Treblinka penal camp set up at a local gravel quarry a mile and a half away and which had been in operation before the extermination centre was constructed. It had provided its own, separate catalogue of horrors for its inmates and the 10,000 Poles who were murdered there. Now I climbed up to the reconstructed platform, marking the place where the Jews had disembarked. The air was still and silent.

As soon as the Jews descended from the cattle wagons, groups of SS and Ukrainian auxiliaries charged at them with shouts and swinging truncheons. It first seemed as though the train had stopped at the edge of a dense pine forest. Everyone moved towards a dark wall of trees. But it was another Nazi ruse. The Germans had made a fence from the trees; barbed wire had been intertwined between the branches. Hershl recalls: ‘The SS herded the rest of the men and women down from the ramp with their truncheons and drove them through a gate leading to a large square.’ Some of the SS cracked whips; others held barking dogs on leashes. Children and adults screamed in terror. Noses and mouths were bloodied by punches and kicks, bones were broken with clubs, and faces were lacerated by whips. To avoid further blows, the victims ran.

A telephone conversation with Hershl’s elder son, Alan, came back to me. He said, ‘My father used to say that sometimes, in Treblinka, it was like being there, and not being there. I know that makes no sense.’ It made sense to me now. Groups of silent Jewish slave workers wearing strange, colourful attire and blue bands at their wrists climbed into the wagons and pulled out the bodies of those who had died en route. The slave Jews did not speak. Fear dictated their every move. They passed like ghosts, like dead men walking.

Amid the mayhem and the terror, the suffering mass of Częstochowa Jews was herded group by group toward a wide gate in the fence, where a Ukrainian stood guard, his machine-gun trained on the crowd. They were driven into a square. ‘
Tempo
schnell,
’ the guards screamed. What was this place?

Moments later, Hershl heard one of the Jewish slave workers mutter the ‘terrible truth’ about Treblinka under his breath. They were not being transported to the east for agricultural work after all. They had all come to this barren, desolate place in the middle of nowhere to be exterminated.

* * *

I walked up the cobblestone path from an area that had been deceptively called Station Square, where Hershl and the rest of the Jews that late September day in 1942 were driven from the platform toward the equally cynically named Deportation Square. Trainloads of 5,000–7,000 people at a time arrived daily. At this point, the men and women were separated and forced to undress. I walked up the slight slope, trembling with cold, next to a number of large standing stones on which were inscribed the names of countries whose Jews – some 800,000 souls, probably more – were brought to this remote spot and murdered.

The camp was intended originally to expedite the extermination of Jews within the General Government of Occupied Poland. But, in time, Jews from Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were also brought for extermination. The path I walked led to the giant stone monument where the gas chambers had once stood. A stone engraving at the base of the monument read ‘Never Again’ in six languages.

The shortness of the distance from the train platform to the death chambers was in itself shocking. How quickly and efficiently these people were processed and killed. Behind the monument lay the symbolic grates, which in 1943 had been rails placed on supports of reinforced concrete in giant pits, where the bodies of the gassed were burned. All around was the symbolic graveyard. It was not an actual graveyard, because there are no bodies beneath this earth, only dust.

Roy and I walked in the sea of 17,000 memorial stones, large and small, jagged and rounded, hunched and still, each of them representing a Polish-Jewish community that had been blotted out in this place. Roy snapped photographs blindly against the falling snow. Over and over again, I repeated the words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I could not stop the words on my lips.

There was no wind. Ours were the only footprints for miles. I wanted to find the stone marking the 40,000 Jews from Częstochowa, but it was too dark to search. The community of Klobuck, with just 1,600 Jews, was too small to have a stone of its own, but was symbolically represented among those thousands of stones with no name. I kept trying to imagine Hershl here, his desperation and his suffering, but also his hope and his determination to live. This was where he had learned to survive, improbably and against all the odds, but 47 years later those lessons had betrayed him.

Some impulse drew me toward the darkness of the forest to the south of the camp. It was where many of the prisoners, including Hershl, had run during the escape. Most were killed before they reached the woods, but others made it. It was so quiet and, in spite of the snow, I no longer felt the cold. I was numb. Before I realised it, I was deep in the woods. Illogical as it was, I wanted to call to them and tell them that it was all right now, that it was safe to come out. I pulled myself out of my reverie and headed back toward the memorial stones. Before I had come, I had imagined that somehow this ground was hallowed and sacred, if only because of the number of dead beneath the muffled earth. But I now knew there was nothing sacred about it; it was just the site of a mass murder. It was cursed ground, and like Hershl I clenched my fists in anger and frustration, but also in utter disbelief at the human horror and sheer senselessness of it all.