Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (12 page)

Roy and I returned to the Czarny Kot late that night, our nerves frayed, but the hotel’s ever-helpful staff rustled us up some creamy borscht, (Polish beetroot soup), fish cakes and salad. They also brought us vodka and, sitting by ourselves in the hotel’s big dining room, we drank copiously with our food and for several hours afterwards.

‘I think we were very lucky,’ said Roy.

‘You mean lucky to be alive, after that drive through the blizzard?’ I asked, trying to ignore the terrible gloom that had followed us from Treblinka.

‘No, I mean we were lucky to have been there in that fading light and in that silence and that solitude, with the snow falling the way it was,’ Roy said. ‘I think that no matter how many times you return there, you’d never repeat that experience. It was special, a one-off.’ He gulped down another vodka quickly and sat silently for a moment. Then he asked me, ‘How do you feel?’

‘Terrible,’ I confessed. ‘And angry. But I guess I also feel my emotions are worthless, that they’re cheap and easy, compared with the real horror that people went through there.’

I collapsed into my hotel bed that night, tormented by dreams I could not remember on waking. In my notepad the next day, I wrote simply, ‘Miserable night’.

Later that morning I said goodbye to Roy, whose flight departed just after noon. I spent the rest of the day wandering the slushy streets of Warsaw, hungover and hazy, trying to figure out how Hershl could have survived that terrible place and yet end up killing himself years later. I stayed close to the Old City, the heart of the Polish capital, which has been so meticulously and perfectly rebuilt that it has been awarded a Unesco World Heritage designation. Critics complain it is a mere Disney version of the city’s pre-war self.

I wandered from bar to bar, sipping coffees and beers, and rereading the handful of the few Treblinka histories I kept in my backpack and in which I had immersed myself over the past few months. I had called Sam often over that period, perhaps two or three times a week, and relayed to him each new fact about his father’s hellish experience in Treblinka as I discovered it. I took meticulous notes of our conversations and re-read those also.

The body of authoritative and reliable works about Treblinka, and that includes two books by survivors and a few testimonies, can be counted on two hands. I had no doubt that Hershl’s memoir, long-forgotten and referred to in no scholarly work on the subject, added significantly to the history of what occurred there. Yet Sam often responded in a muted fashion to the information. I began to feel guilty about what I was putting him through. I knew Hershl’s pain was also Sam’s pain, and that of his elder brother, Alan. Hitler’s hatred had not ended with those who had been touched directly by its evil, but had continued to torture those of a generation after his death.

Within a few years of Hershl’s suicide, both his sons would attempt their own suicides – and, thankfully, they would fail. One son took an overdose after watching a news report about a Kosovo massacre in 1999. ‘I thought, what’s the bloody point,’ Alan recalled painfully, months later. ‘The human race is stupid.’ The other son, my friend Sam, felt that his own suffering simply needed to end. The last thing I wanted to do with their father’s story was hurt them more by bringing back the horror of the death camps, and brow-beat them with it. One day, I asked Sam outright if these terrible details were too upsetting for him.

‘Should I stop?’ I asked him. ‘Should I stop telling you about all this stuff? Should I stop everything? Should I stop writing this terrible story?’ I could feel tension in the silence.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, at last. ‘It’s difficult sometimes. But if I ever want you to stop, I’ll just say I need a break and you can call back later. If it hurts too much, I wouldn’t do it. I think it’s important my father’s story is told. It’s another piece of the Holocaust puzzle. My father always said the worst parts of the Holocaust were not known, and I think that’s true. The world wants to hear about Auschwitz orchestras and the diary of Anne Frank. No one wants to know the details of how she suffered and died in Bergen-Belsen. It’s not uplifting enough. It’s too much for them – too much reality, too much truth. I think you should tell my father’s story as it was. People should know what really happened in Treblinka. Whether it will do any good, I don’t know. But at least it’s true. We don’t need any more fairy tales.’

I was also plagued by self-doubt. Why me? Why was I doing this, and for whom? Hershl had been dead for almost eighteen years. Sitting in that quaint, stone-built bar in the Old Town of Warsaw and looking again through the Treblinka histories, I suddenly realised what I was doing here – I was trying to save my friend’s life.

The revelation shocked me at first. It seemed naïve and even embarrassing, but it was true. I was trying to prevent my friend – and his brother – from attempting suicide again. Somehow, I hoped that by filling in the blanks in their father’s story – and there were many of them – it would make their burden lighter, and help them go on.

The bare facts about Treblinka are available in a few specific histories, and they are corroborated by eyewitness accounts. The book containing Hershl’s story even includes a map of the camp, presumably taken from a drawing by his own hand. To be sure, Treblinka was not a concentration camp, or a slave labour camp. Neither was it one of the feared torture centres that had been built for the enemies of the Reich, nor a transit camp, as the Nazis attempted to convince their victims and as Holocaust deniers have continued to claim. Those who survived, as well as the perpetrators, have left us a historical record in testimonies and personal interviews that tell us precisely what Treblinka was. Treblinka was an extermination camp and it was established for one purpose only – the murder of Jews on a massive and efficient industrial scale.

The order for construction of the camp came from a mid-ranking Nazi called Odilo Globocnik, the Himmler-appointed head of Operation Reinhard, at the beginning of April 1942, when Belzec and Sobibor were already functioning. Its grounds were designated to stand within a concealed area of fourteen acres of sandy, infertile ground in the middle of a pine forest, about a mile from an already-existing Treblinka penal camp. The design was based on the blueprint for Sobibor. The maze of linking rail lines in the vicinity made it particularly convenient, and the surrounding heavy forest was deemed perfect for keeping operations secret. Prisoners from the penal camp were exploited as construction workers, as were many Jews from nearby villages, none of whom survived.

Murders occurred there even before the gas chambers were erected. Jan Sulkowski, a Polish prisoner from the penal camp, who worked as a bricklayer during the construction, recalled: ‘The Germans killed Jews either by beating them or shooting them. I also witnessed cases where SS men … during the felling of forests, forced Jews to stand beneath trees which were about to fall down.’ Franciszek Zabecki, the Treblinka village station master, said Teodor Von Eurpen, the SS commander in charge of the construction project, even took pot shots at Jews for his own sadistic pleasure, ‘as if they were partridges’.

A road was built through the forest and a telephone line was connected from the camp to Treblinka village and to Malkinia. A double barbed-wire fence was raised around the 600-by 400-metre perimeter. High watchtowers were positioned at the corners and also intermittently. It was then partitioned into three zones – housing, arrival and extermination. The latter was kept totally separate and hidden from view by branches intertwined with barbed wire; it was a camp within a camp. This area also contained three gas chambers, disguised as shower rooms. As in Sobibor and Belzec, a ‘tube’ – cynically called by the SS the
Himmelstrasse
, or the ‘Street to Heaven’ – led from the undressing barracks to the extermination zone. Also based on the plans for the two other camps, a Lazarett – a sham infirmary – was constructed. In spite of the Red Cross flag posted outside its door, it contained not doctors and medicines, but an execution pit and a fire, where the old, sick and the troublesome were led and into which they fell when shot or were pushed.

For key personnel positions at the camp, Globocnik called upon members of the Third Reich’s secret T4 euthanasia programme. These functionaries had had little to do since August 1941, when the programme was halted, and Globocnik decided to make use of their special knowledge. He appointed Christian Wirth, the former director of a dozen euthanasia institutes and a fanatical anti-Semite, as the inspector of all three Operation Reinhard camps. Wirth was a brutal psychopath, nicknamed by his fellow Nazis ‘Christian the terrible’. The Ukrainian auxiliaries called him Stuka. Dr Irmfried Eberl, another T4 functionary, was the first commander of Treblinka.

The gassings began on 23 July 1942, with the arrival of a transport of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. Amongst one of the transports two weeks later was Janusz Korczak, the Polish-Jewish children’s author, who in spite of offers of sanctuary accompanied 196 children from his orphanage in Warsaw to their death in the gas chambers of Treblinka Death by asphyxiation was achieved in about half an hour, and the victims arrived in their thousands. However, under a system devised by Wirth, a few Jews were selected from each transport to make up a special task force – a Jewish
Sonderkommando
– to carry out the manual and most grotesque aspects of the extermination process. These Jews pulled the corpses from the gas chambers, buried and burned bodies, extracted gold from the mouths of the dead, sorted through clothing and cleaned the trains. The
Sonderkommando
lived a brief existence. They were selected for their youth and strength, but were kept alive for only a few days, two or three weeks at best. This human material was granted a little more life in exchange for work, and when their usefulness had been expended they were murdered. From the point of view of the camp’s SS masters, the Jewish
Sonderkommando
were also the keepers of all the terrifying secrets of this extermination factory, so they could not be allowed to remain alive. Their ranks, which varied between 600 and 1,200, depending on the number of arrivals expected, were perpetually reduced by a routine of daily executions, and then replenished from new transports.

Although some 245,000 Jews were deported and murdered during Eberl’s reign, his tenure did not go well. August Hingst, an SS sergeant who served at the camp at that time, testified that ‘Dr Eberl’s ambition was to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps.’ He added: ‘So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.’ Eberl’s incompetent command was also a concern. As more transports arrived each day from Warsaw, Bialystok and Lublin, mountains of corpses and victims’ belongings were piled all over the camp. Globocnik was also furious over reports of corruption. Large sums of money and valuables disappeared into the pockets of camp staff, and Eberl channelled money into the coffers of his former T4 commanders in Berlin.

During the final week of August, Globocnik and Wirth travelled to Treblinka to investigate. He dismissed Eberl immediately upon arrival. His replacement was Franz Stangl, another former T4 operative, who was transferred from Sobibor. Stangl immediately got to work transforming Treblinka into the world’s most efficient killing factory. Kurt Franz, a sadistic psychopath who had also served with the T4 program, was appointed Stangl’s deputy. It was Stangl and Franz who exercised total control over the camp during Hershl’s ten-and-a-half months there.

* * *

I left Poland a couple of days later, my head swimming with deathly images. I could see the dead clearly and I had a sense of the suffering of those who had miraculously survived and what they had to carry with them. I could also see the faces of the perpetrators. The day after I got home, I called Sam to tell him about the trip. I told him I had been in Klobuck and that I had seen a pink house in a part of the town that had once been the shtetl, and perhaps that had been where the Szperlings had lived. I also said I had seen the little river that Rebecca Bernstein had spoken of, where Hershl had learned to swim and where the rest of Klobuck’s youth had once amused themselves on hot summer days. I told him also I had been to Treblinka and how it had affected me.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said. ‘This must be getting to you.’

‘I dream about it,’ I said. ‘Several times a week.’

‘You’re maybe feeling just a little bit of what my father felt,’ he said. But I wasn’t sure that was true. I was beginning to understand that so few could possibly feel what Hershl felt, because so few had suffered the particular hell of Treblinka and survived.

‘When I left Treblinka, I was angry,’ I said. ‘But I felt my emotions were worthless and cheap and easy, compared with the real horror of what people went through there.’

‘That’s just part of the disease of the place,’ he said. ‘That’s just what my father felt when he thought about his family and what they went through there.’

‘Sam, I think I’ve found a clue,’ I told him.

‘Go on,’ he said, interested. ‘A clue to what?’

‘To why he survived, or at least part of the why, maybe the beginning of the why – bizarrely it has nothing at all to do with him.’

‘My father always said he survived for two reasons – the first was his friend, Samuel Rajzman, who was a kind of surrogate father to him, and the second was luck.’

The odds against survival in Treblinka were enormous. The intention was that every Jew who arrived was to be exterminated, so in theory the chances of emerging alive were zero, barring a miracle or an accident. In the tragic reality, around 60 Jewish men and two Jewish women survived out of the 800,000-plus victims processed for murder. Assuming you were not immediately driven into a gas chamber, asphyxiated and then burned, as was the fate of the overwhelming majority, you were still likely to be beaten to death, shot, hanged, or torn to pieces by Kurt Franz’s ferocious dog. You could also drop from exhaustion, starvation, disease, or even suicide. Yet of all the incredible and unforeseeable events that occurred in that miserable place, one episode, which took place less than three weeks before Hershl’s arrival, expanded his chances of survival beyond zero to, at best, 14,000 to one.