Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (13 page)

It happened on 11 September 1942, the eve of the Jewish New Year. SS Sergeant Max Bialas was in charge of the inspection of the Jewish
Sonderkommando
in Treblinka’s Roll Call Square that day. He arrived with Kurt Franz, whom the prisoners called ‘
Lalke
’, the Polish word for a doll, because of his deceptively handsome appearance.

Before them was the desperate assembled mass of slave workers. Some had been selected for the
Sonderkommando
that very day from a transport of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. Surrounded by Ukrainian auxiliaries with whips and guns, they were bruised and bloodied. Their first hours in Treblinka had been marked by a rain of blows, whiplashes, punches and kicks. Some of the Jews were so traumatised after the day’s gruesome proceedings that their spirits were already broken and they were ready for death. Approximately 45,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto had been transported to Treblinka and gassed between 3–11 September, and these included the ones who had been selected to assist the killers. Many faces were nothing more than bloody masses. These ‘marked’ Jews were always the first to be noticed and the first to be taken to the Lazarett, where they were shot and fell into the burning pit, or to be fed into the gas chambers at the next available opportunity. This battered group now stood at stony attention in a parody of a military parade.

Among them was one Meir Berliner, an Argentinian citizen, who had been visiting his parents in Warsaw when war broke out. His family had accompanied him from South America, and they had all become trapped in the Polish capital. He had arrived at Treblinka on a transport a few days earlier with his pregnant wife, five children, and parents, all of whom were separated from him on arrival and were murdered in the gas chambers. Berliner, who was selected for the
Sonderkommando
, had been in Treblinka long enough to learn the terrible truth.

Bialas walked among them, inspecting the ranks and occasionally pulling out new victims for the Lazarett. He ordered those who had arrived that day to step out of the ranks and line up on the side. However, it was not clear who was to be liquidated – the new arrivals or those who had arrived earlier. Testimonies of witnesses recall that the tension was agony in that moment. No-one moved. The Ukrainian guards began beating the Jews mercilessly with their whips and cudgels. Suddenly, Berliner broke free from the ranks and charged at Bialas. Witnesses saw the silver flash of a knife in his fist, and Berliner thrust the blade directly into the SS sergeant’s back. Bialas collapsed in the courtyard. Survivor Abraham Krzepicki, one of those who witnessed the event, recalled: ‘SS men came … They looked petrified … Berliner did not even try to escape. He stood quite composed, with a strange, mild smile on his face.’

SS Sergeant August Wilhelm Miete ran at Berliner with a shovel in his hand, and swung it into his face. Berliner fell, and Miete proceeded to hack him to death where he lay. Several Ukrainians also rushed forward and began beating Berliner. Other Ukrainians picked up shovels and lurched into the ranks, swinging their implements murderously. At the same time, guards began firing wildly from the watchtowers into the crowd. The prisoners ran in all directions to escape the gunfire. Dozens were killed and wounded. Franz screamed for the shooting to stop in an attempt to regain control. He ordered the Jews to reform in their ranks, and he had the fatally wounded Bialas taken away.

The Jews, shocked by the attack, gathered back into the line up, surrounded by nervous and heavily armed SS and Ukrainians. Franz ordered the Jewish Camp Elder, an engineer from Warsaw named Alfred Galewski, to stand in front of the roll call, and then beat him bloody with his whip. Then ten prisoners were pulled from the ranks at random and shot. A short time later, Bialas died en route to the military hospital in Ostrow.

The Germans were also shocked at this first act of violent resistance in the camp. It became clear that these Jews were not as harmless as they had thought, and that in despair they could be extremely dangerous. The following day, another 150 Jews were selected and shot into the pit in the Lazarett in a further act of revenge. The rest of the Jewish
Sonderkommando
was deprived of food and water for the next three days. While Berliner’s solitary act of resistance did nothing to halt the grinding of the death machine, the
Sonderkommando
had won a modicum of respect though it also underlined the futility of solitary acts of rebellion. Yet, at the same time, the episode provided a glimmer of hope by proving that human dignity, or resistance at least, still existed here.

More importantly, the incident brought about lasting changes to the way the
Sonderkommando
were organised – a change that gave Hershl and others a chance for survival, or at least a temporary reprieve. While most of the thousands of Jews transported to the camp each day knew nothing of their fate until they were in the gas chambers, Stangl now realised something important: those who learned that they had come here to die – but were being kept alive for just a few days to work – posed a serious threat to the efficiency of the killing process. This was especially so if they discovered what had already happened to their families. He concluded that with nothing to lose, members of the
Sonderkommando
were capable of desperate acts. So Stangl did what any good Nazi might have done in the circumstances – he introduced false hope, and ordered the establishment of a ‘permanent’ slave group. This order put a stop to the constant selections and replacement of workers. When Hershl arrived three weeks later, this permanent group of slaves was still being amassed.

Meanwhile, Wirth came personally from Lublin to inform the Jews of this new regime. Tanhum Greenberg, a Treblinka prisoner whose testimony is held at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, recalled the announcement. ‘You Jews should work hard,’ Wirth told them:

In this ‘city’ of Jews, there now existed for the first time the possibility of survival. However, the price for those that remained alive would be enormous.

Hershl Sperling arrived in hell some time in late September or early October 1942. A reconstruction of his terrible first day in Treblinka is possible because Hershl described it himself in considerable detail in his book. But he does not tell it all. Perhaps he could not tell it all. Notably, the most painful aspects of his personal suffering and grief are omitted from his words. For this, I turned to Sam and, later, Alan, who had lived in the presence of that suffering for many years, and who retain a profound sense of their father’s agony, but little concrete detail. Taken together, a sharp and disturbing picture emerges. Our conversations were not cathartic for them, because I offered no solution or solace. Nonetheless, they provided important clues to the impact of Treblinka and what had been going on in Hershl’s traumatised psyche.

During one of these long conversations, Sam told me, ‘My father could tell me about the piles of bodies, but he couldn’t tell me the name of his mother or his sister. I have a sense he was always a fifteen-year-old boy who had lost his family. There was a very big void. He would always be a child whose parents had been murdered.’

I turned to Hershl’s words once more. But it might have been easier to understand the man who had written them by standing on my head and reading the characters upside down. It occurred to me that he had devoted almost two-thirds of the first half of his Treblinka account to the events of his first day there, but made no mention of those things that terrorised him the most – the loss of his family, his culture, his people.

Sam said, ‘It’s a bit like this mystery of why he carried around a book that wasn’t his all these years. He wanted to have something that was connected to what had happened, but the real thing was too much. In our dining room, in our house in Glasgow, there was an old black and white family photograph taken around 1907 or 1908. It showed my father’s mother when she was maybe seven or eight years old. The photograph was always there, but he hardly ever went into that room. It’s the same thing. He wanted to have these things close, but not so close that it made him remember and suffer.’

‘Strange, I think, that he makes no mention of his family in his testimony.’

‘The omissions were intentional,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t have any doubt about that.’

* * *

That first day, the air was filled with the sound of weeping, choking, of children crying. The people were driven from Treblinka’s Station Square through the guarded gate and into the ‘Reception Square’. There was fear and confusion everywhere. The SS did everything in their power to disguise their greatest weakness – their small numbers – with wildly brutal and cruel behaviour. Guards screamed orders. Dogs on leashes barked and lunged ferociously. Whips cracked. Truncheons and rifle butts smashed into faces. At the same time, the SS still attempted to perpetuate the deception that this was a transit site, and that the Jews were being ushered towards showers. Few believed this anymore – although, somewhere in their hearts, there flickered the twin sparks of hope that both were true, that just maybe they were really going to be sent to the east for work. But the pungent, nauseating odour of decomposing corpses wafted across the camp. Hershl writes:

This laceration of family ties debilitated the victims further, after the trauma of their train journey. However, for the Nazis, the division of the sexes had one primary purpose – the women must be separated and sent to the ‘hairdressers’ to have their hair shorn. Yet it also served to eliminate the possibility of triggering the protective instinct among fathers and older brothers, who might resist at the sight of their wives and sisters being driven into the gas chambers. At the same time, the men were dissuaded from rebelling for fear that it might endanger the lives of their loved ones.

Hershl does not mention that one of those agonising scenes was his own. I imagine the family clinging desperately to one another. I hear the cries of little, red-haired, nine-year-old Frumet piercing the chaos around them.

Sam and I had many telephone conversations, during which I attempted to jog his memory for anything Hershl might have said to him about Treblinka. On one occasion, he told me an astonishing story. I knew Hershl had spoken very little to his sons about Treblinka, if only because Sam has the most extraordinary power of recall that I have ever known, and he most certainly would have remembered such things. Often, Sam delved deep into his memory to recall incidents and even conversations that had occurred years earlier and that sometimes took a few moments. However, he answered quickly this time, when I brought up the subject of Hershl’s arrival and selection at the camp. It was a story, he said, his father had sworn was true.

As Sam spoke, I immediately saw Hershl in the dust of Reception Square, just before father and son were separated from mother and daughter. I imagined the mayhem around them, and the noise and the terror. I also saw Gitel, fighting back her tears and her desperation. She gripped Hershl by the shoulders and stared into his face; one hand caressed his cheek.

Sam said, ‘According to what my father told me, they were walking in a line and his mother stopped to explain to him what was happening to them. She said they were being chosen to live or die, and that he alone would survive to tell their story, and that one day he would leave Europe and escape to Scotland.’

‘It was like a prophecy, almost Biblical, given the annihilation and suffering that was going on all around them.’

‘That was how it was told to us, like a prophecy. My father told us about this more than once, a few times.’

‘It’s also amazing that he even knew where Scotland was, this fifteen-year-old boy from a shtetl in Klobuck.’

‘His mother had relatives – the Goldbergs – who had moved to Scotland in the 1930s,’ Sam said. ‘In Scotland, they called themselves Gilbert.’

I would later meet the offspring of one of these relatives. But now, so clearly, I imagined the truncheon that came down hard on Hershl’s head. I saw him fall in the dust, momentarily blinded. When he got up, his mother and sister were no longer there. Hershl writes: ‘At last, the people have been divided into two groups.’ The SS guards screamed at them: ‘
Alles herunter
’ – ‘everything down’. Across the square, the men could see women standing in front of the wooden barracks, spilling out from the crammed interior. Terrified families called to one another across the square. Hershl stood with his father. I imagine them clasping one another’s hand. ‘Savage SS let fly with their rubber truncheons and force the people to undress. Some more slowly, some more quickly, with greater or lesser degrees of embarrassment, the men and the women undress and lay their clothes aside.’

Amid all this chaos, one Jewish slave worker in colourful attire – this one with a red armband – made his way through the confused crowd. He was muttering indecipherable words and handing out pieces of thread, with which people were supposed to tie their shoes together. Had this man gone mad? Now other strange, muttering characters began to move among them. They were also dressed in odd clothing – silk shirts, pyjama bottoms, colourful chiffon scarves and caps – each of them wore a different type of cap. One of them, at last, spoke directly to Hershl.

In Reception Square, all the naked women were driven into the barracks.

Whips cracked again as the naked men were forced to pack all the clothing – male and female alike – and pile them in an area for disinfection.

Near the door of the men’s barracks, a cashier set up his operation. The deception continued. All gold, money, foreign currency and jewellery must be deposited in return for a receipt. The men formed a line amid whiplashes from the Ukrainian auxiliaries. Regulations required that everyone bathe before continuing their journey, they announced. They were marched to Roll Call Square, where a new order rang out. Hershl writes:

Hershl and his father were assailed with whips and truncheons, and cut with bayonets, as they ran, naked, with their hands in the air, deprived of human dignity. ‘
Schnell,
schnell,
’ the guards screamed. Some of the guards laughed at the sight of these Jews on the brink of collapse. Others called out insults. Some of the Jews were old men. Others were ill. Still others, like Hershl, were adolescent boys. The weakest among them grew breathless, staggering as they fell in the dirt. None had consumed food or water for at least two days. Those who went down either picked themselves up beneath a rain of blows or were dragged to the Lazarett and shot into the pit. Hershl watched in disbelief as the cruelty unfolded. Indeed, a tone of disbelief and shock runs through his entire account of Treblinka. It was the start of an education for him. He was beginning to understand that every aspect of human endeavour in Treblinka carried with it the possibility of death. The run had a secondary purpose for the SS. The idea was to make certain the men were fully distracted and properly cowed during the roughly thirty minutes it took to stuff every woman and child into the gas chambers and murder them, from the closing of the door to the moment the first corpses were dragged out the other side. Efficiency was everything.

Now the men were marched back to a narrow dirt strip between the two sets of wooden huts, so-called Deportation Square. There were no choices. There was no question of resistance. With their receipts in their hands, this doomed procession of naked men was herded toward a gate in the fence. Fierce dogs snapped at their naked bodies to be sure no one dallied. An SS man called out: ‘Faster, faster, the water is getting cold.’ They fled through the gate to escape the terror behind them.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. An SS man – one of no more than 20 possible individuals – grabbed Hershl by the arm and yanked him to the side. ‘At the very door, 30 men are pulled out. I am one of them.’

We cannot know what thoughts went through his mind as his father was driven through the gate toward death. The SS man spoke to him in German.

‘You understand me?’

Instinctively, perhaps with his mother’s prophecy spinning around in his head, he answered, ‘Ja.’

‘Good. Go get into your clothes. Special work.’ The German’s tone was almost friendly. ‘Chatty,’ recalled Richard Glazar, another Treblinka survivor, who experienced a similar selection less than a week later.

A Jewish prisoner, the head of the work group, wearing a blue band on his sleeve, appeared and divided the 30 young men into six groups of five. He led one group across the square to a storeroom piled high with clothes. Hershl was among this group. This foreman’s name was Samuel Rajzman.

Hershl was instructed to tie the clothes in bundles and wrap them in sheets. Rajzman urged the workers to work quickly. Hershl writes: ‘We have been chosen to form the work-squads in the camp. For the meantime, we are safe.’ The annihilation of 7,000 people – the entire transport of Jews, save 30 souls, who had set off that late September day from Częstochowa – was complete.

* * *

No member of the Jewish
Sonderkommando
survived Treblinka without friendship. Every survivor was helped by someone else – even though in many cases in the end that ‘someone else’ did not survive. Samuel Rajzman, who was already 40 years old by the time he was deported to the death camp, was Hershl’s ‘someone else’, and almost immediately became a kind of surrogate father to Hershl. This is not to suggest that Hershl did not possess an inner strength that helped him survive – but in the grotesque hell of Treblinka, that was not enough.

Rajzman, who would become the only Treblinka survivor to testify at the Nuremberg trials, arrived at the camp on a transport from Warsaw on 21 September 1942, a week or so before Hershl. He was born in the Polish town of Wegrow in 1902. Before the war, he lived with his wife and young daughter in Warsaw, where he had been an accountant and translator with an import-export business. Years later, even long after Rajzman’s death, Hershl spoke of him with an extraordinary admiration.