Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (25 page)

We know Hershl studied this list – even through he had been separated from his parents and sister only minutes before their deaths. Sam said, ‘He wasn’t one of the ones who didn’t know what had happened to his family.’

Nonetheless, Hershl discovered names he recognised from Treblinka. These survivors were the closest people he had to a family, and he immediately sought them out. He concludes his account in the pale green book with a verification of events by naming several of these heroic individuals. His accounts ends:

We know nothing of what took place at these meetings, because Hershl did not speak to his sons about them. Nonetheless, these men have emerged as extremely important figures in the history of Treblinka. Without them, the crimes and the atrocities committed at the camp would have remained a secret. The final paragraph of Hershl’s account does not tell us at which camp he met Arie Kudlik, a fountain-pen expert who exchanged expensive gold-nibbed pens with the Treblinka guards for sandwiches. Nor do we know where he was reunited with Samuel Rajzman, his surrogate father and saviour. Yet I imagine there were tears of joy and sorrow. Rajzman was the only Treblinka survivor to testify at the Nuremberg trials. Kudlik later produced a map of Treblinka for the Central Jewish Historical Committee, and is listed as one of the survivors to have given evidence in 1946 in Warsaw to the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland.

Hershl also travelled to Foehrenwald camp, where he met Treblinka survivor Wolf Schneiderman, who later emigrated to the United States and became a butcher in New York. He also travelled to the D.P. camp in Bamberg, a Bavarian site near Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden to meet with Eugon Turowski, who in Treblinka worked in the metal workshop and copied the key to the armoury that made the prisoners’ revolt possible. Turowski also gave evidence to the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. No more than 70 had survived out of almost a million people. Yet within this handful of individuals, this tiny sub-set of Holocaust survivors, there began a kind of conspiracy of silence. No-one else could possibly grasp the torments they had come through. Theirs was a unique, shared experience that bound them together forever.

* * *

Sam and I had a minor dispute over the restaurant bill as we stood in front of the cash register in the café. Each of us had our wallet in one hand, with the other thrusting money at the Moroccan waiter, who smiled patiently. In the end, Sam paid because he insisted more often and more stubbornly.

‘How much is it?’ Sam asked the waiter.

‘Fifteen,’ the Moroccan said.

‘Fifteen million,’ said Sam. ‘Okay, here’s twenty million.’

The waiter smiled. He took the money and dipped into the register. ‘And here’s five million change,’ he said.

‘And here’s your two million tip,’ said Sam, dropping two pound coins into the gratuity cup on the counter.

I laughed. It offered a moment of respite. However, there was still something disconcerting about the episode, because of how much it reminded me of Hershl – not the Hershl I remembered, but rather the person I had come to know since I had begun to write about him. I had also forgotten how much Sam enjoyed games like this, acting out his own unique brand of nonsense. In that moment, it seemed as though Hershl were speaking to me from beyond the grave, through my friend, his son, telling me that our lives and all that we cherished were meaningless, except perhaps life itself, and that nothing should ever be taken for granted. He was telling me that the mask of normality could drop at any moment.

As soon as we were outside, Sam lit up a cigarette. He smoked thoughtfully, as we walked along the street in the dark, past shuttered shop doorways. I watched him now and suddenly recalled the sadness that had overwhelmed him after his mother died and afterwards how my mother would pull him into a hug whenever he came to visit. Then she would force him to sit at our dining room table and put bowls of chicken soup and plates of meatloaf and potatoes in front of him. I remembered I had said to my mother, ‘I don’t think you really have to force feed him every time he comes over to see me.’

‘Oh yes I do,’ she informed me. ‘He hasn’t got a mother anymore.’ And now, as we walked along this London street in the dark, it came back to me what he had said when my mother died years later, and how he had dropped everything to catch a train and arrive in time for the funeral the following day.

‘After a while, you’ll forget how terrible things were in the end, and the good memories will come back of her when she was younger,’ he had said. ‘After a while, you’ll remember her in happier times.’ It took a long time for that to happen, but those good memories did return eventually, and I am forever grateful for that piece of wisdom.

Now, as we walked, I said, ‘It’s nice to see that you’re getting along so well with the Muslims. After the September 11 attacks, there seems to be so much hatred and suspicion everywhere.’

‘I don’t think those people in that café hate anyone. I suppose I’m hoping they don’t. You know, in a lot of ways I prefer the anti-Semitism of the Muslim world, because it’s not as ugly as European anti-Semitism. In Europe, the hatred is ingrained deeper in the culture. In some Arab countries, it was okay for Jews for a long time. I don’t think you can say that for any European country. The culture in Europe always goes back to its Christian roots, where Jews were regarded as Christ-killers. At the same time, Jews were a minority and they had a particular way of living that was different from the majority and were easy to persecute. Even European anti-Semites today who say they don’t believe in Jesus, don’t understand that their hatred is rooted in their culture, and that it’s passed on from generation to generation, like a disease. People still celebrate Christmas traditions, even though they’re not religious, don’t they? Anti-Semitism is a fundamental building block of European culture. I told you, if there were only twenty Jews left in Europe, people would still try to kill them. It’s always about the hatred. Somehow, we eat away at their souls.’

I said, ‘You know, there was even anti-Semitism in the D.P. camps. That surprised me when I first read about it. Actually, I found it utterly incredible after six million Jews were murdered. What does it take to stop the hatred?’

‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me,’ said Sam. ‘I’d be more surprised if there wasn’t anti-Semitism in these camps. If there were no Jews left in Europe, they would still want to kill Jews, because hatred is part of their culture. The Nazis weren’t particularly religious. They called themselves socialists, and in some ways they were model socialists, fighting for the rights of workers, the way a lot of Europeans are socialists now. They hide behind their fake egalitarian principles, but really nothing has changed. Outwardly, they’re no longer anti-Jewish. Instead they’re now anti-Israel, but they’re still filled with hatred. They have all these grand ideas, with culture and cathedrals and their music, but actually they’re all just hooligans who want to kill people, identical to their anti-Semitic ancestors.’

According to the records we received from Bad Arolsen, Hershl was transferred from Dachau to a D.P. camp outside the Bavarian village of Tirschenreuth, close to the Czech border, on 28 August 1945. While he was now free and the brutality of the SS had been stamped out, the conditions in the camp, especially in winter, were awful. Observers found survivors in almost every camp shivering in unheated rooms. They slept in bunks of rough, unfinished lumber. Mattresses were straw-filled sacks. Their bedding consisted of shoddy, grey Wehrmacht blankets. Two or three families lived crowded together in single rooms without privacy. The food they received was the same every day. The camp was also filled with various national groups – including Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Russians and Ukrainians – and Jews again found themselves receiving the brunt of daily anti-Semitic taunts and victimisation.

At the same time, a rampant black market flourished amid the chaos of liberation. For much of the German population, this was yet another pretext for anti-Semitism. The D.P. camps were not only the source of much of the demand, but they were also under the jurisdiction of the US military and the local Bavarian police were denied entry, a source of resentment. However, the black market in fact was not a Jewish phenomenon – although, according to the German population, the Jews were behind all criminal activity. Data produced at the time from contemporaneous court records attempted to point an accusing finger at the Jews – but instead revealed that criminality was more widespread among the German population. The fact was that during the war, ordinary Germans experienced very little economic hardship, primarily because of the ruthless exploitation of the countries occupied by the Nazis. When food shortages occurred after the war, they were blamed on the occupying powers and, of course, the Jews, who in their view were now receiving unfair privileges. It is noteworthy that one of the first requests of the so-called de-Nazified civil governments of Germany to the Allied Control Council was that the rations of the displaced persons camps be reduced.

It is worth repeating the 1947 observation of Jewish-German writer Ralph Giodana:

In Sam’s dusty apartment later that night, he told me something I found surprising. ‘My father had the idea that he wanted to open a cinema,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you that already?’

‘No, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘In Tirschenreuth, I think, or maybe in the camp itself.’

Perhaps only with the kind of hope that comes with youth could a survivor of the Holocaust see an opportunity in all the misery and chaos around him. Hershl often spoke of how much time he had spent with the Americans after liberation. I wondered now if those GIs in Dachau and in Tirschenreuth had spoken to him of the great American passion for Hollywood. Then it occurred to me that Hershl had probably never seen a movie until after the war. There was no cinema in Klobuck and most likely he saw his first film – I imagine a Hollywood production from the 1930s or early 1940s – in a Dachau ‘movie house’ put up by the soldiers for their own entertainment. Or maybe the notion had struck him when he first awoke in the Dachau army hospital and had seen George Stevens’ film crew.

Sam said, ‘I guess we can speculate about what gave him the idea. Maybe he just heard about a cinema for sale in Tirschenreuth. I know he also had the idea that money was safer in bricks and mortar because currency was less secure, and people still remembered the German inflation of the 1920s and 1930s. I think he wanted something concrete and safe.’

‘It was a good business idea, too,’ I said. ‘There were thousands of people there, who were starved of any form of cultural relief. Some of the camps had cinemas, but not all of them, and there was none in Tirschenreuth. It was a business opportunity to be seized, a captive audience, so to speak.’

Back at my desk, as I looked over my notes of the conversation, I remembered how years later Hershl had gone alone one night to the cinema in Glasgow to see
The Killing Fields
, the film about Cambodian journalist Dith Pran, and his journey to escape from the death camps of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. I remembered there was a sequence in that movie in which Pran escaped and stumbled upon the infamous killing fields of the regime, where millions of Cambodian citizens had been murdered as traitors to the new order. I also remembered how Sam had said to me that Hershl had ‘felt bad’ for Pran. An image now came to me of Hershl standing in that dumping ground of human remains, surrounded by bones and skulls amid the terrible stench, alone, as if in Treblinka, as if he were the last Jew on earth.

* * *

Hershl had no money, save the special currency that was issued in the camps and which could only be spent in camp food stores. There was only one possibility for him to get his hands on real money quickly and enter the cinema business. His plan was to reclaim his grandfather’s land in Klobuck and sell it. It was good, fertile ground, where horses and cattle once grazed. He knew he could not return to Poland to live, and he had no desire to do so. Everything for him there was gone. He only wanted his rightful inheritance and then to leave. He had no difficulty persuading the officials at UNRRA to provide his ticket. One day during the early fall of 1946, he walked out of the D.P. camp in Tirschenreuth and headed for the train station.

‘I remember a story I think he told me about riding on top of an American tank,’ I said to Sam.

‘Maybe that was the time,’ he said. ‘He was also selling things on the black market then. My father said the Americans felt sorry for him and gave him things to sell.’

‘I guess he took a train from Tirschenreuth – where there was a station then – to Wiesau, about ten miles west, and then east to Prague, and on to Poland. He would have had to be careful.’

‘Why?’

‘It was a crazy time on the roads in Germany, just after the war. The confusion and population movement were incredible. The roads were jammed with a tidal wave of refugees – and not just Jews, who’d been forced inside Nazi Germany towards the end of the war. There were foreign conscript workers and freed prisoners, as well as Germans, expelled from various territories in the east, heading west. Millions upon millions of migrating, disoriented people trekking this way and that.’