Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (28 page)

However, Hochberg shed little light on the practical considerations of where Jewish printing presses had been found. Weeks earlier I had written to the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for information, and Dr David Silberklang, director of
Yad Vashem
Studies
, the scholarly annual journal of Yad Vashem, answered me. Coincidentally, his reply came the day before I had flown to Baltimore. I called it up and re-read it: ‘I don’t know where the commission obtained a Hebrew-character typewriter, but these were around. The Nazis had not destroyed every one.’

I also discovered the commission had published the first issue of the monthly
Fun
Letzen Hurban
in August 1946. Hershl’s story appeared in August 1947, although we cannot know when it was written. I imagined Hershl now, grief pressing down through the tip of his pen, writing his story in the empty porcelain factory in Tirschenreuth.

* * *

My concentration was broken by the sound of my daughter’s voice. I looked up and saw her running toward me. She ran into my arms and embraced me with what seemed to be extraordinary strength.

‘Dad, we’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

‘How did it go? Did you like Daniel’s Story?’

‘We didn’t go to Daniel’s Story. Rubin said I was old enough to see the whole museum.’

‘Well, if Rubin said it was OK, that’s fine with me,’ I said.

‘She was very interested,’ said Rubin. ‘Did you get what you needed?’

‘It’s another piece of the puzzle,’ I said.

‘Can you come round again with us?’ my daughter asked.

‘Come,’ Rubin said. ‘I want to show you the boxcar they got from Poland.’

We walked together through the three floors of photographs, artefacts and models depicting streams of Holocaust memory and open theatres of looping film footage. The museum was divided into three parts – Nazi Assault, Final Solution, and Last Chapter – and we passed image after image of ghetto round-ups, beatings, murders, deportations, medical tortures in Auschwitz, emaciated corpses of survivors and mountains of dead, twisted bodies.

On the third floor, a procession of visitors moved along a corridor that led through a wooden railcar. It was the same kind of railcar that had taken Hershl to Treblinka.

‘They made a big deal about this coming from Poland,’ Rubin said. ‘The Polish government was supposed to donate it, but I think the museum ended up having to pay for the wagon.’ We moved inside the boxcar. ‘This was it,’ he said.

‘Was this the same car you were in?’ my daughter asked.

‘It was one just like this,’ Rubin said. ‘100 people were packed in. Ten came out alive.’

We were holding up the flow of traffic through the railcar and some of the people in the line were becoming irritated. Rubin ignored them. Others, however, had gathered around and were trying to listen to him speak, as though he were bringing word from another planet. A young black woman came over to us.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Did you say you were in a railcar like this?’

‘Yes, I was.’

The young woman lifted a pad. ‘How old were you? Can you describe it?’

‘Where are you from?’ asked Rubin.

‘Washington,’ the woman said. ‘I’m a sophomore student at American University. Can you tell me what it was like?’ She was poised to write. Rubin studied the pad.

‘Can I describe it? There were 100 people in our car, all men. The women and children went in another car. I went to Bergen-Belsen, but I can’t tell you where I was coming from. I don’t know. There was no room to sit. It was only after a few hours, when people started to die and we put their bodies in the middle of the wagon, that we were able to sit. We travelled for four days and three nights. There was no food or water. They threw in one bucket for us to relieve ourselves. It wasn’t long before it was overflowing. At Bergen-Belsen there were only ten of us left alive. How I survived, I can’t tell you.’ Then he added, ‘This is what happens when you don’t protect the free political processes we have in this country.’

The young woman scribbled furiously in her pad as Rubin told her his story. I was scribbling in my pad also, and I watched her face at the same time, the way the sadness and emotion crossed her expression with each tragic nuance of Rubin’s story. I noticed now that a crowd had formed around us, each person listening intently.

‘Which camp were you liberated in?’ she asked.

‘I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen. After the train, they sent us on a death march. We had to wear wooden shoes, like clogs. We walked through fields and along forest tracks. We came from the east. That’s all I know, and we walked in fives. When somebody fell they were shot and trucks came behind to pick up the dead bodies. It must have been winter. I remember there was snow on the ground and we were freezing.’

‘And what can you tell me about Bergen-Belsen?’

‘I’ll never forget the bulldozers moving piles of naked dead bodies and crushing their bones as they were pushed into the big pits. So inhuman to treat the dead like that. That is something I’ll never forget. We were treated worse than animals. How they came up with some of the things they did to people I’ll never know. Bergen-Belsen was where they dumped you when you couldn’t work anymore. It was the last stop.’

‘Can you give me your name?’ the young woman asked.

‘What do you want my name for?’ Rubin asked.

The young woman smiled again, embarrassed. ‘Because I want to write something about you,’ she said.

‘You want to write something about me. For you, I’ll tell you my name. My name is Rubin Sztajer.’ He spelled it carefully.

‘And how do you spell the name of that town you were from?’ He spelled out Klobuck for her also, and she wrote it in her pad. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice broken with emotion. Then, suddenly she learned forward, put her arms around Rubin’s neck and embraced him tightly. Rubin smiled in embarrassment.

‘Wherever I go, people want to hear my story. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile what I do.’

That evening, on the way back to Baltimore, there was little conversation in the car. I offered to drive, but Rubin said no. My daughter had fallen asleep in the back seat. Suddenly, after a long while, Rubin suddenly said to me, ‘I’d like the right to change my opinion.’

‘Of course. About what?’

‘I’ve been thinking, and I’ve changed my mind about Szperling. He wasn’t a coward.’

‘OK,’ I said, pulling out my notebook and pen. There was a pained expression on Rubin’s face.

‘I think what he needed was to talk to someone – I mean after his wife died – but he didn’t know where to start. I think he was afraid that if he started he would never be able to stop, and the memories would flood back out and destroy him.’

‘Maybe, in the end, that’s what happened.’

* * *

Back at the Sztajers’ pristine apartment Rubin told me more of his story. We sat on his sofa and I scribbled notes as he spoke. He picked up his story the day the camp was liberated.

‘I was close to death,’ he said. ‘After liberation, the same day, I collapsed. It was the end for me. I was naked and in pain. There was nothing left of me. I don’t remember. My sister, Gussie, knew what happened, but she wouldn’t speak. She would never speak about what happened.’

‘You never talked to her about her experiences?’ I asked.

‘You know, a woman survivor in the Holocaust, I don’t want to ask. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. But I had been asking her for years to come to see what I was doing in the schools. I said, “You’re not going to have to speak. Just listen and watch.” I had to promise. So she agreed to come and sit at the back of the class.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, I told my story the usual way in the classroom. They were very good kids. At the end, when I asked if there were any questions, this one kid put his hand up and asked about liberation. I said I didn’t know, but that my sister did. So I introduced her at the back of the classroom. “Gussie,” I said, “I know I promised you, but this student is asking a question that I want to answer, but I can’t.” Then, after a moment, she stood up and, very bravely, began to speak. “Just this one time,” she said, and she told the story of how we had both been in Bergen-Belsen, but hadn’t known it. After liberation, someone recognised me lying on the ground and went to tell Gussie. The first thing she did was to take off her underwear and put it on me, to give me some dignity. Then, somehow, she and some of the other women carried me into the women’s barracks where they nursed me back to health. They saved my life.’

‘That’s quite a story,’ I said. Rubin sprang from the couch with astonishing agility.

‘I’m going to phone Gussie in New York.’

He spoke first to her in Yiddish, and then handed me the telephone.

‘Hello?’ I said, tentatively.

‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice was accented and soft. She sounded much younger than her 83 years. There was something gentle in her tone, and I immediately warmed to her. I started to tell her about the book I was writing, but she quickly interrupted and said, ‘Rubin told me.’

‘I wanted to ask if you remember anything of the Szperling family in Klobutsk.’ I used the now-defunct Yiddish rendition of the town’s name. ‘Do you remember anything of Hershl?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was two years older, but I remember a lot of girls in town had a crush on him. He was so cute and so likeable. Everybody liked him.’ I had heard this before from Rebecca Bernstein but it was wonderful to hear again.

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘I remember his mother was very tall and the older brother that died was very tall also.’ There could be no doubt she was talking about the same Szperlings. ‘But I didn’t see much of him, because I was older. I do remember his mother was a Goldberg, and they had family that moved to Scotland. They wanted to get away from Poland, from all the anti-Semitism then. I remember when they went it was a big deal in the town. Everybody spoke about it. There was also a Goldberg sister, I think, who went to Israel.’

‘Did Rubin tell you what happened to Hershl?’ I asked.

‘I was surprised when I heard,’ Gussie said. ‘I can’t understand it. I’m a survivor also – I can’t tell you the hell I went through – but I want to live.’ She drew breath and repeated: ‘I want to live!’

I thanked her and said goodbye. I felt terrible. The last thing I had wanted was to upset her, but I knew that I had.

The next morning, as my daughter and I took our seats on the plane, I had the strangest sensation of seeing Hershl again in Tirschenreuth, writing his story. He was nineteen and still thin as a rake, but his eyes held the pain of a thousand years.

A few weeks later I was back in Scotland and the rain was beating down in sheets. It was a Tuesday afternoon and I took a break. I had been re-reading the few testimonies of other Treblinka survivors. I had also gone back over the papers that Severin Hochberg had given me in Washington. My head felt heavy. I stood at my back door and watched the rain push across the hay field behind the house. The Campsie Hills stood above and beyond them but they were shrouded in thick, grey clouds and half the hill was obscured. Suddenly, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared. A jet’s vapour trail became visible. Within minutes, the sky was a clear blue and the clouds lifted off the top of the hills.

I scribbled, ‘Natural beauty affirms life.’ I knew that when Hershl needed nature he went to the coastal town of Ayr, where seagulls squawked on the pier as he stared out at the choppy waters of the Firth of Clyde and the hills of the Isle of Arran in the distance. He always seemed so solitary, and his presence on that pier perilous. One line from Hochberg’s papers kept returning to me. ‘You understand,’ a survivor had written, ‘the concentration camp experience is nothing that endears you to people.’

I checked my email for the first time that day. I was suddenly excited. A note from my sister told me that Haddas, an Israeli friend in Los Angeles, had made contact with Treblinka survivor Samuel Willenberg in Tel Aviv for me. I had understood that Willenberg was the last Treblinka survivor alive, and I desperately wanted to speak with anyone who remembered Hershl beyond his childhood in Klobuck and to confirm his existence among his peers. I had obtained Willenberg’s phone number from his daughter, but because he did not speak English and my Hebrew and Polish were virtually non-existent, my sister arranged for a translator. It turned out that Willenberg’s wife spoke English and they very much wanted to speak to me. Later in the afternoon, when I called Haddas, there was another piece of good news.

‘Willenberg is not the last Treblinka survivor,’ she said. ‘He told me there are four others and I have the phone numbers of three of them. The fourth one you can’t call, because he has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember anything. If you need me to call them, just let me know. But I’ll give you the numbers.’

She gave me the telephone numbers of survivors Kalman Teigman, Pinchas Epstein and Josef Czarny. I wanted to call them immediately, but because of the time difference I would have to wait until the following day. I began also to think about Hershl’s life beyond Treblinka. Who was alive who could give me their impressions of him as a twenty-year-old refugee amid the smoke-blackened brick and rain of industrial Glasgow in the 1940s? There were civic documents that verified he was there, and there was further documentation from the International Tracing Service archives at Bad Arolsen in Germany, which noted first that Hershl had ‘emigrated on 4 September 1947, coming from Munich, from France to England by train and ship’. But I wanted human corroboration.

I telephoned Sam and told him about the Treblinka survivors. I also asked him if there was anyone who might remember his father when he first arrived in Glasgow.

‘You could try my cousins, Sylvia and Felicia,’ he said. ‘They’re the daughters of Louis Goldberg, the brother of my father’s mother. They changed their name to Gilbert when they got here. They must remember my father when he first came from Germany. They were children when my father went to live in their house. I’ll speak to Alan and try to think of others.’

‘Where do they live?’ I asked.

‘Somewhere in Glasgow,’ Sam said. ‘I have phone numbers and addresses. I haven’t seen them in years.’

As soon as I ended my call with Sam, I called Sylvia, the younger of the sisters – both of whom were in their late sixties – and I arranged to meet with her at her house on Saturday. She seemed happy to help me.

* * *

The following day, at around 11.00am, I telephoned the survivors. I began with Josef Czarny. Like Hershl, he was born in 1927 and had been fifteen when he was deported from the Warsaw ghetto. He was penniless and desperately hungry. His family were already dead from starvation. When the order came to report to the Umschlagplatz, he went of his own free will for the three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade promised to those who reported voluntarily. He and thousands of others were then placed in cattle cars. In Treblinka, he was selected to live and ended up working in the camp zoo. There was a time I might have been reticent to question Holocaust survivors for fear I might upset them and dredge up unwelcome memories, but I now understood that most survivors wanted to talk. They wanted to tell the world. It was just that the world didn’t want to listen to them. Anyway, if he didn’t want to talk, he would say so.

‘Josef Czarny?’ I asked when he picked up the telephone.

‘Ken,’ he said, using the Hebrew word for ‘yes’. His voice was like gravel.

‘Do you speak English?’

‘No,’ he said, forcefully. But then he added, ‘A little. How can I help you?’ I explained to him why I was calling. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘Do you remember Hershl Sperling in Treblinka?’

‘Szperling?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Hershl Szperling?’

‘No. Do you speak Hebrew?’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Find someone to call me in Hebrew. Goodbye.’ He hung up the phone.

I put a mark beside his name and number in my notepad to have Haddas call him in Hebrew. I moved on to Kalman Teigman, born in Warsaw in 1922, whose testimony, coincidentally, I had been reading just that morning. Teigman had been one of the planners of the Treblinka revolt. He spoke good English, but only after expressing disappointment that I did not speak Yiddish. He did not recall Hershl either, but he became very interested when I told him about the pale green book containing Hershl’s testimony.

‘Maybe if I saw a picture of him, I’d recognise him,’ he said. ‘Tell me, does he mention any names in his testimony?’

I opened it and went to the last paragraph, which contained the list of names. ‘Maybe you know some of these people. Did you know a Samuel Rajzman?’

‘Rajzman, no.’

‘Schneiderman?’

‘No.’

‘How about Kudlik from Częstochowa?’ I asked.

‘Kudlik? Kudlik’s a good friend of mine.’

‘Is he still living?’

‘No, he’s gone. His son is in Israel, but he doesn’t know much.’

‘He also names Turowski. Do you know him?’

‘Turowski’s also a friend of mine.’

‘Is he living?’

‘He’s gone, too. His wife lives near here, but he’s gone a long time ago now.’

‘And you definitely don’t recall Hershl Szperling?’

‘You say he was fifteen. You could maybe try Czarny or Epstein. Or maybe Willenberg. And you’re writing a book about Treblinka?’

‘Treblinka and Hershl Sperling,’ I said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much written about Treblinka. Everything is about Auschwitz.’ He suddenly became agitated.

‘Treblinka was not the same as Auschwitz. In Treblinka, there was nothing, just gas chambers where they murdered people, the workers and the guards.’

I thanked him and promised to send a copy of Hershl’s testimony, which he had requested.

‘It was very nice talking with you,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘Don’t forget to send me the book,’ he said before he hung up.

Next I tried Pinchas Epstein, the Częstochowa-born Jew whose job in Treblinka was corpse-carrier in the death camp.

‘Mr Epstein?’

‘Ken.’ His voice sounded older and more frail than the previous two, and I could hear him breathing very heavily.

‘Do you speak English?’

‘No … a little.’

I told him about Hershl’s testimony and that I was writing about his life.

‘I don’t understand. You speak Hebrew? Yiddish?’ His English was slow and broken.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I want to ask you if remember a Hershl Szperling in Treblinka.’

‘Szperling?’

‘Yes. Hershl Szperling in Treblinka.’ His breathing became louder.

‘Yes. I remember him.’

‘You do?’

‘I remember Szperling.’

‘Can you tell me what you remember?’ I asked. After several stops and starts, he said ‘My English not good. If someone calls and speaks Hebrew …’ I had to wait a few hours before calling Haddas, because of the time difference between Scotland and Los Angeles and by the time I got hold of her it was too late to call Israel. However, she promised she would call the next day. Finally I called Samuel Willenberg’s wife. She was friendly and helpful. We spoke for a while about Hershl and Treblinka, and she translated for her husband.

‘My husband says he doesn’t remember Hershl Szperling, but he has his name on the list of people who survived the uprising,’ she said. ‘So he’s definitely one of them. You should come to Israel and visit us if you want to know more about Treblinka.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s expensive.’

‘Well, if you come, you should hurry.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because we’re 85. Things can happen. You know, my husband is supposed to be in Warsaw now getting a medal from the Polish president, because he was also in the Warsaw uprising, not the ghetto, but the Polish uprising. But he fell and broke his leg. Now he’s sitting here with a cast.’

‘I’m sorry to ask this question, but I’d like to know why you think a Treblinka survivor would kill himself, after so many years.’

I heard her translating the question for her husband. Then a short discussion in Hebrew followed. At last she said, ‘Maybe he became crazy. You know none of us came out the camps 100 per cent.’ She too wanted me to send a copy of Hershl’s testimony – ‘This is a very important historical document’ – I promised that I would.

* * *

The next morning, I drove my car across Bridge Street in Glasgow, the old road over the River Clyde, on a rare sunny morning and entered an area known broadly as the South Side. I glanced over at the rail bridge on my left as I passed, and looked into the darkness of its iron-girder interior, where Hershl had been before his death. I wanted to stop, but the flow of traffic made it impossible and I pushed southwards, my mood sorrowful.

Once over the river, I drove through a district called the Gorbals, a knot of streets tucked into the shoulder of a bend in the Clyde. This was where the Glasgow journey began for the thousands of Jews who had arrived in Scotland, desperate and poor, fleeing the pogroms of tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of my own relatives among them. Its grid-iron layout of four-storey brick tenement buildings – home to Jews, Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics forced from their own lands by famine – has long been demolished. In the many memoirs of Jewish life in the Gorbals during this period, most go to great lengths to stress the absence of anti-Semitism. It is an urban wasteland now of crime and crumbling high-rise tower blocks.

I followed Pollokshaws Road, the main artery leading south from the river, out of the Gorbals. This was the same route most of the Jews had taken on their upwardly mobile, southward journey out of poverty. During the inter-war years, building decay, overcrowding and sanitation conditions grew worse and many Jews began to move down into adjoining districts with names such as Govanhill, Strathbungo, Crosshill, Crossmyloof and East Pollokshields.

The wasteland between the Gorbals and Strathbungo gradually gave way to a few shops with names that reflected the fact they belonged to later waves of immigrants – mostly Pakistani and Indian. I turned left on Allison Street and drove past rows of Victorian sandstone tenements. The streets were full of people. I turned right on Niddrie Road and passed an old synagogue, built in 1927, around the time Jews were beginning to relocate to the area. I was looking for Westmoreland Street, where I knew Hershl, Yaja and Alan had lived before the birth of Sam.

I crossed Victoria Road, and turned right on Westmoreland, a quiet backstreet between two main thoroughfares. I didn’t know the street number, but it didn’t much matter because it was a row of four-storey, sand-coloured stone tenements that were all the same. I drove to the end and turned around, and crossed back over Allison Street until I reached the other end of Westmoreland. The number 21 suddenly popped into my head. Perhaps Alan had mentioned it during one of our telephone conversations. The street probably hadn’t changed much since he and his parents had lived here. I stopped the car and looked across at 21 Westmoreland Street. A young Pakistani woman wearing a red sari and multi-coloured scarves pushed a baby carriage along the pavement. I tried to imagine Hershl here before setting off again.

Back on Pollokshaws Road, I passed pubs, South Asian fast-food restaurants, fruit sellers, specialist meat vendors and clothes shops. At Shawlands Cross, Pollokshaws Road became Kilmarnock Road, and tenements gave way to handsome old residences with large, manicured lawns and trees. Another mile or so, and I was in the heart of Giffnock, now home to most of Glasgow’s remaining 7,000 Jews. People were out walking their dogs. A jogger went by. I turned left into Otterburn Drive, where Sam’s cousins, the Goldbergs – now Gilberts – had once had a home and where Hershl had lived when he first arrived in Scotland. Large, affluent two and three-storey villas dominated the street. It must have appeared extraordinary to Hershl.

Another few minutes’ drive south and I was in Whitecraigs, one of the richest enclaves in Glasgow and then passed into the neighbouring suburb of Newton Mearns. After studying Sylvia’s directions I found her house fairly quickly. I headed along a wide driveway and up to the door. I saw a woman get up as I walked past the large front window. She opened the door as I arrived.

‘Are you Mark?’ she asked. She was a small, middle-aged woman with large glasses.

‘Yes. Sylvia?’ We shook hands as I entered the house.

‘Come into the living room,’ she said. We entered a bright, tidy room with comfortable-looking chairs and couches. As I turned, I was surprised to see another woman rising out of a chair in front of the window.