Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (27 page)

Something I had read a few weeks earlier suddenly came back to me. While I was conducting an internet search on the German town of Wiesau – from where Hershl had taken the train connection to Prague during his time at Tirschenreuth – I had stumbled upon the 14 October 1946 testimony of one Sebastian Herr, an ethnic German from Romania who had, according to the report, worked as a tailor for the SS in Leitmeritz in Czechoslovakia. His testimony related to events that had occurred in May the previous year in Prague, just after the city had been liberated by the Red Army. Herr had been incarcerated in Pankratz prison. He told how he and a group of prisoners were forced to dig up the bodies of SS men who had been killed during the Soviet liberation and had been buried in mass graves. I recalled Herr’s terrible description.

This was clearly not an isolated incident. The website contained numerous testimonies relating to atrocities committed against ethnic Germans in the aftermath of the war. I felt ashamed as I read these accounts. This was not the way victors should behave and it was not justice, even if the SS had committed atrocities of their own, and I was in no doubt that Hershl would have agreed with me.

As I lay there, in Rubin and Regina’s spare room, with my daughter sleeping beside me, it came to me that Hershl’s story was not just about Hershl. Nor was it only about the terrible and tragic plight of six million murdered Jews or those who survived and were doomed to suffer for the rest of their lives. It was about the irrational hatred that had made it all possible, the same raw hatred that had gouged the eyes from SS men and beat desperate individuals into the gas chambers of Treblinka.

I fell asleep that night thinking of the millions of people like Hershl through history and that there must be thousands upon thousands of new Hershls in the world today. The root cause of it all is the hatred that is breathed into the crib and is nurtured and grown into a virus that consumes and destroys everything it touches. It can never be destroyed completely. There is always a remnant that lives to pass on the disease. This, I was certain, is what former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir meant when, speaking in 1989 of anti-Semitism, he said that Poles ‘suck it in with their mother’s milk,’ adding, ‘this is something that is deeply imbued in their tradition, their mentality.’ What happened on Polish soil during World War II will accompany the history of Poland and all of humanity until the end of time. I fell asleep listening to the rhythmic breathing of my daughter, and eventually I stopped thinking about how brutal and beastly the human race is to itself.

* * *

Rubin, my daughter and I set off early the next morning. Before turning on to the highway to Washington, we pulled into a drive-through McDonald’s, just minutes after getting started.

‘I’ve got to have my Prozac,’ said Rubin. I was aware that I was looking at him curiously.

‘Coffee,’ he said, laughing to himself.

‘You never know,’ I said. Rubin chuckled again.

‘That’s true.’

At the service window, Rubin ordered a couple of half-price ‘senior-citizen’ coffees and asked the teenager who served us ‘How are you today?’

The young man smiled. ‘I’m a little tired,’ he said.

‘Come on now,’ said Rubin. ‘What are you going to do when you get to my age?’

Moments later, we turned on to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Rubin said to me: ‘That’s what I tell the kids when I talk to them. The message is always the same. I don’t care what kind of background you come from – if someone like me can make it, anybody can make it.’ After a pause, he added, ‘You know, if somehow I couldn’t speak, if I couldn’t tell the world what happened, I’d go out of my mind. I’ve spoken to more than 100,000 people in 25 years of doing this.’ We chatted more about his classroom talks and about his disappointment at the limited interest in the Holocaust among America’s Jewish community. ‘I’m disappointed in the world,’ Rubin said. ‘But I’m also disappointed in America’s Jews. In all the years I’ve been speaking, I’ve never had a rabbi come listen to me once, and it’s increasing all the time, because every year there are fewer of us available, so to speak. I think it’s important to learn what to do when the next Holocaust comes. I only had six years of formal schooling, but I have a lot of common sense after what I’ve been through. For me, the whole business is political. Evil flourishes when good people do nothing.’

We cruised along the busy highway, and we also spoke about Hershl, about his life and about the tragedy of his suicide. Rubin was silent as I spoke, and asked almost no questions, except occasionally to clarify the details of a few minor specifics. Hershl’s story appeared to disturb him. His lips pursed and his head shook at times when I spoke. As we approached the outskirts of Washington DC, Rubin said, ‘Tell me what it is that you want. Why have you come to see me?’

‘Apart from accompanying me to the museum?’

‘Yes, apart from that.’ I hesitated for a moment, but then blurted it out.

‘I want to know why you, as a fellow Holocaust survivor, think Hershl Szperling killed himself.’ Rubin took in a deep breath.

‘In the end – and I’m sorry to say it – he was a coward,’ he replied, not without sympathy. ‘You asked me what I think, so I’m telling you.’ His response disturbed me, and I could see he knew it. I profoundly disagreed with him.

‘You know, I knew him quite well when I was a teenager. He was the father of my friend. I’ve also studied his life now for more than a year, and I’ve discovered things about him that seem to me absolutely extraordinary and often brave. Never once did it strike me that anything he did was an act of cowardice.’

‘Well, I think it was cowardly, and it was selfish. Just look at the pain and the suffering he left behind for his two sons to carry.’

‘I think – in fact, I know – that they were suffering long before Hershl killed himself. I suspect their problems stem more from Hershl’s inability to cope with life after the Holocaust and its lasting trauma, than from his death.’ I now saw that Rubin was uncomfortable with his own conclusion.

The museum loomed up before us, a massive ornate stone block – a mix of limestone and brick, mimicking Jerusalem stone – with a large brick courtyard, just off Capitol Mall, in the centre of Washington. A sculpture stood in the museum’s plaza, entitled, ‘Loss and Regeneration’. It was 10.00am and there were already long lines forming, but we were able to circumvent the crowd with Rubin’s privileged ‘survivor’ status. Once inside, my backpack was sent through an x-ray machine. My laptop was removed from the bag by a large, female guard and the keyboard was dusted for traces of explosive. Afterward, we went straight to the museum’s archive department on the fifth floor. I had arranged to meet Severin Hochberg, a historian whom I was informed knew something about the testimonies written immediately after the war. Rubin joined me, but he did not come in for the interview. Instead, he made sure I got to where I needed to go, and then took my daughter downstairs for a tour of ‘Daniel’s Story’, a special children’s exhibition. I shook hands with Hochberg, a bespectacled, grey-haired, scholarly man. He led me into his office, which was piled high with papers and books.

‘Please, sit down,’ Hochberg said.

I took my notebook and a pen from my pocket. I saw that he had printed out some of my emails and had placed them in front of him on his desk. ‘So,’ I said. ‘What can you tell me?’ Hochberg picked up a thick wad of papers and handed them to me.

‘This may help,’ he said. ‘I did a little research for you.’

They were academic documents, the first of which had been published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1997. It was entitled, ‘Our Eyes Have Seen Eternity: Memory and Self-Identity Among the She-erith Hapletah’. I knew that She-erith Hapletah translated from Hebrew as ‘saved remnant’, and it was the name the Jews of the D.P. camps gave to themselves. Hershl was a ‘saved remnant’, as was his pale green book.

A line from the document jumped out at me. I underlined it in red ink. ‘Survivors are obsessed with the need to keep memory before our eyes, to be a bridge to the memory of future generations. Do not let the world forget.’ This was also part of Hershl’s burden. I saw now that the article also quoted renowned survivor-writer Elie Wiesel: ‘What survivors wanted was to transmit a message to the world, a message of which they were the sole bearers. Having gained an insight into Man that will forever remain unequalled …’

‘What do you know about the Central Historic Commission?’ I asked Hochberg. ‘The name of this organisation appears at the front of the journal.’

‘Well, there’s a lot of information in those articles. The Central Historical Commission was created by the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the United States Zone of Occupied Germany. It was one of the first organisations allowed in the D.P. camps and was a coordinated effort to collect material from survivors. The idea was to leave a historical record, so it all didn’t just disappear into history, and also evidence for future war crimes trials. There were thousands of testimonies taken, some written by the survivors themselves, some dictated to people from the commission. Not all of them were published.’

‘I don’t think any of this is particularly well-known. I suppose among scholars it is,’ I said. Hochberg smiled.

‘There is a huge amount of information that not many people know about.’

‘Do you think that behind it all, there was also the Jewish idea of leaving a body of text behind, a kind of cultural reverence for the written word? You know, like the exhortation of Simon Dubnov, the Jewish Historian from Riga, ‘
schreibt und farsch
reibt
!’ – write and record?’

Hochberg smiled again. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find in those articles there were survivors who believed that allowing even one piece of information about the death camps – its murders and its victims – go unrecorded was tantamount to giving Hitler a victory. There was a lot of writing going on in those camps. There were eleven Jewish newspapers in the deportation camps in the American zone in Germany in the first years after the war. That is where a lot of the survivor testimonies were first published.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I also wanted to ask you about some of the discrepancies in Hershl Sperling’s testimony. Some of them are strange, like the timing of the Treblinka revolt. Hershl says it began at 4.00am. In fact, it began at 4.00pm. He’s exactly twelve hours out.’

Hochberg shrugged. ‘After seventeen years of reading survivor accounts, I can tell you that time errors are common. Time is often confused by survivors, as is day and night. First of all, you have to remember that time was not the important thing to them.’

‘Presumably, he knew that it was afternoon, not morning,’ I said.

‘You know, it’s also possible that what he wrote down or dictated was printed incorrectly. I’ve come across several instances of this. As I’ve said, many of the testimonies are full of little discrepancies, which can be put down to all kinds of things. I don’t think any of them detracts from the overall truth.’

‘I believe he wrote it himself, simply because he told one of his sons that he had “written something”. But I have another question.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I wanted to ask about the names Israel Kaplan and Joseph Kas? Do they mean anything to you? Their names also appear at the front of the journal as editors.’

‘There’s some information on Kaplan in one of the articles I gave you.’ Hochberg looked at his watch. I could see he was anxious to end our meeting, so I stood up and shook his hand. Once at the door of his office, he called out, ‘Good luck with the book.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and made my way down to the main floor of the museum.

I found a bench and sat and read through the articles. As I read, I remembered a poster I had seen years ago in the library of the Holocaust research centre at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It showed a camp inmate holding aloft in his arms a scroll, and above him were the words: ‘Help Write the History of the Last Destruction.’ The poster was made in 1946, and was one of several that were put up throughout the D.P. camps. It was designed to attract attention, and it did. I suddenly connected this poster with the journal containing Hershl’s testimony, entitled: ‘From the Last Extermination’. The Yiddish words,
Fun Letzen Hurban
, translates precisely into ‘from the latest destruction,’ according to standard Yiddish dictionaries. Contained within the title, there was also the sense that something, an entire culture and human existence, had been lost and could never be recovered. Yet it also seemed to imply that more was to come. I tried to imagine Hershl seeing this poster and responding to it, determined to write and record.

I sat on the bench, amid a throng of museum visitors and read further into the papers. I learned that during its three years of existence, the Central Historical Commission collected more than 2,500 written testimonies and almost 10,000 questionnaires in the American Zone of Germany. Shmuel Krakówski, the director of archives at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Documentation Centre, noted:

I also read that Israel Kaplan, a teacher from the devastated central Lithuanian community of Kovno, had been appointed to head the Central Historical Commission, along with accountant Moshe Figenboim. Through their leadership and a pool of employees, all unpaid, 2,500 testimonies were recorded and 8,000 questionnaires were filled out.