Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (31 page)

It was getting late. I pulled out of Lothian Drive and began driving back through South Side. The traffic began to get heavier as I moved toward the city centre. I was stuck at a traffic light in Shawlands when it came to me that Shenkin may have been trying to erase Hershl’s memory. I had read that temporary short-term memory loss was common among patients who had received ECT treatment, and sometimes also long-term memory loss. But I understood the treatment was doomed to fail. Although memory tortured Hershl, it was also the weapon he had used to confront the truth. Removing his memory was equivalent to emasculating him, and the whole episode was just another barbaric ordeal he had to endure.

I found myself at the River Clyde. I parked my car under the bridge and got out. I wanted to take another look. I hadn’t been back in more than a year. I pushed open a creaking metal gate that led down to the southern bank, directly beneath the bridge. The city centre across the river glistened in the afternoon sun. Some impulse drew me toward a weather-blackened metal ladder that was cemented into the concrete bridge supports. The place was empty except for beer cans, broken bottles that had held cheap wine and discarded syringes.

I put my foot on the first metal rung and began to climb. My heart was pounding. I climbed higher and higher until I reached a small platform, from which I pulled myself into the bridge. Instinctively, I called out warily, ‘Hello.’ My voice echoed into the dimness of the bridge’s metal innards.

There was no reply. Two wooden ramps stretched along the length of the bridge, one on each side, placed there to provide access for maintenance. Wavering streaks of light shot through the spaces made by the criss-cross of iron supports, strangely illuminating pockets of the interior. I could see an old blanket rolled up against one of the supports. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I picked out other remains of human habitation – more cans, newspapers and empty wine bottles. I made my way along the eastern ramp, toward the middle of the bridge, on the side that Hershl had tumbled from. My footsteps echoed on the board as I walked. I heard the sound of a low humming that grew quickly louder, the sound of an approaching train. The roar was deafening as it passed overhead, as though I were directly beneath the jet of an ascending aircraft. The air was ripped from me. The entire bridge shook and swayed and rattled, and I held fast to one of the supports to steady myself until the train crossed the bridge and its sound became a distant moan. I felt suddenly terrified to be here, in the empty shell of this bridge and in the place where Hershl had spent his last moments.

I made my way slowly to the centre of the bridge, and stopped at an open space between two sets of supports. I reasoned that if Hershl had been sleeping along this horizontal bar, he might easily have rolled over and fallen. It was a risky place to sleep, but Hershl liked taking risks. There was also something about the confinement and the austerity, and the company he had kept here that may have taken him back to the Treblinka barracks. I crouched down and edged myself on to the bar. I touched the metal above my head, as though I were seeking an answer from it, as though this ancient iron might remember what had occurred eighteen years earlier. I looked down at the water below and I suddenly began to feel very dizzy. An image of Hershl falling entered my head and I imagined myself floating in the water below. I felt a sudden urge to see my children. I realised I had been too long away from my family.

It was after 7.00pm by the time I arrived home. I could smell the chicken my wife was cooking. My ten-year-old son saw me from the hallway and rushed in to greet me.

‘Daddy’s home,’ he called. As he was hugging me, my daughter ran in and did the same.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘I was just out for a little while,’ I said. ‘Stuff to do with my book.’ Then my wife came in. I leaned over to kiss her and we all embraced. My son called out with glee, ‘Family hug.’

‘We’ve been trying to call you,’ my wife said.

‘Cell phone’s out of batteries. Sorry.’

‘We were starting to get worried.’

‘I went to the bridge,’ I said.

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m glad to be home.’

I poured myself a long shot of whisky. I went out to sit on the back step and watch the red sunset over the hills. It was beautiful. Then my daughter came out and hugged me again.

‘I forgot to tell you, your friend Sam called.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘He made me write down this name on a piece of paper.’ She handed me the note, and the name on it was Flora McInnes. ‘He said he didn’t know the number, but her son owns a cafe called –’ her voice rose up at the end of the sentence to make a question – ‘Gandolfi? And that you can get the number from him.’

‘Café Gandolfi. Yes, I know it. It’s a place in Glasgow. What else did he say?’

‘That she used to live on the same street and that she was friends with his mother and she might know some things.’

‘Which street?’

‘It’s on the other side of the paper.’

I turned over the piece of paper, and saw that it said ‘Lothian Drive’ in big letters. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, and kissed her.

The following day, as instructed, I obtained Flora McInnes’ telephone number from her son Seumus at the cafe. Seumus remembered the Sperling family well. He told me he had attended Sam’s bar mitzvah. He called him ‘Sammy’ and he called Yaja ‘Yetta’. I also learned that his mother, a world-renowned traditional Gaelic singer, was better known by her ‘Barra name’ Flora McNeil, and that she was now 85 but ‘still going strong’. It occurred to me that Hershl, too, should have been still going strong. I phoned Mrs McInnes.

‘She called on me a lot,’ Mrs McInnes said, her soft Western Isles accent lilting gently upward. ‘But it was a long time ago.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and it’s difficult to remember the things she said. But I was wondering if you remember anything she might have said about her husband.’

‘Well, I remember that she used to come to the house at all times of the day, sometimes in the morning and sometimes again in the afternoon. Sometimes she was upset and a bit disturbed. But we spoke about her upbringing and I spoke about mine. They were very, very Orthodox, you know, and we developed quite a taste for Jewish cooking in our house, because she would always come around with challah or gifilte fish. My son still makes them in his restaurant. We used to swap recipes. She used to say that she understood me and that I understood her.’

‘But nothing about what was going on in their house?’

‘It’s so difficult to remember. It is so many years ago. I do remember she used to say that the Jewish people in Glasgow didn’t want to know what they had gone through. And there were plenty of Jewish people in that area, even on their street. But she used to come to me, and if I was doing the ironing she would tell me to sit and she’d take over the ironing herself. She was a lovely woman. I was very fond of her. She was the strong one in that family, I’ll tell you, but she never got a chance, what with everything that happened to her and the way her life was then. But she was very proud of her boys.’

‘I know she was,’ I said.

‘I remember one time I was going to a dance and I was all dressed up. We were just about to go out when the doorbell rang and it was Yetta. I can still see her now standing in the hallway. She said, “Here, you can borrow this ring.” I had seen her wearing it and I’d only mentioned in passing that I liked it. It had a big blue stone and, you know, everyone admired it that night.’ It was Florrie’s ring.

‘Did you ever meet Hershl – or Henry, I suppose you would have called him?’

‘Yes, Henry. No, I didn’t see very much of him. He was always very quiet. I think he was a client of my husband, who was a lawyer. It was conveyance work and maybe some other business when Henry had a shop.’ I told her a little about Treblinka, and what he had been through. Her voice seemed to fade. ‘How little one knows about what’s in people’s hearts,’ she said.

* * *

Over the next few days, further conversations with Sam and Alan filled in more of their father’s story. A few weeks after the ECT ended, Hershl began to pick up – although he always did; his suffering came in cycles. He resumed his work at Grafton’s Fashion Centre, although the situation was still difficult for him, Alan recalled. Hershl and Yaja also now seemed closer and more dependent on one another than ever before. They resumed their after-dinner walks, with their arms entwined and their whispered Yiddish. Sometimes, the suffering returned, and it seemed these walks along with regular calls to his surrogate father, Samuel Rajzman in Canada, were all that held him together.

During the early summer of 1967, Hershl decided to take drastic action – he packed up his family and moved them to Montreal. He had flown to Canada two or three times over the past few months to see Rajzman and make preparations for a new life. The trips occurred before Rajzman gave his interview to journalist Gitta Sereny in the early 1970s for
Into That Darkness
, her book about Treblinka commandant Paul Franz Stangl. According to the descriptions of Sam and Alan, Rajzman’s situation appears to have been similar when Hershl arrived.

Rajzman had emigrated to Canada shortly after the war and had become prosperous and well-established in a quiet residential district of Montreal, from where he conducted a flourishing lumber business. He lived with his second wife and they were a quiet and gentle couple, who had found each other after the war. Both had lost everyone they had loved during the Nazi terror in Poland.

Hershl quickly found a job, with Rajzman’s help, as a manager at Steinberg’s Miracle Mart, a discount department store chain carrying clothing, toys, appliances and other goods. Rajzman may also have helped with the immigration process for the Sperlings, because he counted Pierre Trudeau, the flamboyant Canadian justice minister who the following year would be elected as the country’s prime minister, among his close friends. Trudeau at times also turned to Rajzman for advice, and did so by telephone on several occasions in the Sperlings’ presence. Privately, Rajzman boasted he had given Trudeau his first job after he graduated as a lawyer.

In the summer of 1967, the Sperlings arrived by ship, the
Empress of Canada
. For Hershl and Yaja, much of the time aboard was spent listening to the BBC World Service for news of the Six-Day War in Israel. They will have heard the first reports on the morning of 5 June 1967, the immediate aftermath of the moment when a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it, in response to the threats by its Arab neighbours to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

‘It was like a floating hotel,’ Sam told me one night. ‘Very luxurious. I remember going past Newfoundland and how huge and exciting Quebec port was, at least to a seven-year-old.’

It was a happy and hopeful time for the Sperlings, and Hershl loved a new beginning. He was addicted to hope. He and Yaja strolled the deck of the
Empress of Canada
arm-in-arm during the voyage. Hershl was also pleased that he would soon be nearer to Rajzman. While young Sam explored the decks of the ship, only teenage Alan was sullen. He had already enrolled in a pre-law degree at McGill University in Montreal and was miserable at the prospect. During the course of my research, I came to understand this was not an isolated phenomenon. Like so many other survivor parents, Hershl and Yaja’s expectations of Alan, born in the first years after liberation, were extraordinarily high. In response, Alan spent much of his life rejecting the special role he had been designated – to fill the emptiness left behind by those who had perished. I wondered if Hershl had looked at his first-born son and in some way dreaded what he represented – the pull toward life and the future, which for him meant abandoning the past and all those who had died.

When they arrived in Montreal, they stayed at first with a family called Osczega, whom either Hershl or Yaja had known from long ago in Poland. They had a daughter, who was around ten years old, with whom Sam recalled fighting furiously. Eventually they moved into the top floor of a duplex owned by a Greek family. Hershl bought himself a Chevrolet and drove to visit the Rajzmans once or twice a week. This was the home of the man who had kept Hershl alive in Treblinka. Being once more in his presence was a haven.

I asked Sam what he remembered of that time.

‘It was a clean house,’ he said. ‘Thinking back, I’d say it was fastidious and over-tidy, very old-fashioned. He used to give us tea in china cups. I remember there wasn’t much to do. I was seven and he seemed very old. Then, I would have said he was about 90, but I guess he was in his sixties. Even then, I knew very well he was very special to my father.’

‘Did you like him? Was he friendly toward you?’ I asked.

‘I liked him, but he was never someone who bounced me on his knee and, when I think about it, he never gave me any presents. He didn’t seem overly interested in me. The first time I met him, he took me into a room with an aquarium and fish, and he showed me squirrels out the window. I used to stay in this room while he talked with my parents. I got the impression they spoke about everything. Once you’ve been through Treblinka with someone, when you’ve been naked with someone– both physically and emotionally – I don’t believe anything is barred.’

In August 1942, during the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, Rajzman and his first wife had tried to hide their twelve-year-old daughter, as related to the writer Gitta Sereny. I read Sam a section over the telephone from Sereny’s interview. ‘My wife and I had only one thought – to hide our little girl,’ Rajzman said. ‘In the street where both my wife and I worked at a factory was a cellar. And in that cellar was a coalbunker. We took about twenty children and hid them in there and locked the door. Even though we were considered essential workers, the Gestapo came the next day and we were all driven to the assembly square.’

Rajzman managed to get away from those assembled after two days and went straight to the cellar to find his daughter. ‘The door was open and the children were gone. A neighbour said the Germans had come the day before and taken them.’ Then it occurred to him the children might still be in the square, because the transports were often kept waiting for days. He enlisted the help of a Polish friend and the two of them raced to the Umshlagplatz. Miraculously, the children were still there. ‘We managed to get my little girl and a boy whose parents were friends of ours and we took them back to our factory. They stayed hidden for several days, but in the end they took them away. Since that day, I cannot bear to look at a child.’