Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (8 page)

I decided I needed a hot shower, but instead stood freezing for a few moments beneath a rusty faucet-head that dribbled lukewarm water. The towel was the size of a dishrag and I dried myself hastily with a t-shirt before dressing quickly. I told myself this was nothing compared with what Hershl had gone through. But I was cold all the same, and I crawled into bed and pulled Hershl’s pale green book out of the protective bubble-wrap in my backpack. I ran my fingers over the Hebrew characters and the title of his testament at the top of the first page. I deciphered the word ‘Treblinka’ out of the Hebrew at the top of the page, and something recoiled deep inside me. I suddenly felt terribly alone. The combo’s bass guitar boomed upward and made the letters vibrate as I looked at them. I pulled the translation from my bag and began to re-read it.

Hershl’s testimony began here, in the city of Częstochowa. There was no doubt about the historical veracity of his story. All the major events to which he referred and the people mentioned are confirmed by contemporary accounts and historical documentation. The central character of his story – himself – is neither rogue nor hero. He is simply an intelligent and bewildered young man, devastated by what he has witnessed and has been forced to endure, and also by the murder of his family. I could hear his voice clearly.

I read that opening passage again and again, until I felt the terror in his words. I didn’t want to be alone, so I telephoned Sam in London, but there was no reply. I pulled my notes from my backpack and looked back at what I had scribbled about Częstochowa and thought of our conversation the day after I had received the translation through the mail.

Sam said, ‘I had no idea he had been in Częstochowa. Because he never spoke about it, we assumed he was taken straight from Klobuck to Treblinka.’

‘He never mentioned Częstochowa at all?’ I asked.

‘Only that he had been there before the war – with his father, I think – and something about a monastery and the lunatics who came to pray at some Catholic icon there.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m trying to remember. I think his mother also had relatives in Częstochowa.’

‘She did. I’ve found many Goldbergs in the old records of the city. There were a lot of Szperlings also.’

‘Ah-ha,’ said Sam.

‘But I’m interested to know why he thought those people at Jasna Góra were lunatics? It’s just a Catholic devotional site, where pilgrims come. There is a painting called the Black Madonna, supposedly made by Luke on a table top built by Jesus.’

‘I guess he thought a lot of them were dangerous fanatics. A lot of them used to make trouble for the Jews during the Catholic holidays.’

‘I see.’

‘Have you found out anything else?’

‘The ghetto made by the Germans was enormous in Częstochowa,’ I told him. ‘There were 45,000 people crammed into this little space, and the conditions were awful. There was a lot of starvation, and a lot of desperation and disease and death. There was resistance there, too, and a protest against the
Judenrat
. I think it’s important to know these people weren’t just victims. It’s extraordinary to think of your father in the middle of all this, and he never even mentioned it.’

‘There are a lot of things like that about my father.’

‘Then there was the terror of the round-ups. Most of the people in the Częstochowa ghetto ended their lives in Treblinka gas chambers,’ I told him. Sam groaned.

‘He never mentioned that either.’

‘He hid out in a bunker there until they found him,’ I said, aware now that he was hearing this information for the first time. ‘He even names the Nazi officer who led the round-up.’

‘I had no idea,’ he said, emotion beginning to strangle his words. ‘He never said. It’s odd, though, because when he spoke about the war and the camps, he often made out as if he were at the centre of things but we thought – well, we thought that was just the way he saw it because he was there. He said a lot of crazy things we didn’t believe.’

‘It looks like a lot of these crazy things were true,’ I said.

‘Yes, it does look that way.’

‘You know, the more I learn about him and what he went through, it seems he really was at the centre of things. He experienced almost everything there was to experience as a Jew under Nazi rule, except death – although he certainly witnessed that. But he was there at the beginning, when the Wehrmacht first crossed into Poland. He saw the Stukas dive-bombing Polish positions during the Battle of Mokra. He lived through ghettos, round-ups, the death trains, an extermination camp, Auschwitz, the death marches to other concentration camps, and even liberation. I don’t suppose there are many who did – or could – survive what he survived.’

Sam was silent for a moment. ‘The important thing, though, is how that affected him.’

‘I agree,’ I said.

I got out of bed and looked from the window on to Pilsudskiego Street, where 65 years earlier tens of thousands of Jews were marched to the railway tracks and forced into the boxcars. Those who were old or did not move fast enough to satisfy the Germans’ need for speed were murdered right there with bullets or were clubbed to death with rifle butts. Save a handful, the only Jews here today are ghosts, who are kept company, ironically, by the thousands of holy images seen everywhere of the most famous Jew of all. Jewish factories once produced these religious artifacts and souvenirs for the pilgrims of Częstochowa.

That night I dreamed I was on an old cobblestoned street. I assumed it was Poland. I was walking around dragging a very heavy package. Suddenly, Hershl was walking with me. I remember wondering what he felt about me and what I was doing. He was walking quickly, and I was having trouble keeping up with him because I was dragging this package. At last, we came to a pretty house with trees and a garden in front of it. It was the pink house I had seen in the Klobuck ghetto. At the side of the house, there were men digging a deep ditch, and as I drew closer I could see gravestones. One of them was mine. I woke suddenly, hardly able to catch my breath. I scribbled the dream in my notebook.

* * *

In June 1942, a Jewish fighting organisation, known as the ZOB (
Zydowska Organizacja
Bojowa
), was established in the Częstochowa ghetto with the idea of mounting armed resistance against their Nazi oppressors. That same month, the
Judenrat
received an order to provide a precise plan of the ghetto with individual homes marked and named. Shortly afterwards, Jews were removed from a part of Kawia Street because there were pits to be dug for future victims. Homes located on Garibaldi Street were also emptied to make room for storehouses intended for plundered Jewish property.

The last stage in the preparations for genocide was played out the following month. The German authorities issued orders for a roll call, designated for 3.00pm, at which time all ghetto residents between the ages of fifteen and sixty were to assemble, including the
Judenrat
and Jewish police. Hershl was now fifteen, and so stayed behind with Frumet and watched the frenzied movement of people in the street below. They gathered and waited, surrounded by armed SS. Then they were sent home, unaware this was a dress rehearsal for liquidation. No-one believed the ghetto would be liquidated because everyone knew it was important to the war effort. The idea of extermination was unthinkable anyway – in spite of persistent rumours of mass murders in Lithuania and Latvia.

News of the killings at Chelmno, a pilot scheme extermination camp, also began to emerge. As early as January 1942, during the first weeks of its operation, two prisoners – Michael Podchlebnik and Yacov Griwanowski – escaped to the Warsaw ghetto and gave a detailed report to the Jewish underground there. News travelled frequently between Warsaw and Częstochowa. Their accounts were harrowing and desperate. Yet, still, it did not seem possible that so many men, women and children could be murdered. It was at this time that the name Treblinka began to enter the vocabulary of the ghetto. However, when in July and August 1942 a few Warsaw Jews escaped to Częstochowa and warned them about deportations to Treblinka, most of the inhabitants refused to believe it.

The Częstochowa ZOB, locally known as Fighting Group 66 because its leaders met at 66 Nadrzeczna Street, had enlisted around 300 fighters. They planned their first revolt on 22 September 1942. But the day before, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the revolt was frustrated when a sudden
Aktion
barred access to the bunkers where their weapons had been hidden. During the night, SS and Ukrainian auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto and installed bright lamps on the streets. As soon as the lights were switched on, gunshots were fired. Panic broke out and the ghetto echoed with screams of ‘
Raus
’ and ‘
Arbeitspass
’. Doors were smashed and Jews were dragged into the street. Hershl’s testimony tells us that the sounds of wild shooting and people screaming filled the air. What lay ahead was twelve days of savage round-ups. Hershl tells us:

SS Captain Paul Degenhardt, a Polish
Volksdeutche
, was the Gestapo official in charge of the operation. Degenhardt, who proclaimed himself the ‘father of the Jews’, was known to his fellow Nazis as the perfect organiser. It was said he had an ape-like face that provoked terror. In the early hours of the morning, Degenhardt summoned Leon Kopinski, the
Judenrat
president, and informed him an
Aktion
would soon begin and many ghetto inhabitants would be ‘transported east’ for agricultural work. In this first round-up, 7,000 Jews were to be deported.

As instructed by Degenhardt, Kopinski ordered the ghetto’s 250 unarmed Jewish police units to muster at the metal factory at Krotka Street, where they were kept under guard, in spite of the fact that many had been the recipients of favoured treatment from the Germans as informants and aids. They were led by Shalom Gutman, the sadistic Jewish police commandant, who was despised for his collaboration and cruelty. Soon afterwards, at exactly 4.00am, several units of SS soldiers, Gestapo units and Ukrainian auxiliaries burst into the ghetto’s illegal orphanage and the old people’s home. All the residents were murdered.

Hershl looked from the window of his apartment into the brightly lit street, where he and his family were crammed in with a number of other families. He watched the SS and Ukrainians sweep through the ghetto. The order rang out that all residents from Kawia, Koszarowa, Krotka, Garibaldi, Warszawski and Wilsona streets were to assemble by 6.00am at the metal factory.

The SS screamed in the street. Every Jew must possess a work permit or face the consequences. The Nazis and their auxiliaries rampaged through homes, smashing faces here and pulling triggers there. The panicked people were thus driven toward the metal factory. A few Jews, some of them from Fighting Group 66, attempted to challenge the round-up and were executed. By 6.00am the operation was proceeding as planned. A mass of people – women, men, children, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick, fathers, grandparents and pregnant mothers – gathered at the square on Krotka Street. They waited with uncertainty. Babies cried in their mothers’ arms. The chanting of Hebrew prayers could be heard. Many held their
Arbeitspass
in outstretched hands, hopefully. They had all survived the misery and subjugation of the ghetto, and now they must endure this. The SS brandished automatic weapons, cudgels and whips to keep order.

The selection began. One by one, over a period of several hours, the Jews were driven across the heavily guarded square. Some of the police offered words of comfort to their fellow Jews about the work in the east, perpetuating a lie they believed themselves. Hershl witnessed the events that followed.

We cannot know the precise location of Hershl’s bunker. It almost certainly lay within the ghetto boundaries, because any attempt to escape over to the ‘Aryan’ side, with the city swarming as it was with SS and informants, would have been madness. In all likelihood they sought refuge in some concealed place within the darkness of one of the ghetto cellars. We do not know whether it was a cellar that had already been searched and marked or one that had been overlooked.

Outside, 7,000 people were force-marched towards the ghetto’s exit to the sound of curses and whips. This mass of families, in many cases three and four generations clinging together, were already exhausted by the segregation, maltreatment, starvation and humiliation. Now they faced an unequal confrontation with more than 300 armed, well-fed men in uniform, many smirking and laughing, their weapons at the ready.