Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (10 page)

Hershl could not have known that the starvation, humiliation and brutality in the Częstochowa ghetto were merely a prelude to the fate that awaited that city’s Jewish inhabitants. The train journey that followed marked yet another low in human degradation. The diabolical conditions in which the Jews of Europe were transported to their deaths served no practical function, but were instead the expression of senseless and abject cruelty, which most of the time was applied with astonishing zeal.

I travelled those same tracks in the relative comfort of a PKP Intercity train, part of the modern national railway of Poland, between Częstochowa and Warsaw on an icy day in February 2007. I tried to imagine Hershl riding these tracks, a fifteen-year-old boy and his family amid the crush of bodies. With 80–100 people in each boxcar, there was space to sit if everyone was packed tightly together, almost on top of one another. However, many instead pushed desperately toward the small air aperture. Their numbers included the old, the sick, the pregnant, nursing women and before long those who had gone mad from the journey. The chlorine sprinkled on the floor burned their eyes. If there were claustrophobics among them – as there must have been, because this was in many ways a random cross-section of humanity – their suffering is unimaginable.

Somewhere in the Polish hinterland, I pulled Hershl’s pale green book from my backpack. The train was full and noisy. We stopped momentarily at a station. The platform was deserted, the town small, its name on the station sign to me unpronounceable. Five of the six people in my compartment began to doze. The sixth, a grandmotherly woman, watched me as I ritualistically ran my fingers across the dark blue Hebrew lettering of that terrifying title on the cover, ‘
Fun Letzten Hurban
’ – From the Last Extermination. Then I began to read the translation.

They had been told they were being transported east for work. Few believed the story any more. It was still early morning and a beautiful autumn day was breaking. The train shuddered and began its slow, tortuous pull northward out of Częstochowa and across the bleak Polish landscape to Treblinka.

My train pushed into a wintry rural landscape. I saw brown rutted earth, speckled with snow. A solitary magpie wheeled and landed. Another unknown village off the rail line went by in the distance. It was impossible to imagine the intensity of the crush and confinement in that hot, airless container. Twenty minutes into the journey, I observed a fenced compound at the side of the track, and the shocking site of rusted old freight cars, some of them smashed and dented. Others were covered with graffiti. Who knows how old they were or for what purposes they had been used? In Hershl’s time, those few who could see from the little grated window of the boxcar glimpsed golden fields of sun-dried grass. As the autumn sun warmed that beautiful day in 1942, the interior of the wagon became an oven. The smell was putrid because people had defecated in all four corners. Hershl wrote: ‘The natural functions have to be performed in the wagon. It makes the situation more terrible.’

The train rolled on past flat fields. The passengers fought to reach the little window, jostling for air. Outside, a rusty track ran parallel. It was impossible to tell where they were. Suddenly, the train stopped. Then the sound of shouting; machine-guns and pistol shots was heard. The pandemonium in the wagon became the deathly silence of fear.

From my train I could see a collapsing wooden barn with holes in its rotten walls and roof. An old tree stood in the middle of a field, its limbs twisted and dead as though it had been struck by lightning; it may have been living when Hershl’s train passed. By the end of the first day, all the water had been drunk. Hysteria broke out. Babies cried incessantly, their mouths wide open and desperately gasping for air. Other accounts recount how people gasped and groaned, their heads lolling and their bodies shuddering. Hershl wrote:

Terrible as it was, this was not an extreme case. The transports from eastern Poland, where the Jews were considered to be even lesser merchandise than those from the west, sometimes contained as many as 220 persons per car. Often, no food or water was provided. The people were packed together so densely there was no place to sit or squat. Throughout the passage, Jews constantly tried to break out through the walls and ceiling of the train cars. Many succeeded, but were shot by soldiers guarding the train or were hunted down by police units. On some occasions, the guards used up all their ammunition shooting the fleeing Jews before the train reached its destination, and they had to resort to stones and bayonets to keep order. Sheep to the slaughter?

My ride to Warsaw took around three hours on worn-out, Communist-era rolling stock, and it was not an express train. Hershl’s journey on these same tracks lasted around 24 hours, and it was still 80 kilometres short of Treblinka.

* * *

The requests for these so-called ‘special trains’, or
Sonderzuge
– the rolling stock of the sequestered Polish railway system – came from SS and Gestapo leaders in charge of the deportations in their districts. However, fulfilling those requests was the responsibility of
Generaldirektion der Ostbahn
, or Directorate of the Eastern Railroad, ‘
Gedob
’ for short. Its headquarters were in Kraków, and it had special responsibility for the scheduling of deportation trains for Operation Reinhard. However, for most of the deportations from the east, the number of trains requested or provided was not enough for the size of the transport. At the same time, many SS and Gestapo officers in charge of Jewish transports often overloaded the freight trains on purpose. There is ample evidence suggesting that many were so enthusiastic about their task of transporting Jews to the death camps in the minimum time and with maximum efficiency they disregarded the capacity guidelines, which were inhumane in the first place. At the same time, in a further perverse deception, some transports from western Europe and Bulgaria arrived at the camps in luxury carriages, for which the victims had to pay for their own tickets. The instructions were the same for all – bring warm clothes for work in the east, bring your money, furs and all the wealth and security you and your family have accumulated. The number of victims was chalked on the side of each carriage, be they passenger trains or boxcars.

According to Gedob’s calculations, Hershl’s journey to Treblinka should have lasted at most six hours. However, the train hit a snag on the outskirts of Warsaw. The planners of Operation Reinhard had designated that Jews deported for extermination from the Warsaw district were to be transported to both Treblinka and Sobibor; but between the end of July and early October, the Warsaw-Lublin-Sobibor line was under repair, so all the trains were directed to Treblinka. There was a bottleneck that clogged the railway system, already overloaded by the demands of the war on the eastern front. Moreover, Treblinka’s refusal to process transports at night further extended the tortuous journey.

Hershl’s train crawled through the outskirts of Warsaw some time the following evening, avoiding the central area of the Polish capital so as not to draw attention to itaself and its human cargo. Once it crossed the Vistula River and reached the northeastern side of the city, it joined with the main Warsaw to Bialystok line. Later that night, the train pulled on to a siding a few miles shy of the village of Malkinia, seven kilometres from Treblinka, where it remained until morning.

The train was heavily guarded during the night by the SS as well as Ukrainian and Latvian watchman. The terror inside the boxes is impossible to imagine. The watchmen’s purpose was not just to prevent escape, but also to guard against the robbery of Jewish valuables. At times, drunken Latvian guards proposed escape to their victims in exchange for money and valuables, and then shot them as they ran. On at least one occasion, a rogue SS unit hijacked a lightly guarded train en route from the town of Siedlce to Treblinka and killed the guards. They then entered each of the 60 wagons, machine-gunned the occupants and robbed the corpses. They also plundered the two wagons that contained valuables confiscated from the Jews before the train set off. The masters of Operation Reinhard were furious at the raid. This was an unlawful act of brigandry perpetrated by members of the SS. They had murdered Jews destined for their gas chambers and the booty rightfully belonged to the Reich.

Later the following day, Hershl’s train passed slowly into deep woods. Once out of the shadows of the trees, it moved toward a clearing and came upon the village of Malkinia, a station on the main Warsaw-Bialystok railway line. It stopped again for a long time, perhaps several hours. It was the point at which the human cargo branched off the main line toward death. It was also the point at which the tracks from the major Jewish population centres of Warsaw, Bialystok, Siedlce and Lomza intersected. From the Nazi perspective, it was the perfect location for a secret extermination camp for Jews.

Somewhere between Malkinia and Treblinka comes a terrible warning. In the fields on either side of the track, Polish farm labourers worked among the hay. The train moved so slowly, those Jews crushed up against the grated windows of the wagons were able to call to them.

The Polish farm workers slowly disappeared into the distance. No-one wanted to believe it. How could they send so many people to their deaths?

* * *

I had now crossed the rail bridge that spanned the Vistula River and looked over the city of Warsaw. I saw commuters push into tramcars with the sense of resignation that has survived the half-century of Communism. The dull architectural uniformity, the result of the city’s almost complete rebuilding from the ruins after 1945, seemed complete. I recalled what Sam had said to me: ‘What’s important is how all this affected him.’ He was right, of course. Yet in my research I discovered no study that attempted to understand the lasting trauma of those confined in these overcrowded wagons. Perhaps that is because the overwhelming majority of those who did not die en route were almost immediately put to death in the camps. And among the few survivors of these dreadful journeys, this pre-camp trauma was subsumed because worse followed. For Hershl, this journey, like Auschwitz, was minor compared with the hell of Treblinka. Hershl’s train crawled across the Bug River, over a single-track wooden rail bridge where the river looped and bent, and on toward the village of Treblinka. Those at the grated window could see the landscape suddenly transformed from lush forests and fertile pasture into sandy and barren earth.

Treblinka village station was a station like so many others. But now the train pulled on to another sideline. Inside Hershl’s wagon, after perhaps 36 dreadful hours, a new fear took over in the wake of the warnings from the peasants in the field. The foul air was filled with the cries of thousands of people. In the sweltering cars most of them called for water, but others called for a doctor. They had somehow retained their belief in humanity and charity and that perhaps even the Nazis would take pity on them and a doctor would come. Hershl writes: ‘We don’t have much time to think about all this. A special locomotive takes away 20 of the 60 wagons which made up our train. After five minutes, it comes back and takes another 20 wagons.’ A woman beside him could no longer bear the anxiety and the ferocious heat and thirst. Hershl recalls her suffering. ‘They’re murdered already,’ this unknown woman cried. ‘They’re dead, dead, dead. My God, why has this happened to us?’

Franciszek Zabecki, the Treblinka station master who was also a member of the Polish Underground, told Gitta Sereny for her book,
Into That Darkness
:

Hershl adds: