Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (3 page)

Sam, desperate to understand, once asked his father if he had killed anyone – the worst crime his young mind could imagine – but Hershl said he had not. He later told Sam that after the war he had been driven by a terrible desire to take revenge on the Germans for what they had done. He wanted to murder indiscriminately, but he chose to take no action. He had preferred to remain as he was, even in his shattered state, than to become like those who had tormented him and had attempted to annihilate an entire people. In the end, Hershl Sperling was a moral man.

When Yaja became ill and died of cancer, Hershl’s manic mood swings grew more pronounced and his disappearances grew more frequent and more prolonged. Studies of Holocaust survivors in Israel suggest that the loss of a spouse can reactivate Holocaust terror and increase the likelihood of suicide. Hershl and his wife had clung to each other in desperation and mutual dependence, and then she was gone.

A month or so before Hershl’s suicide, he sat motionless in his living room chair. He had almost entirely given up food. His eyes were still and stared blankly forward. His head did not move. His body was limp. He reacted to nothing. Sam recalled that he had thrown accusations at him that day. ‘I said things like “See what you’re doing to us. You should never have had children. You should never have brought us into this world”.’ In a brief flash of recognition, he looked at his son and said, ‘You’re right.’ Then he was gone. Those were the last words he spoke to Sam.

* * *

In April 2005, as the world’s media commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I was on the telephone to Sam, who was living in London. He had recently given up high-paid employment as a software consultant, and at 45 years old had taken up physics as part of a science degree. Like his father, he had long since given up on believing in God, but retained a fascination with creation and how the world worked at its most fundamental level. He described himself as an ‘agnostic’, because it was ‘impossible to be sure one way or the other’. Hershl had been dead for almost eighteen years. He would have been 78 years old. Sam and I were talking about the Auschwitz commemoration, when he said: ‘Well, you remember what my father always said. “Auschwitz was nothing”.’

‘I remember,’ I said. There was a long pause. I could tell he was biting his bottom lip, as was his habit when something disturbed him. ‘Did you know he wrote a book about Treblinka?’

‘No,’ I said, intrigued. ‘Where is it? Have you seen it?’

Sam had seen the book only once. It was published just after the war, while Hershl was still in Germany, in a displaced persons camp in the American Zone, he said. He recalled that it had ‘horrible pictures in it’. Hershl had become angry when he discovered his son had taken down the leather briefcase and had glimpsed the Hebrew script and the pictures in his book. ‘He was trying to protect you,’ I said.

‘I know. He kept it in that leather briefcase, along with a strange South African seal,’ Sam said. ‘No one was ever allowed to look at it.’ Later, Hershl told Sam he should read it when he was older. But he never did.

‘Do you think he meant for you to look at it?’ I asked.

Sam took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. My brother sent it to a Jewish library somewhere after he cleared out my father’s house. Neither of us at that time really could bear to know what was in it. I’m not sure I could bear it now.’

‘Do you know which library?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Could you translate it if we found it?’

‘My parents spoke to me in Yiddish and I answered in English. I can’t speak it very well, never mind translate something.’

‘Should I try to find it and get it translated?’ I asked. There was another long pause, marking a conflict between curiosity and dread that was almost palpable. I sensed menace in his father’s book, and perhaps he did too. I imagined Sam’s hands trembling and I remembered, strangely, Hershl winking at me. I understood then the terrible hold Hitler’s madness had on my friend, even though had been born fifteen years after the beast was slain. I also realised that if this was diluted, second-generation pain, Hershl’s suffering must have been a thousand times worse.

‘All right,’ Sam replied.

So began the search for the book that would reveal Hershl’s secret – the source of his nightmares, and also the source of suffering for Sam and Alan. I had no idea if it would help them, but both were eager for me to proceed. Nor did we have any idea what to expect. I also wondered how such a work could have been published in Germany after the war. Where did the publisher even find a Yiddish printing press in a country devastated by the Allied onslaught and for more than a decade stripped by Hitler of all things Jewish? Did the Nazis not smash Jewish printing presses all over Europe? And then there were the bigger questions. Why had he written it? What horrors would it tell? He was just nineteen years old when he put pen to paper to
schreibt
and
farchreibt
, the Yiddish exhortation to write and record.

Phone calls and emails followed. Within a few days, I discovered that the book had been sent by Sam’s brother to the Wiener Library in London, one of the world’s largest collections of material relating to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. A few days after my inquiry, an email arrived from librarian Howard Falksohn, who had tracked the book by locating the ‘Thank you’ note from the library to Sam’s brother, dated 26 October 1989, one month after Hershl’s death.

Falksohn wrote that the library had been grateful for the book, and that it had been catalogued in the Wiener’s miscellaneous journals series. Its title was
Journal of the
Jewish People During the Nazi Regime
. The book, in fact a journal, was Number Four in a series, and was published in March 1947, in Munich, by the Central Historical Commission of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the American Zone. I immediately telephoned Sam. ‘I found it,’ I told him.

‘
Mazel tov
,’ he said, but I sensed trepidation in his voice. We agreed that I would come to London, that we would go to visit the Wiener Library together and photograph the book. Photocopies were not allowed because of its fragile condition.

Sam chain-smoked cigarettes. He was nervous. His father’s pain had long been his pain. We walked toward the Underground near his home in north London, and he said: ‘You remember Pigpen in the Charlie Brown comics, with that dust cloud always around him wherever he went? That’s the way I felt for a long time, always dirty from the Holocaust, always tainted.’

We got off at Great Portland Street and walked five minutes to the library, hardly exchanging a word. Outside, about 11am on a Saturday morning, Sam puffed nervously on his cigarette, leaning for support on the Victorian railing that led to a grand black door of the old brick building.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I think so. Actually, I don’t know what I’ll do when I see the book. Maybe I’ll do something crazy, like eat it.’ We rang the buzzer. I stated our business into the intercom and we entered. Howard Falksohn was expecting us. He stood up to greet us from his desk, and shook our hands.

‘So, the book,’ he said, pulling it out of a brown Manila envelope. He handed it to me and I passed it to Sam.

‘My God, that’s it,’ said Sam, running a hand over the faded green cover, its large Hebrew type drawing attention to itself. In roman type at the bottom, it read, ‘Nr. 4’ and the date ‘1947’. Sam bit his bottom lip.

‘Can you read any of it, the Yiddish I mean?’ I asked.

‘Just a few words,’ Sam said. He opened the book carefully at a random page and looked into the Yiddish text. I saw his hands trembling. ‘Look, that word is ‘
krankeyt
’ – sickness or illness – but, no, I couldn’t translate this.’

He slowly flipped the book over. On the back, there was an English title: ‘From the Last Extermination’ and a sub-heading ‘Journal for the History of the Jewish People During the Nazi Regime’. I ran my fingers over the cover, touching history, but also touching something terrible, the result of almost unspeakable evil.

Israel Kaplan, the book’s editor, was listed. There were few other clues, at least to the untrained eye. On the inside back cover, a date, March 1947. A Munich print shop was named: R. Oldenbourg. We could make out the Yiddish words,
Tsentraler Historisher
Komisiye
, and below that in English, ‘Copyright by Central Historical Commission, Munchen, Mohlstrasse 12a. Edition: 8000 copies’. At the very bottom, a small line of print read, ‘Published under DP-Publications License US-E-3 OMGB. Information Control Division.’ There was information here that could be investigated.

A typed note, part of the library’s cataloguing system, stated in Yiddish:
Fun Letzten
Hurban,
the journal’s title, and the dates ‘1946–1948 (discontinued)’. It noted this was book number four and had been published in March 1947. This was one volume in a series of eight publications but the library only had one. It also noted: ‘Good condition. Important DP publication. Scarce.’

The library note heartened us. It was important that the book’s value was recognised – but it was not what we expected. A table of contents ran below the title on the back cover page. It appeared to be a list of separate articles written by different individuals on various aspects of the Nazi regime, the murder of Jews and the annihilation of their communities – ‘The Extermination of Jews in Eastern Galicia’ By Dr Philip Friedmann; ‘Polish Jewish Soldiers as War Prisoners (Memoirs)’ by Mendel Lifschitz; ‘Tchernowitz (Cernauti)’ by Dr Jakob Ungar; ‘In the Forests of White Russia (EyeWitness Report)’ a) ‘Around Woloshin’ by Mosche Mejerson, b) ‘In the Braslav area’ by Mosche Trejster, c) ‘At Radun’ by Lieb Lewin; ‘My Experiences During the War (From the Series of Children’s Reports)’ by Daniel Burstin; ‘Lullaby (Ghetto-song)’; ‘Buna (Camp song)’; ‘Nazi documents with comments; photographs of the Nazi period’. The name Buna chimed with me. It was the largest sub-camp of Auschwitz and the place where chemist and author Primo Levi had spent 11 months as a forced labourer. Levi’s suicide in 1987, two years before Hershl’s death, baffled some who knew his work. My scant research to-date had revealed that while suicides are rare amongst survivors, those who wrote of their experiences – and faced them – were more likely to kill themselves.

Two of the photographs drew immediate attention to themselves. One showed a Hassidic Jew on skis, a posed photograph to make the Jewish man in his long gabardine coat and sidelocks look foolish, confiscated by the Allies from a German after the war. No doubt this Jew had been murdered later. The second showed four men, hands on their heads, being taken away to be shot after being discovered in their concealed bunker in the town of Czortkow, in the western Ukraine, in 1943. Hershl had hidden in a bunker in Częstochowa. He had been caught up in the
Aktionen
or round-ups of late September 1942. There were 40,000–50,000 Jews crammed in the Częstochowa ghetto just before the first deportations to Treblinka from the city. It was baffling. What was Hershl’s connection to this, and why was his name not listed among the authors?

‘I don’t understand,’ said Sam, biting his bottom lip ‘Perhaps he had simply contributed to someone else’s story; but he always said he had written something about Treblinka.’ He ran his eyes again down the table of contents. ‘It’s not here. What was he doing with this book? I don’t know why it was so important.’

Falksohn confirmed this was definitely the only book that had been donated by the Sperling family. Why would he carry this book around for so long and protect it the way he did? Neither did Falksohn know much about the book, except that it was ‘clearly an authentic piece of Holocaust testimony’ that had been written during the chaos that had followed the end of the war, possibly to assist taking Nazi criminals to trial. Yet the fact that it was published in Munich was significant, because Hershl had been liberated in Dachau, half an hour’s train journey from the city. I insisted to myself that this could not be a dead end. There must be a clue in the book itself and we had to get it translated to find it. Sam remarked that it was typical of his father that he should make even the discovery of his story an ordeal. He was like that; he enjoyed making others jump through hoops.

It must have been about a week later. I was back at home, sitting at my desk and searching through the internet for a local translator of Yiddish, no easy task in Scotland. I recalled the deep gentle green of Hershl’s eyes, and the dark hair on the back of his hands. I suddenly remembered him remarking one day, completely out of the blue, that he had no idea why the Italians had joined the Axis during the war. ‘They’re short, dark and hairy, just like Jews,’ he had said. The politics were unimportant to him. Now I saw him again, reclining on a deck chair in the late afternoon sun one summer long ago on his front lawn in Newton Mearns, his dark and tanned face, his chest, stomach and arms covered with hair. He was wearing only his underwear. People in Newton Mearns did not sunbathe on their front lawn, let alone in their underwear. The neighbours doubtless considered him strange, but he didn’t care.

Out of the reverie, something occurred to me: Maybe we had the wrong volume. I put the name ‘Sperling’ into an internet search engine, together with ‘From the Last Extermination’ and up came the listing of a Jewish library in Montreal, in Canada. It listed the
Journal for the History of the Jewish People During the Nazi Regime
, volume Number Six – not the Number Four that Hershl had carried for years in his briefcase. Then below the Canadian library result, the site of an antiques bookseller in Jerusalem also listed the same book. I studied the description impatiently. The first chapter of the book, whose cover on the vendor’s website looked identical to the book at the Wiener Library, was entitled ‘Treblinka – Eye-Witness Report’ by ‘H. Sperling’. I had found it. I ordered the book immediately, confirming it was the book I wanted with the Jerusalem bookseller, a Rabbi Yaakov Shemaria – a title and name that persuaded me to part with $85.