Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (32 page)

A long silence followed. Eventually, Sam said: ‘That makes me sad to think that my presence there might have upset him, because I was there and I was seven, while I was playing in his living room. The very last thing I’d want to do is to upset him or cause him any more suffering.’ He stopped again, and I could hear him puff deeply on a cigarette. ‘I think that when they were in Treblinka, they found each other. For my father, Rajzman would become his father, and for Rajzman, my father became the child he had to save.’

Sometimes, during these visits, Hershl had in his possession the green book and he and Rajzman would discuss its contents for hours. The exact nature of these discussions cannot be known of course, but Rajzman did hold copies of other volumes in the series, ‘From The Last Extermination’. I still had come no closer to solving the mystery of why Hershl had held in his leather briefcase a volume in the same series of journals, but one that did not contain his account. I wondered now if it were possible that at some point during these discussions with Rajzman the pair had exchanged books.

‘It’s possible,’ said Sam. ‘As I’ve said, I think essentially my father wanted to keep something that was connected with Treblinka, but he could not handle having the real thing. It was probably too painful for him. It was enough for him to have something that was closely associated with the things he had written about.’

‘There might be another possibility,’ I said. ‘What if he never had the journal that contained his account, volume number six, in the first place? It was printed in August 1947, and he left Germany in September that year. Maybe he just wasn’t around to get a copy when they were distributed. The book your father had was volume four and it was published in May 1947.’

‘But you see, I think if he wanted to have volume number six, he would have found a way to get it,’ Sam said. ‘I think he just couldn’t bear to have it.’

Life went on for the Sperlings in Montreal. Hershl’s job at Steinberg’s Miracle Mart worked out well. Sam went to school and Alan began pre-law at McGill. Hershl seemed happier also, and so did Yaja, because Rajzman had taken the pressure off her to be the rock on which Hershl was anchored. The trauma now manifested itself in unusual ways.

‘When I look back at our time in Canada, some things stand out,’ Sam said. ‘I remember being in a store with my father and I wanted one of these jackets they called wind-cheaters. I wanted it in blue, but he wouldn’t let me. I could have it in any other colour except blue. He became very angry, because I wouldn’t accept that. Even at seven I knew that blue must have reminded him of something in the camps, but I don’t know what. I also knew this wasn’t normal, and that there was something very, very wrong with the way he was reacting.’

He asked me if I knew of anything about the colour blue that might have reminded Hershl of the camps, but I could not think of anything, except perhaps prisoners’ striped uniforms in Dachau, which the Americans dyed blue to change their appearance. Sam sighed deeply, as though he were utterly drained. ‘I remember deciding then and there, when I was seven, that I didn’t want to have children, because I thought all fathers must surely be crazy like him. There were other things, too. I remember a lot of toys disappearing, and clothes, and some things that other people had bought for me. I learned later that he would go around the house and if he discovered that something was made in Germany, he would just throw it out, without saying anything.’

There was strange behaviour. On one occasion, the family were driving back to Montreal after spending a few days with Yaja’s relatives in New York during Passover, in the spring of 1968. During their stay in Brooklyn, the Sperlings had bought various electrical goods. Alan had bought a cassette player, a technological wonder in those days, of which he was particularly proud. However, Hershl decided he did not want to pay the tax on the goods on re-entering Canada. Driving north on the New York State Thruway, close to the Canadian border, Hershl attempted to avoid the main border crossing on the Northway and veer west, probably at Plattsburg, into the back roads of the Adirondacks. He was determined to cross the border undetected. It was April, and there was probably still snow on the ground. He drove north on the old Military Turnpike, and then veered off the beaten track again on to the remote, twisting small roads that cut through the region.

Sam recalled: ‘Some of the roads he took were really back roads. I remember Alan getting very nervous. He kept saying that this was going to end in disaster, but my father just waved away all his objections. Eventually, he found a road that crossed in to Canada. But, of course, as soon as we entered Canada, we were pursued by the border authorities and when they stopped us they wanted to know what the hell we were doing. My father started speaking Yiddish at them. Then he went into this method-acting performance of the innocent tourist. It was very convincing, but they took us all back to their headquarters, and they kept us there for something like ten hours.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘I remember my mother was wearing this very colourful sweater and for some reason the customs people were very interested in it, and I remember the customs officials made her keep taking it off and putting it back on, which my father found hysterical. He was the only one there who seemed to be enjoying himself. I’m sure he liked the risk and the danger of it all. He took the attitude that this was a safe kind of risk, because these guards weren’t Nazis, and although they had guns, they weren’t going to shoot us for trying to get some radios and a cassette player over the border. Alan, on the other hand, was going crazy, and ranted on about the customs having authority to smash everything with a hammer. Alan didn’t want his prized cassette player destroyed with a hammer. But my father stuck to his story, continuing this guiltless face, and eventually they let us go. I’m sure he got a really big adrenaline buzz from the whole episode.’

Meanwhile, back in Montreal, Alan began to struggle at McGill University – not academically, for Alan never scored less than 90 per cent in any exam he sat, but he was bored. He was also unhappy over the fact he had to pass a pre-law degree, in keeping with the North American university system. He wanted to go straight to the law degree, as in the British university system. This was a teenager with an IQ over 160. The previous year, he had achieved the highest mark in the country on a high school history exam. One afternoon, during a family visit to the Rajzmans, Alan suddenly announced that he was desperately unhappy and that he no longer wanted to become a lawyer. An argument erupted. Hershl was particularly upset. Then the patriarchal Rajzman spoke out amid the melee.

Alan told me a few nights later that Rajzman had said, ‘So the world will have one less lawyer. It’s not the end of everything.’ Amid the silence that prevailed, Hershl threw his hands in the air and accepted.

‘He had extraordinary influence over my father,’ Alan said. ‘He was an enormous calming power and had an ability to take him back to reality.’ Arrangements were made for Alan to return to Scotland alone, and the family would follow a few months later, albeit against their wishes. They returned in the summer of 1968. In Hershl’s hand was the briefcase, possibly now containing the switched book. It is possible that Hershl’s original book is now held in the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. I made several enquiries by telephone and email, and a few weeks later received a reply from Eddie Paul, the head of Bibliographic & Information Services at the library.

‘Since we seldom take note of the provenance of book donations – we do with our archival collection – it would be difficult to confirm how we obtained any of the items in our collection. However, since the estate of Samuel Rajzman did leave the JPL an endowment fund to fund books on the Holocaust, it is entirely possible that the journal was obtained through his collection.’

Sam and I must have been about fifteen. I remember it was late morning on a Saturday. The weather was typically dull and chilly. I remember the sky over Newton Mearns was low and steely grey. Sam’s house at 63 Castlehill Drive was just around the corner from mine, and I went to meet him. Alan was upstairs, the reclusive genius in his bedroom busying himself with cricket statistics, crossword puzzles and impossibly difficult Mensa enigmas, or at least that was what I assumed. Sam got his jacket and we set out through the quiet suburban streets, past the affluent homes with their new cars in the driveways and their neatly mown lawns. We were not exactly fearful of anti-Semitic youths, the way we might have been had we been walking through the streets of Klobuck 40 years earlier, but we were still vigilant. Anti-Semitism in Newton Mearns was widespread, but it was a kind of subdued anti-Semitism that existed overtly in the school playground and behind closed doors. We reached the bus stop on the Old Mearns Road without incident and made our way into the city centre. Hershl had driven into Glasgow much earlier that day, and we were going to meet him. This was a big day for Hershl. That morning he had opened his own men’s clothing retailer. Its name, Catch 22, after the popular Joseph Heller novel, had been Alan’s idea.

We arrived in Glasgow around noon, but we first stopped off to see Yaja. She gave us money for lunch and we bought something on the run. Then we went east along busy Argyle Street and on to Stockwell Street, and finally into Catch 22. I remember thinking when I first saw Hershl how incredibly happy and proud he looked. He was dressed in a striking new brown suit, which matched the colour of his thinning hair perfectly. He also had on brown shoes and he wore an impeccable white shirt and patterned tie. But most striking of all, I remember, was the genuine happiness on his face as he strode through the aisles of clothing, past Glasgow’s Saturday shoppers and racks of new shirts and suits. His pale green eyes sparkled with joy as he shook hands with customers and asked if they had found everything they were looking for. He was at that moment neither desperate nor sad, but everything a man should be in the world outside his family. When Hershl caught sight of us entering his new shop, already heaving with customers, his smile grew wide, and I remember clearly the way his arms swept out before him, his hands open, telling us to survey his new kingdom. ‘What do you think?’ he called to us through the crowd. He strode over, so proud it was a veritable swagger, and he put his hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled. Then he patted me hard on the back and asked: ‘Boychik, you like it?’ I smiled and said, ‘Yes,’ unsure of what else I should say in that moment of glory.

Perhaps it was that same day, I cannot recall, but I have a clear memory of Hershl collaring two thieves near the shop’s door. I remember both of them were at least a head taller than Hershl’s five-foot-seven-inches, yet he gripped them both by the ear and threw them out. It was impressive to see that this little man had no fear in a city where knife crime and violence was common. When I think back now, it is difficult to think of him as being afraid. He seemed to fear nothing. For a man who had looked Mengele in the eyes and survived, what were two Glasgow delinquents?

In the end, a little more than a year later, Catch 22 failed because of repeated break-ins. Several nights each week, the family were woken up in the early hours of the morning by police calls demanding that Hershl come into the shop and board up the premises. Once, thieves had even tried to enter the shop through the roof. Perhaps he could have improved security and persevered, because the business was highly profitable, but after the initial thrill of opening, his interest waned and he was bored again.

I remember, when I came to visit Sam in the evening, even during the time when Catch 22 was still operating, Hershl was often restless in his house. I recall the way he used to pace. Sometimes, bored with television and domesticity, he would suddenly jump up from the couch, impatiently grab for a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table, light up and leave. Then, still smoking his cigarette, he would re-enter the living room, and sit down for just a moment before jumping up again.

Sam said, ‘Everything was approached as though it were a terrible crisis, from the smallest, insignificant, trivial thing, such as deciding what food to buy, to real crises, like sickness and death.’ Sometimes, he would begin annoying Alan. He might begin an argument, or start making noises, and when Alan got up to leave, Hershl would chase after him up the stairway and continue his efforts through the closed door of Alan’s bedroom. I remember once he chased Alan up the stairs while mooing like a cow, and he continued to moo for some twenty minutes after Alan had banged shut his door. I did not understand then that, for Hershl, everything really was a crisis. For the purposes of survival, Hershl had marshalled all his powers, both physical and psychological, in the camps, and that state of mind had become part of him forever. It seemed as though some chemical change had occurred in Treblinka that could never be reversed.

‘Living in a house with two Holocaust survivors was not exactly like growing up in a normal British household.’ Sam told me. ‘From an early age, it was made very clear to me that the outside world was a very dangerous place, and that there were people out there who wanted to kill us, and that there were these other people called Nazis, who had killed millions of Jews like us and who had tried to kill my parents.’

I remembered Hershl and Yaja having dinner with my parents in our home. Hershl had liked my father because he generally liked Americans. American soldiers had liberated him, and his experience in the American Zone of Germany after the war was generally positive. During the course of the evening, while Yaja and my mother conversed happily, Hershl said almost nothing. My father’s well-meaning efforts to make conversation were met with nods, short, polite replies and the occasional strained smile. I remember Hershl sitting on our couch after dinner, with an impenetrable look on his face. Was he remembering Treblinka then? I understood his utter inability to relate to those who had not suffered as he had done and had not witnessed what he had. His capacity for empathy was smashed, and with that came an inability to make friendships. But then something unusual happened. Out of the silence, when no-one was paying attention, he looked up at me and winked. It seemed as extraordinary now as it did then, an act of complicity; for just a second he had let me into his world. I wondered, illogical as it was, if Hershl might have been giving me a sign. Was he giving me permission to sift through layer upon layer of his tormented psyche and one day write his story? Out of the reverie, I stared through the canopy of branches into the great reddening of the sky, and I realised then that the story of his life – a story that needed to be told – was a gift not from him at all, but from my friend, Sam, and his brother, Alan, both of whom were the last keepers of Hershl’s memory and his suffering.

After Catch 22 finally closed, Hershl pottered around the house, smoking and sleeping. On Shabbas, he and Yaja said prayers and observed the holiday faithfully. Hershl knew every nuance of the service by heart. For them, their Jewishness was everything. It was the link to all he had been before the Nazis came and all that had been lost.

* * *

Disaster struck during spring 1977. Yaja had previously been diagnosed with cervical cancer, but it had spread to her bones. The cancer had first appeared three years earlier, but she had responded well to treatment and it was beginning to look as though she had beaten the disease. Yaja was also kept willingly in the dark by her family; she may have suspected her illness – indeed, she must have known – but she asked no questions and sought no confirmation. There was a deep-rooted mistrust of doctors in the Sperling house; in the camps becoming ill and being sent to a doctor was often the equivalent of a death sentence. I asked Alan what he remembered about this period.

‘Like so many things in our house, we knew nothing about them until the shit hit the fan, if you’ll pardon my language,’ Alan said. ‘All sorts of things happened in secret. You have to remember that in our house, doctors didn’t exist, illness didn’t exist and death didn’t exist. Anyway, my mother went into the hospital for an operation and things seemed to go quite well. I had no idea there was anything wrong until the day before she went into the hospital.’

Over the next year-and-a-half, Yaja’s condition seemed to improve. Then, some time during the middle of 1977, she began to experience excruciating pain in her back. I was in and out of the Sperling home often during that time, and I remember Yaja very clearly smiling as affectionately as ever at her family – and at me, also, when I was there. I recall no instance of her succumbing to pain or losing patience. One night during the winter of 1977, Yaja was in the hospital undergoing tests, and a call came. The doctor gave no news on the telephone, but asked that Hershl come in the following day.

Alan said, ‘My father didn’t have to say anything to us. A phone call from that particular doctor was enough. He simply asked that my father come in the next day and see him. What he would tell him was that my mother’s condition was terminal.’

‘Do you remember how your father reacted?’ I asked.

‘I remember his reaction after that phone call very clearly. He hung up the phone and proceeded to consume a large quantity of whisky. I remember being shocked by that, because I had never seen him drink like that before. Then he retired to bed without saying a word. It was a pivotal point. From the moment of that phone call, my father utterly lost the will to live. It was downhill from there.’

Yaja came home after treatment. Occasionally I would visit Sam and she would be there, moving between the kitchen and living room, smiling, sometimes affectionately touching Sam’s cheek as she spoke to him in a soft Yiddish. He would answer her in English.

Meanwhile, the talk between Sam and I in those days was black as death. I remember feeling helpless. Sometimes, at the front door, Sam would tell me that this was not a good time – never because his mother was not feeling up to having his friend in the house, but because Hershl ‘wasn’t feeling well’.

In the middle of it all Hershl struck upon the bizarre and untimely idea of opening another business – a rival suede and leather shop in Glasgow’s prestigious Argyle Arcade, near Skincraft, the shop where Yaja had worked before her illness.

‘It wasn’t so much a business idea as a distraction and a fantasy. The whole thing was mad, and what’s even crazier is that he managed to persuade a partner that it was a good idea. It went as far as them signing a lease on the property in the Argyll Arcade, which as you can imagine cost a lot of money. That was where Glasgow’s most exclusive jewellery shops were located, and still are, I believe.’

‘What did you and Sam think about it, in the middle of your mother’s illness?’

‘It was just something else we didn’t know about. I knew nothing about it, until one day an envelope arrived from the partner’s lawyer. I remember when my father saw it, he just went to bed. Soon, we started getting frantic phone calls from the partner and his lawyer, and I realised how serious the situation was.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I took the package and went to see my father’s lawyer immediately. We spoke generally at first, then he said he understood fully how my father and I had arrived in this state. It was a bit of a relief. You see, the lawyer was also the son of a Holocaust survivor. He said that although he had problems he was lucky because only one of his parents had been in the camps. Anyway, he looked over the lease, and the situation appeared to be hopeless. I was extremely worried, because the following week the landlord would begin taking a large amount of rent money out of my father’s bank account and there was no way he was in a state to operate a business. We would run out of money in a very short time. I had visions of us all being thrown into the street as my mother lay dying.’

‘So how did you get out of the situation?’

‘The lawyer gave me a copy of the lease, and he asked me to look over it to see if I could spot anything, and he said he would do the same. The missives had not yet been signed, so the contract was not formalised. When I took it home and read over it, it became clear that the landlord had missed one of the deadlines. I forget precisely what it was about – it was a long time ago – but in the end we were able to nullify the contract. I don’t want to make myself out to be a hero, but I will say that was the most valuable thing I have ever done in my life.’ I asked him how his father had responded to this sudden reversal of events.

‘He was so depressed, it didn’t matter. He simply acknowledged it and went back to bed when I told him. I still have questions about the way the so-called partner acted. He must have known what kind of condition my father was in. Anyway, thankfully, it ended there.’

In the weeks before Yaja’s death, the despair of the Sperling family was unconquerable. Sam disappeared to a friend’s house to sleep, and although he sometimes ate with us, I saw little of the Sperlings for three months. In September, Yaja went into hospital and died.

‘My mother did not have private medical insurance, but one of the consultant doctors there was so impressed by her that he made sure she got a private room,’ Alan said. ‘Unlike my father, there was no-one who wanted to live more than my mother.’

I remembered that Felicia had told me that Hershl had prevented people from visiting his wife in hospital – although that edict may have only applied to certain people. During my conversation with Flora McInnes, the Sperling’s former neighbour, she told me that Hershl had called her.

‘I remember it was Henry who called. I hadn’t heard from them much since they moved away from Lothian Drive, but he said she was very ill in the hospital with cancer and that she wanted to see me before she died. So I went up to the hospital. I could see she was being well looked after, but it was very sad. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I do remember that she said she was very happy to have known me and that I was to give her love to all my family. She was a remarkable woman, you know,’ she added, ‘really a remarkable woman and she never got a chance in life.’