Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (33 page)

Yaja died on 7 October 1978. Hershl took the call at 2.00am on Saturday morning. I went to visit Sam the following day and he gave me the news at the front door. I remember the moment very clearly. ‘My mother died last night,’ he said matter-of factly. I left them to mourn. I remember sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car driving to her funeral. I was eighteen, and I was very upset with them. I remember lashing out, saying that they should not go to the funeral of a woman they had made no effort to befriend in her lifetime and that it was hypocrisy. My words upset them and I remember the way they looked at each other. Of course, I was wrong. Sam was in our house as much as I was in his. My mother had treated him like another son. I later apologized.

The funeral is a blur. I remember walking with Sam beside the coffin. His face was a mess of tears. It is the only funeral I have ever attended in Scotland at which it did not rain, although I remember a cold wind ripped through us. He shovelled earth on the coffin in the grave, and recited the Kaddish. I also scattered earth. I remember looking at Hershl. His eyes were closed and his mouth was unnaturally open, as though he were dead himself. I remembered I was ashamed to be staring and I turned away with tears in my eyes.

The following day, Sam checked himself into Leverndale Psychiatric Hospital in Glasgow, then changed his mind and escaped over the wall the following day in his pyjamas. That night, he came to our house for dinner.

* * *

I found an article on the internet from the
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
from 2004. It was about suicidal tendencies among ageing Holocaust survivors. The study found that amongst depressed older adults, survivors of the Holocaust were 87 per cent more likely to contemplate suicide than anyone else in that age group. Moreover, the article noted that the loss of a spouse often reactivated Holocaust terror. The reactivation of the terror in Treblinka was amongst the worst possible. I remembered that Treblinka survivor Richard Glazer had killed himself after the death of his wife in 1998 and I noted that the wives of the four Treblinka survivors I had spoken with in Israel were still living.

The years that followed Yaja’s death marked a slow and tortuous decline for Hershl. After the closure of Catch 22, he never worked again. He was lonely and there was no-one left to bring him back and to whisper soft Yiddish in his ear.

Letters and phone calls came often from Samuel Rajzman in the months just after Yaja’s death, perhaps more than usual. Hershl read them with relish and replied quickly and with equal fervour. Then he would return to bed, where he spent much of his day. He consumed disturbing cocktails of Scotch and Valium, and smoked cigarettes incessantly. He rarely went outside, except to the local shop to replenish his whisky and cigarette supply.

Sam had by now moved to a kibbutz in Israel. Hershl and Alan remained alone in the house at 63 Castlehill Drive, each in their own precarious psychological state. Alan cared for Hershl and they alternately bickered and ignored one another.

Then one day the letters from Rajzman stopped. Their absence left a gaping hole in what had been, through the years, through all Hershl’s suffering, one of the few constants in his life. Hershl called Sam in Israel to tell him that he feared something had happened to his surrogate father. A few weeks later, an article in the now-defunct
Jewish Echo
reported his death. I found a listing through the JewishGen website, in the death records of Quebec, which noted the burial of one Sam Rajzman on 16 September 1979 at Baron de Hirch – De la Savane Cemetary, Montreal, Line 10, Grave 332. A separate listing noted the burial of a Rosa Rajzman at the same cemetery in November 1992, at Line 10, Grave 331, beside her husband.

A string of house moves followed, all of them just a few streets from each other. It was the only way Hershl knew how to keep going. Alan told me, ‘Whether it was moving house, moving street, or moving country, he always thought he could start again and everything would be better. But they were all just distractions. It meant he was doing something. But of course you can’t run away from yourself, no matter where you go.’

In 1980, Hershl suffered a heart attack. All those years of gut-wrenching stress, anxiety and inner turmoil – not to mention his heavy smoking and alcohol addiction – had taken their toll on his body. Nonetheless, he recovered from it. Then, a few years later, came his first suicide attempt.

‘I think it was in 1983 or 1984. He had gone to Israel for a holiday,’ Alan told me.

‘I guess Sam was still in Israel then.’ I said. ‘Is that why he went back to Israel?’

‘It was just a holiday. Sam had met a girl on a kibbutz and had moved to Denmark. Anyway, about 48 hours after my father left Glasgow, I got a call from the Israeli police, who said there had been an incident and that he may have tried to kill himself. After another 48 hours, he was back at home and he refused to talk about what had happened.’

Other disappearances and suicide attempts – whether real or half-hearted – followed. For the most part, Hershl remained in bed in a haze of alcohol, Valium and cigarette smoke.

Alan said, ‘I tried to cook for him, but it seemed he hardly ever ate. He seemed to go for years without eating. He just drank all day and smoked. I imagine he was trying to kill himself like that. I remember one time walking into the bathroom while he was in the bath and he was so skeletal, like he must have been in the camps, or at least that’s what I thought. I knew he was dying, one way or another. Nothing could erase the past or bring my mother back to him. That was what he needed, impossible as it was. Whenever he went out, I used to worry that he might kill someone else. I used to wrestle with my conscience about calling the police, because he was driving drunk all the time. If he had killed someone like that I don’t know how I would have continued to live with myself. But miraculously it never happened.’

It occurred to me now that it must have seemed to Hershl that he could not die. Treblinka had not killed him, nor had Auschwitz, Dachau or any of the other camps. He had survived death marches, starvation, even a heart attack. Now he was surviving all this whisky, and the madness that plagued him. The drunk and careless driving and all the crazy risk-taking had not worked either. Over the course of the next few years he took at least five overdoses and on each occasion his stomach was pumped and he survived. On two occasions, after being reported missing by Alan, he was discovered unconscious by police in a hotel in Ayr with whisky and Valium at his side.

I telephoned Sam and asked about his impressions of his father at that time.

‘Maybe he was so scared of the past, maybe the things that happened in day-to-day life, all the risks he took, meant nothing to him. Alan once said “if the devil suddenly came out of the carpet, my father wouldn’t bat an eyelid.” Maybe he was convinced that he could survive everything, although I think sometimes he was annoyed that he couldn’t die.’

In early 1987, Hershl’s condition picked up a little after a phone call from the American Embassy in London. They had wanted him to identify John Demianiuk, a retired autoworker from Cleveland, Ohio, who had been deported to Israel and was about to be placed on trial in Jerusalem under the allegation that he was really Ivan the Terrible, one of the most notorious, sadistic and malevolent practitioners of genocide at Treblinka.

Alan told me: ‘He was in absolutely no doubt that he would recognise him. He said he would be able recognise him no matter how old he was or even if he had undergone plastic surgery.’ Shortly afterwards, two men from the US State Department came to Scotland to interview him.

‘Were you there when the men arrived?’ I asked.

‘Yes I was,’ Alan said.

‘And what did your father do?’

‘Well, he got out of bed, which was a big thing for him. They spread out a lot of photographs for him to look at. My father studied them all closely. After a while, he said, “You haven’t shown me a picture of him yet.” The men appeared disappointed, but they were not as disappointed as my father. He would have liked nothing better than for Ivan the Terrible to have been brought to justice, but none of those pictures were him.’

It turned out that Hershl was right. Demianiuk was not Ivan the Terrible after all. In 1993, four years after Hershl’s death, the Israeli Supreme Court concluded from evidence that had recently become available from Russian archives that another man, Ivan Marchenko, was in fact Ivan the Terrible. However, in 2002, a US judge ruled that documents from World War II proved that while Demianiuk had not been in Treblinka, he was indeed a Nazi guard, who had trained at the Operation Reinhard training camp at Trawniki and that he had been a willing participant in leading Jews to the gas chambers at Sobibor. The judge also concluded that he had served as a guard at Majdanek in Poland and Flossenburg in Germany. In early 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected a challenge from Demianiuk, then 87, to a final deportation order by the nation’s chief immigration judge. The order was finally given to send Demjanjuk to Germany or Poland if his native Ukraine would not take him. At the time of writing, the matter is still unresolved.

As Demjanjuk’s trial proceeded, even as it brought Treblinka back into the public light, Hershl’s condition deteriorated further. There was another incident when he went back to Israel for a holiday in the late 1980s and gave himself hypothermia from sleeping on the balcony of a hotel. Back in Glasgow, he took another overdose of sleeping pills.

Alan said: ‘I went round to his house to see him. By this time he had more or less kicked me out, so I was living in my house around the corner. He said he was better off without me. He accused me of being like a camp guard, so I left. But I was checking up on him all the time – even though when I went there he didn’t want to see me, but when I didn’t come he later accused me of not caring. Anyway, I went to see him that day, and I found him unconscious. I couldn’t wake him, so I called an ambulance and they took him to the Victoria Hospital, where they pumped his stomach again.’

‘This is awful,’ I said. ‘I can hardly bear to listen to this. It must have been terrible for you.’

‘He was extremely angry because he wanted to die,’ Alan said. ‘Actually, angry doesn’t come close to describing it. While he was getting his stomach pumped he was screaming at me. He was abusive and furious that I had found him and that he had survived again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You know,’ Alan said, ‘when he did finally die, I didn’t believe it until I had actually seen his body.’

On Friday morning, 23 September 1989, some time around 10.00am, Alan Sperling, the eldest son of a man who had survived two Nazi death camps and four concentration camps, was observing his father with suspicion. It was an unusually clear and beautiful morning in Glasgow, and sunlight streamed in through the windows of Hershl’s latest home on Laigh Road, in Newton Mearns. In spite of having his own home around the corner, Alan had moved back in with his father. Hershl was already out of bed and dressed, which was unusual in itself for this time of day, and he informed Alan he was going out to buy a pack of cigarettes.

‘I thought that he was planning something, so I said I would go with him,’ Alan said. ‘He accused me again of being like a camp guard and a kapo, which I found particularly insulting – but I went anyway, because I was worried about him.’ Father and son got into the car together. Instead of turning left at the end of Laigh Road to go to the nearest store, Hershl turned right and pulled into the service station on the Old Mearns Road. Alan got out and filled up his father’s car with petrol for him, and then he got back into the passenger seat.

‘He had obviously worked it all out in advance,’ Alan said. ‘As soon as I got back in the car, he told me that he had forgotten his wallet. So I got back out of the car and went inside to pay for the petrol.’

‘Then what happened?’ I asked him.

‘Well, by the time I’d come back out, he had driven off. Even in the terrible condition he was in, that cunning was something he never lost. It was something ingrained in him from his time in Treblinka. I ran back to the house, normally about a ten-minute walk, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. I’m not sure he’d worked out what he would do next, but certainly his immediate plan was to separate himself from me.’

The terrible last few months that preceded that day in 1989 was a period of torment for Hershl and sorrow for his sons. Before their eyes, their father was transforming from suffering survivor into a
muselmänner
, the term Hershl had used himself when referring to those emaciated souls in the camps who were in the final stage between starvation and death. Hershl might have once been a muselman himself before liberation, when he had been on the brink of death. Now, here he was again, his life hanging by a thread. I asked Sam what he remembered of his father in that condition. The last time Sam saw his father was around two months before his death. He had travelled up from London, where he was living, and had been shocked to discover how much his father had deteriorated in the months since his last visit.

‘I can tell you about my last image of him,’ Sam told me. ‘He was sitting in a chair, a distance from the television, but he wasn’t really watching it. There was no movement in his body. His head didn’t move. His eyes didn’t even move. It’s difficult to explain. They were completely empty.’

‘Like a
muselmänner
,’ I said.

‘Exactly. There was something that he was absorbed in, but it wasn’t here. He had gone back to the camps. I could see that clearly. It was very disturbing. I remember getting very angry and shouting at him. I remember saying that he should never have had children, that he had had no right, and after a while he just said, ‘You’re right.’ I was getting angry to try to get a reaction out of him, but even those two words were an effort. Eventually I just left; I thought he might snap out of it, because we were used to the cycles of depression he went through.’

But there was no recovery this time. Over the next few weeks, he sat, drank whisky, popped pills, gazed into emptiness and slept. Sometimes, he lifted his head in flashing moments of lucidity and told Alan: ‘This is worse than Treblinka.’ I asked Alan what he remembered about the final disappearance.

‘You know, the whole business lasted for three or four days, but now it has merged into one for me.’ I could hear the emotion crack his voice.

‘If you want me to call back another time I can. I know this is difficult for you.’

‘I think I called the police immediately and I explained the circumstances to them. I can’t stress to you enough the inevitability of this. He had tried to go off somewhere and kill himself before, but more recently he had simply stayed in bed and taken overdoses of pills and I had always been there to call the ambulance.’

The police arrived at the house ‘fairly rapidly’, Alan recalled. They were told about Hershl’s condition, about how he had suffered in Treblinka and Auschwitz, and his previous suicide attempts. Alan also gave them the name and telephone number of Hershl’s doctor, so they could verify his psychological state. Then the police left. In the afternoon, when still no word had come, Alan telephoned Sam in London.

‘I was going to come up to Glasgow, but we decided that I’d better stay put, in case my father had decided to drive to London,’ said Sam. Later that day, the police called Alan to report that Hershl had not yet been found and they asked if he was agreeable to a missing person alert and a photograph being shown on the local television news. Alan agreed. A series of small articles also appeared in the local
Glasgow Evening
Times
, complete with Hershl’s physical description, an inaccurate age and a dubious paragraph about frogmen searching the waterways and coastline at Ayr. And so began the long hours and days of waiting and worrying.

Sam recalled, ‘The longer we waited and because the police hadn’t found him yet, the more we became afraid that maybe he wasn’t dead, but had somehow damaged himself.’ On the second day, Hershl’s car was discovered in the parking lot of the Whitecraigs Golf Club, 500 yards from Whitecraigs train station. That day, the police also received a call from someone who had recognised Hershl on the station platform two days earlier, possibly from the photograph on the missing person alert on the television news. Then something strange occurred. The following morning, several police arrived at Alan’s house and asked for permission to search his premises.

Alan said, ‘They searched the house and went up to the loft, but of course my father wasn’t there. Then they asked if they could remove the carpets and lift the floorboards. It was obvious now that I was under suspicion. But I’d had enough of this. I told them if they wanted to lift the floor, they would need a warrant. So they left and didn’t come back again. But I know they also talked to the neighbours, because some of them spoke to me later and told me the police had made it clear to them that I was under suspicion.’

‘That does seem a little odd,’ I said, ‘given your father’s history.’

‘I was extremely irritated by their attitude. They were utterly unsympathetic and suspicious. Considering what my father had been through and his mental condition, their attitude was ludicrous. I had even given them the name and address of his doctor, so they could verify his psychological state. They appeared incompetent. They were just wasting time, especially now that I know he didn’t kill himself right away. Until you told me, I hadn’t known he’d been in Glasgow for four days. The fact that they didn’t find the car for two days, even though it was parked just yards away from the train station, says it all to me. In spite of all this, I already knew what the end would be.’

* * *

I began to wonder why Hershl had not killed himself right away. Did he still feel that he was immortal? Now, at 62 years old, it was as if he had lived a thousand years and more, and so much of it in unfathomable loneliness. I was trying now to imagine how empty my world would be if it had been revealed to me at fifteen how truly terrible and murderous the human race was.

In the end, he may simply have concluded that hope was useless. It was a virus that had been transmitted to his sons. The fragile optimism Hershl felt after liberation in Dachau turned to bitter disillusionment when it became clear that the world had not changed and it had not learned. The old order had remained in place. There was still anti-Semitism, although it was cloaked in anti-Israel sentiment. There was still the hatred that had been behind every kind of cruelty imaginable. Maybe Hershl’s brooding thoughts and his memories simply drove him insane. Only those who had the ability to forget and pretend were allowed to live. Numerous Holocaust studies suggest this. Because Hershl remembered, he was doomed.

There was one final task that needed to be accomplished. I had the strongest sense that he had wanted to return to Treblinka and to bear witness one last time. Yet only the
muselmänner
, the living dead, could truly bear witness, because they had been closer to death and had still lived. And so, he made his way to the Caledonian Rail Bridge and climbed inside, where he could be near to people who were closest to those in the camps – the dispossessed, the lonely and the desperate. We do not know if he conversed with any of them, but he could see them, hear them and be close to them.

He wandered the city streets and slept for four nights in the belly of the bridge with the other vagrants. The thought of him there, and wandering the city, in a drunken and drugged haze for four and a half days still comes back to me at unexpected hours, if only because it continued to disturb his sons. I wondered now if it meant that he agonised over the final decision? Or did it mean that his intention was not to kill himself, but simply to ‘go back’?

Alan asked me, ‘Did you know that my father was a strong swimmer?’

I had not known. Although strong swimmers are less strong when fully clothed in cold water, and even less so when under the influences of whisky and Diazepam, the bridge from which he tumbled spanned a distance of no more than 200 feet over calm waters. This suggested to me he had not died in the water by accident.

At 3.30pm on Tuesday 26 September, Hershl fell from the iron girder he was lying on. If he was conscious his natural instinct would have been to swim, to raise his head and gasp for breath. Perhaps what followed was an act of courage – Hershl kept his head down in the water. Perhaps the exhaustion he felt, the effect of the pills and the alcohol made it easier for him to make peace with death. I wonder if he felt a sense of pleasure as he abandoned the struggle for life. He no longer had to hold on.

Although George Parsonage, the lifeboat officer of the Glasgow Humane Society, was alerted by the city’s police about 4.00pm and he later concluded that Hershl’s death had occurred a half-an-hour earlier, Alan was not notified until later that evening. It was already dark when the phone call came from the police, marking the end of four-and-a-half terrible days of worry. ‘It seemed as though it was late at night when the police called me, but it is difficult to be exact about the time during that period,’ Alan said.

‘The exact time doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

He proceeded in staccato sentences. I knew it was a strategy to fight back the sadness that now seemed to overwhelm him. I felt terrible for putting him through this interview.

‘I remember it was dark,’ Alan said. ‘A police car came to the house and took me to the morgue. It was somewhere on Pollokshaws Road. I was taken to a glass or Perspex window, where I identified the body. Only his head was showing. The rest of him was covered up. It was enough. I turned and walked away down the corridor. I was immensely sad, but to be honest I was also ambivalent. When my mother died, I was devastated, destroyed. No-one wanted to live more than my mother. But with my father, well, again, I cannot stress enough the inevitability of it. He wanted to die. I remember thinking as I walked away that it was such a huge irony that he had survived the camps and now here he was lying in a morgue in Glasgow.’ The emotion now completely overwhelmed him and Alan began to choke on the memory. He began to speak, but then stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is difficult.’ Then he added: ‘I remember that he used to tell me how he wanted to die in the camps.’

‘Did he say anything about the circumstances surrounding those feelings then?’

‘When planes flew overhead,’ Alan said. ‘I suppose it must have been in Auschwitz or Dachau. The prisoners hoped they were Allied planes, and that they would bomb the camp. It didn’t matter if they were killed too. They were prepared to die, because all they wanted was to put an end to the camps. It was worse in Treblinka. Now, when I think about what he saw in Treblinka and the things he had to do to stay alive …’ Alan’s voice broke, then suddenly he became silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said again. ‘I still find this extremely upsetting. But I believe I have to tell you these things.’

I understood how the sight of Hershl in the morgue had aroused terrible conflicting emotions in Alan. Death was what his father had wanted – but how wrong it is and how unjust is the world we lived in.

The following night, Sam said to me, ‘I think it’s probably the same for all the people who died in the Holocaust. People cared at first, for a little while, then they forgot about it. It’s the same as the way people might see a car accident on the road. At first, they’re disturbed by the carnage, but then they pass by it and it’s gone.’

* * *

There is no clear Biblical or Talmudic law against suicide. The Bible mentions only two suicides – King Saul on Mount Gilboa and David’s counsellor, Ahitophel. In Saul’s final battle, he faced certain defeat and suffered terrible despair. According to the Biblical account, what followed was an unsuccessful suicide attempt, in which the first king of Israel fell on his sword. In terrible agony, Saul asked a nearby soldier to slay him. The soldier finished the job, and thereby assisted Saul’s suicide. In Jewish thought, Saul has been a pardonable prototype for suicides under stress ever since. Nowhere does the Talmud speak of suicide as a sin, although the post-Talmudic booklet Semachot states that those who commit suicide should receive no burial rites. Nonetheless, only those who take their own life with a clear mind should be treated as a suicide, while at the same time suicide as a freely chosen act has more or less been defined out of existence by mental health considerations. And while suicide remains a heinous offence in Judaism, Jewish law insists there must be absolute certainty. The presumption of suicide is not enough.