Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (34 page)

The funeral took place the following day, according to Jewish law, and Rabbi Philip Greenberg, who conducted the ceremony, made no mention of suicide – or even the overwhelming likelihood of suicide. The sun still shone, extending the rare Indian summer in Glasgow for one more day. The grave had already been dug by the time the mourners arrived. Felicia and Sylvia were there. All the mourners gathered in the small room near the entrance to the cemetery. It was a much smaller group than had attended the funeral of his wife eleven years earlier. The closed casket was just a simple pine box, for ostentation is not permitted at the funeral of a Jew. My people believe that, even after death, the body, which once held a holy human life, retains its sanctity.

Rabbi Greenberg, who was then the rabbi of Giffnock Synagogue, tore the garments of Sam and Alan, and recited a blessing – ‘
Baruch atah Hashem Elokeinu melech
haolam, dayan ha’emet
’; ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, the true Judge.’ Later, the same blessing was recited by all mourners at the graveside. Hershl had not believed in God for many years, but he would have been familiar with, and perhaps even comforted by, the ancient practice. He had lived as a Jew, suffered as a Jew and would be buried as a Jew.

Alan said: ‘If there had been even the slightest suggestion that he was going to be buried differently because of the likelihood of suicide, I would have gone crazy. I would have seen to it that nothing like that ever happened.’

‘Do you remember much about the funeral, or was it all a bit of a blur?’ I asked.

‘No, I remember it quite well,’ Alan said. ‘Before the burial, Rabbi Greenberg gave a eulogy in the waiting room at the cemetery. It was ridiculous, because he had not known my father at all, and he seemed to have just picked up a few things about my father from the people there. At one point, he even forgot my father’s name for a period of time – I don’t know how long it was, but it was embarrassingly long. It was a very long silence, before someone reminded him.’

‘Do you remember what was said?’

‘He started to speak about the war and the camps, and about some of my father’s experiences, but only in very general terms. I remember he said that the fact that my father’s two sons were present at the funeral was evidence that, in spite of all his suffering, Hitler had not won.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I remember thinking, given the way I was feeling and the way my life had been up until now, how hollow his words were.’

The following day, I called Sam and asked him about his recollections of the funeral.

‘We’re almost finished with these questions.’

Sam sighed deeply. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I felt nothing.’

Hershl’s body, dressed in a simple white shroud and ritually cleansed in its wooden casket, was wheeled out of the room and into the cemetery. The mourners followed. At last, the body was lowered into the grave. The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was said. Earth was shovelled on to the casket. The back of the shovel was used, which, according to Jewish tradition, shows reluctance to bury a loved one. Covering the casket with earth is considered an honour, because it is something that can be done for the deceased but cannot be reciprocated. It is considered a selfless act.

Sam said: ‘I remember the feeling of emptiness, but there was also relief. My father had wanted to die.’ Hershl’s long years of suffering had come to an end. I wondered now about all the ghosts that he carried on his back for so many years. What would become of all those memories and where would those ghosts go now? Sam and Alan did not deserve them.

In spite of Rabbi Greenberg’s insistence that their presence at their father’s funeral was evidence enough that the Nazis’ plan to annihilate the world’s Jews had failed, he appeared deeply disturbed on the journey from the cemetery. He was riding in a car with Felicia and Sylvia and they were discussing Hershl’s tragedy. After a long silence, the rabbi shook his head and, according to Felicia’s recollection, he said: ‘Maybe Hitler did win after all.’

During my visit to Warsaw in February 2007, I went to visit Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, at Nozyk Synagogue on Twarda Street, on a brutally cold, white winter’s day. I had come with the dual aim of researching Nazi terror for this book and to write a newspaper article on an extraordinary Judaic revival that was occurring in Poland. Nozyk, the only synagogue in Warsaw not destroyed by the Nazis, was now the epicentre of the revival. It seemed to me a phenomenon that defied Hitler’s vision of a Jew-free Europe – especially in the country that had once been the beating heart of European Jewry and where the slaughter had been keenest.

I arrived at the synagogue as Warsaw dragged itself to work. Outside, commuters pushed into tramcars. Except for the old town, which has been meticulously re-made, brick by brick, it was hard to imagine the beautiful and vibrant city it once was.

Earlier that morning, I had taken a stroll through Praga, a district on the other side of the Vistula. This is one of the few places in Warsaw that retains the physical touch of history. I entered a Communist-era milk bar, housed in a 1920s or 1930s building, stoned-faced and pockmarked. While ordering a drink, the waitress disconcertingly referred to the old town as the ‘Ayrian side’ and I wondered what she meant by the remark – whether it was a pejorative view of the old town or a comment on the growing sense of ‘cool’ of Praga itself. A Jewish community had established itself in Praga in the eighteenth century, and was centred around Szeroka and Petersburska streets – now Jagiellonska and Klopotowska streets. Praga’s famed stone synagogue was built in 1836 and was one of only six circular masonry buildings in all of Europe. The Nazis turned it into a delousing centre. After the war, the building housed the offices of the Central Jewish Committee in Poland – the sister organisation of the group that published Hershl’s testimony in 1948. In 1961, the building was demolished amid considerable Jewish protest. A public high school now sits on the site.

With the murder of its Jews, Warsaw and the entire country ultimately lost the multinational character that had been its treasure for centuries. In 1939, there were almost 400,000 Jews in Warsaw alone, around one in three of the population. A decade ago, there didn’t seem to be any at all. But there were now more than 500 who apparently had always been there, and that number was increasing.

Almost every week, another secret Jew came out of the closet and appeared before Schudrich in a state of turmoil. Here in Warsaw, and also in other Polish cities, this had become such a recurring event it led Schudrich to conclude he was in the middle of an important historic phenomenon. Yet the circumstances that brought these people to him were always extraordinary and shocking.

The month before, two teenagers came to visit Schudrich. They were a brother and sister. A few weeks earlier, their father had been hit by a car while crossing the street. He was taken to a hospital, where he subsequently fell into a coma. A few days later, surrounded by his family, he awoke and began singing a song in Yiddish. Then he died. His astonished children began probing relatives, who eventually confirmed that, yes, they were secret Jews – their parents had concealed their heritage and faith from their own offspring.

A few months earlier, an 80-year-old man wandered in off the street and into the rabbi’s office. He then proceeded to drop his trousers and revealed that he had been circumcised. He, too, was a secret Jew. On another occasion, a 22-year-old skinhead named Pawel, an adherent of extreme right-wing Polish nationalist politics, informed Schudrich – rather embarrassedly – that he had been privy to the deathbed confession of his grandmother. The former skinhead, whose grandmother had also been a secret Jew, was now one of Nozyk Synagogue’s most observant congregation members. His parents had turned their back on Jewish life and they had never told him about his background.

Yet another was Mati Pawlak, Schudrich’s assistant and the country’s first Polish-born ordained rabbi since the 1930s. He did not learn until he was fourteen that his family was Jewish, in spite of some early clues. He was the only child in his school whose mother kept him out of Catholic religious classes.

Schudrich now swept into Nozyk, this imposing, but almost hidden one-hundred-year-old building that survived the war only because the Nazis had used it as a stable for their horses. There was an air of mayhem about him. The rabbi’s long scarf and overcoat flew behind him as an entourage of secretaries and well-wishers tried to keep pace. I joined the train and followed him up two flights of stairs into his study. His cell phone rang incessantly. He seemed to switch between English, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish without thinking. Schudrich switched off his cell phone and put it on his desk.

‘That was another one,’ he said.

‘Another secret Jew?’ I asked.

‘It really is like they’re coming out of the closet. Now sit down.’

I looked around a room, cluttered with books, documents, scraps of paper and items of clothing, and saw nowhere to sit. On the wall by the door, a photograph of Schudrich shaking hands with the Polish Pope, John Paul II, drew attention to itself. He swept a crumpled bundle of clothing onto the floor and gestured to me to sit.

‘I just flew in from New York and my arms are killing me,’ Schudrich joked, loosening his tie and removing his overcoat, before collapsing in a chair in front of me. A rabbi needs a sense of humour here, I thought. ‘Actually,’ he added, ‘my ankles are swollen. Now, what can I do for you?’

I wanted to know what was happening in this country more than half a century after the Holocaust. Why, of all places, was a revival occurring here? I also wanted to know what the future held for this fragile but ancient community of Jews. While the vast majority of the world’s Jews can trace their ancestry here, Poland is a country where anti-Semitism was – and, to some extent, still is – virulent. For many, Poland is a graveyard, even cursed ground. In 2008, there were an estimated 15,000 Jews in a total population of 40 million, a tiny fraction of one per cent. Yet they continue to loom large in the Polish psyche. I still saw anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls and, the previous year, Schudrich was punched in the chest and sprayed with pepper spray by a young man shouting ‘Poland for the Poles’ in central Warsaw. The incident made national headlines.

‘There was no question that it was an anti-Semitic incident. But what the papers didn’t report was that I punched the guy back. I’m a New Yorker,’ Schudrich said.

‘Where have all these new Jews come from?’ I asked him.

‘In the very beginning, I became fascinated by the question of what was really left in Poland after the war,’ said Schudrich, who first visited this former Eastern bloc nation in 1973 as a student, decades after his grandparents had left the country. ‘Everyone said there was nothing, just a few old Jews. I felt it didn’t make sense, there had to be something. Imagine going back to Spain in the 1540s, 50 years after the beginning of the inquisition. How many of the hidden Jews could you prevent from disappearing into history? This is the exact modern-day equivalent. When these people come to me with their family histories and their secrets, I don’t tell them they’re Jewish and they have to come to the synagogue. How could I? All I can do is give them choices. If they want to become part of the community here, they’re welcome.’

‘How about Polish anti-Semitism? I can’t help wonder how these Jews can continue to live among it, after all that has happened here?’

‘There is anti-Semitism in every country, but citizens here are not desecrating Jewish cemeteries or attacking Jews in the street, the way they have done recently in Germany, France and in Britain. Of course there is anti-Semitism in Poland. But you have to remember 50 years ago, 95 per cent of Poles were anti-Semitic. Now that figure is probably down to fifteen per cent.’

‘Can you tell me how this happened?’ I asked.

‘There are two different phenomena going on – both parallel and complementary,’ said Schudrich. ‘The first phenomenon is this. Until September 1939, Poland was the centre of the Jewish world. It was a huge and vibrant community – religiously, culturally, socially, you name it, everything. You couldn’t go twenty feet in the street without bumping into a Jew. They were part of the landscape, and like any large group of people – there were about three-and-a-half million of them – some were good and some were bad, some were religious and some assimilated, but they lived in a normal multicultural society, where the various groups all had contact with each other.

‘Then the Nazis came and killed 90 per cent of them. That means ten per cent survived, about 350,000 people. But then after the war, Communism came, and it was made clear that if you wanted to stay Jewish you had to leave the country. In the 25 years after the war, about 250,000 Jews left. That means 100,000 stayed, but they went underground and they kept their religion, their culture and their heritage a secret.

‘That was one or two generations ago. The steady stream of people we are seeing now are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, who feel more free and are gradually discovering their roots since the fall of Communism at the end of 1989.’

‘And the second phenomenon?’

‘Pope John Paul did an extraordinary thing – he declared that anti-Semitism was a sin. They even have a national Judaism day in Poland now. I can’t begin to tell you the impact that had. Almost overnight, centuries of hatred were reversed.’

‘This is an extraordinary community you are nurturing here,’ I said.

He looked squarely at me, and said seriously, ‘It’s a victory over Hitler.’

I wondered what Hershl would have thought of it all. I suspect he would not have trusted it; Alan is certain of it. I suspect he would have told me that human beings always behave decently during times of social and economic stability, that they could afford to be magnanimous in the good times, but the real test of human nature is how they behave during times of hardship. It was then that all the old hatreds and jealousies manifested themselves. Yet Schudrich’s parting comment seemed to evoke Felicia’s recollection of Rabbi Greenberg’s remarks during the funeral and then the reversal he made later in the car. ‘Maybe Hitler did win,’ Greenberg had said.

It struck me now, as I sat in front of my computer in Scotland, that Hershl’s suicide – that he should have survived one of the worst of all possible Holocaust experiences and then throw himself in the river so many years later – was proof that Greenberg had been right. Yet, from the outset of my investigation, I was driven by the ancient words of the Jerusalem Talmud: ‘Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he has saved the whole world.’ This maxim was pinned to the wall above my desk during the many months I worked, and sometimes at night it assailed my dreams. I could not face the idea of victory for the murderer.

I had desperately wanted to know if anything could have been done to save Hershl’s life. I became obsessed with the idea that, even hypothetically, if I could discover a way to save Hershl’s life, I could save others in a similar situation and ultimately save the world. At the same time, I entertained the notion that somehow, by filling in the details of their father’s life and by drawing the right meaning from it, I could also save Alan and Sam. Their survival, too, had hung in the balance in recent years and their attempts to take their own lives had been evidence enough for me that the evil of Hitler’s legacy persisted. Yet I now understood that my hopes were nothing more than the naïve ambitions of a dreamer who could not understand, because he had not been touched personally by the Holocaust. If the tyrant’s primary ambition had been the annihilation of the Jewish people, what further proof of victory did we need than the attempted suicides of a victim’s children more than half a century after Hitler’s own death? As if to compound my failure, I remembered Alan had warned me a few weeks earlier. ‘No book can ever save a single human life,’ he said.

A few weeks later, I lay awake late at night. I remembered trudging through the snow at Treblinka, the thousands of stone monuments like hunched victims. I thought of all the suffering that place had seen. How could I have been so naïve as to imagine Hershl’s story could change anything? I thought of Barry, the dog that had belonged to Kurt Franz, Treblinka’s sadistic deputy commander. I recalled the accounts from former prisoners about how Barry would mangle prisoners on the order, ‘Man, get that dog’. Franz no doubt considered the command to be appropriately dehumanising and amusing; it expressed the depth of his hatred of the Jewish
Sonderkommando
, and all Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich. To Franz, a dog was better than a Jew. I had been surprised to learn Barry had been a St Bernard, a gentle-natured breed most often associated with the rescue of human lives. In Treblinka, the animal was a monster.

I got up and drew aside the curtains. In Treblinka, Hershl had seen the potential monster in all of us, borne of hatred. I recalled a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The
Great Gatsby
: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ In the decades that have elapsed between Treblinka and the time in which I write these words, the world has changed very little. Anti-Semitism, in all its irrationality, persists. Hatred persists, too. The Holocaust did not prevent the genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur or Srebrenica. Every mass human slaughter has been achievable only by harnessing the ever-present hatred of many individuals. In Darfur and Rwanda and in the Balkans, there must be thousands of Hershl Sperlings and thousands of Alans and Sams. We now live in a world where bloodthirsty dictators are brought to justice in courts of human rights, where war criminals are hunted and where responsible nations monitor the movements of tyrants and deploy UN peacekeepers. Our world is one of increasing global scrutiny. But, in the great tally of human suffering and the towering heaps of dead, none of it has made one blind bit of difference. In that moment, as the storm raged over the Campsie Hills, it felt as though the whole world had killed Hershl Sperling.