Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (35 page)

I went into the living room and sat in the darkness for a while. It was cold and late, and I wrapped a blanket around me. It was the middle of the night, but I felt an overwhelming desire now to talk to my friend. I looked at the clock and saw that it read 2.20am, yet I found myself dialling Sam’s number. He picked up almost as soon as it began ringing.

‘Hello,’ he said, slowly.

‘It’s me,’ I answered. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘No, it’s all right. I was just listening to music and reading.’

‘I can’t get your father’s story out of my head,’ I said. Then I blurted out the absurdly massive question that now plagued me, ‘Is there no hope for humankind?’ I asked.

Sam puffed on a cigarette, ‘I think all you can do is tell people what they are,’ he said. ‘There doesn’t necessarily have to be hope.’ He continued, ‘If you were to ask me if I thought that the human race would still be in existence in, say, another 50,000 years, I would have to say no. We haven’t been on the planet very long, and look at what we do to each other.’

‘I just can’t understand why it has to be that way,’ I said.

‘Now you’re starting to sound like my father,’ Sam said, ‘Maybe it’s something to do with Treblinka, the way the place infects you. Maybe it’s the way anyone feels who has been touched by the Holocaust.’

Hershl’s suicide should not surprise anyone. I thought now of the other post-Holocaust suicides I had read about over the past year. I recalled Treblinka survivor Richard Glazer, who wrote of the ‘little death’ he died every day during his years of freedom. Glazer committed suicide in Prague on 20 December 1997. I also thought about the better-known suicides of Primo Levi and fellow Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery, whose experiences had been less appalling than Hershl’s.

‘What if each of us is born not with innate hatred in us, but merely the capacity to hate, like a cup not filled? What if this cup can only be filled by our parents? What we experience as children makes us what we are as adults. Isn’t that your father’s story? He was only twelve when the Nazis marched into Klobuck. He was fifteen in Treblinka. I have a strong feeling that anti-Semitism, and all other racial hatreds and intolerances can only be passed from our parents. It just seems to me that all we have to do is teach our children not to hate. Every time we resist hatred and each time we teach tolerance to our children, we make the future of the world that much better.’

‘I think that’s too much to hope for,’ Sam said.

‘How can you be sure?’ I asked – but as I posed the question, I thought about Sam and Alan’s difficult, troubled lives, and how Hitler’s murderous and hateful legacy had not ended for their father and neither could it ever end for them. I had always understood that in return for the Holocaust nightmare – particularly the experience of Treblinka – Hershl had been granted the gift of deep human knowledge, which, from the moment of their births, had been transmitted to his children. Sam and Alan both understood intuitively that men are beasts and that our civilisations are mere facades.

Sam said, ‘I think each of us have cups of hate and cups of good, if you like, which are already full when we are born. It just depends on what kind of person you are and the extent to which we use the contents of these cups.’

‘But aren’t children born innocent, with a world of hope before them?’ I argued.

‘I think of it all like a bell curve,’ he said. ‘The great mass of the human population appear to occupy the middle. These people represent the herd, and seem to be capable of being persuaded toward either direction, toward good or evil. Only a few people seem to be inherently good or evil, and these two extreme groups sit in those little bits that flick out at either side of the bell curve.’

‘If what you say is true, then there is nothing anyone can do about truly evil people – people like Hitler and even Franz Stangl, people who may not even have killed anyone personally but were responsible for millions of murders – apart from perhaps try to stop them.’

‘That’s it,’ said Sam. ‘But we also need to think about the people on the good side of the bell curve, like the farmer who helped Rajzman, or that SS officer my father mentioned, the one who came to Treblinka and couldn’t believe what he saw? In the end, he was probably killed or sent to the Russian front because he refused to participate. Both of them behaved in a way that was contrary to the logic of survival, probably because they were simply good people.’

‘But those people who are naturally evil still need the great mass of the population in the middle of the curve to carry out their evil acts. What if the cup is what the masses get from nature and the hate that goes into it is what they get from nurture?’

* * *

The next morning, I went for a walk in the hills near my house. I recalled a telephone conversation I’d had with Alan a few days previously.

‘I’m sorry, I should have told you about this before,’ Alan said, ‘but I’ve just worked this out.’

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘Well, there was a period of about ten days – I think it was 1961 – during which my father went away on a trip,’ Alan said. ‘Sam was very young. I remember he was still in his pram. My mother was in an absolute panic and fraught with worry, which was out of character for her. My father said he was going to testify at a trial in Switzerland, and there was all this talk about him having to be careful because it was the middle of the Algerian War and he had to travel through France.’ He paused for a moment, as if struck by sudden emotion.

‘Go on, please,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t know if he went to testify at a trial. The more I think about it, I’m almost certain he went back to Treblinka. When I think about how worried my mother was and my father’s reaction when he returned …’

In spite of weeks of digging, I could find no trial in Switzerland, or anywhere else for that matter, at which Hershl could have testified.

‘What was his reaction?’ I asked.

‘He was down,’ Alan said, quickly. ‘He was very down.’

‘I see. Can you tell me why you think he went back?’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before,’ he repeated.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You can tell me now.’

‘I think he went to pay his last respects and to say he was sorry to the people he could not save. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.’

‘Do you think going back to Treblinka might have helped him in any way?’ There was exasperation in his voice.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘nothing could help him.’

Not long after I returned home from my walk, Sam telephoned.

‘I called to talk to you about hope. I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about how you wanted to end your book with hope. The only hopeful thing I could think of that may have come out of the Holocaust is that maybe guilt about the Holocaust has helped save lives.’

‘Do you believe that’s true, given all the genocides that have occurred since the end of the World War II?’

‘I think you have to be clear about European guilt, which is special because of its history. It’s possible that it saved lives in the Balkans by forcing international intervention – like NATO’s bombing of Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example – earlier than might have otherwise been the case.’

‘But Sam, what about your life? And what about the life of your brother and your father? What about the lives of all those family members who died in the gas chambers? I have to ask you directly: Did Hitler win – maybe not in the context of all the world, but for you and your family?’ I heard the flick of his cigarette lighter at the other end of the line, and I waited in the silence that followed. The pause seemed longer than usual.

‘I think the only way Hitler could have won was to have succeeded in the complete annihilation of the Jewish people, and he didn’t do that. I suppose you could argue that he succeeded at a personal level, because Alan and I have decided not to have children.’

‘Alan told me that you both decided independently long ago not to have children, that it was because of the suffering your father had passed on to you and Alan, that neither of you wanted to pass that on to your children.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But we have cousins and friends, like you, who have children. And to know that is enough for me. It’s enough to defeat Hitler.’

‘And what about your father? Was his suicide a victory for Hitler?’ I asked.

He said, ‘Funnily enough, when I gave a draft of my father’s story to a friend of mine to read, she commented that one major reason it hadn’t been a victory for Hitler was because he didn’t manage to remove my father’s humanity.’

‘It’s possible, I think, your father defeated Hitler by refusing to take revenge. You know, when he first came out of the camps and dreamed about vengeance, when he thought about killing Germans indiscriminately in revenge for all those he had seen led to the gas chambers, and the murder of those he had loved and all the terrible things he’d endured himself, he didn’t do it in the end. That proves that Hitler’s hatred had not infected him. I think it also proves maybe that he could not be infected,’ I said. ‘I think that to have murdered indiscriminately, the way the Nazis did, a person needs a certain amount of hate and a certain amount of fear. I think he had neither.’

‘It’s true what you say. But it’s true of a lot of people. A lot of survivors didn’t take revenge after they got out of the camps.’

‘But not all of them felt they had to take their own lives.’ I paused for a moment, then added, ‘Maybe, Sam, that’s why he died in the end, because he was one of those good people at the side of the bell curve. Maybe he was just a good man in a bad world and in the end he couldn’t cope with that. Maybe the only person he could kill was himself.’

Sam puffed on his cigarette, ‘That’s good enough for me,’ he said. A moment passed and he added: ‘Actually it makes me proud.’

After he hung up, I felt the strangest sensation that Hershl had finally, after all those years, been laid peacefully to rest. I closed my eyes, and words I now remembered from an accompaniment to the Jewish prayer for the dead on the Day of Atonement came flooding back:

All the people and events depicted in this book are real. The issues that are dealt with are also real and they are very important to me. Hershl’s story is another piece of the Holocaust jigsaw, which, if not told, would vanish from twentieth-century history. He was one of the few surviving witnesses to live through so much of the Nazi horror – from the first day of the Polish invasion and the subsequent depravations of Częstochowa ghetto, through to Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau. The courage of his escape from Treblinka amid an uprising that razed one of the most horrendous death factories in the history of humanity cannot be overstated. He was one of the very few to have left us authentic testimony. His story is part of the fabric of what really happened all those years ago.

The form this book has ultimately taken has permitted its characters, some of whom remain very dear to me, to tell their version of events and their thoughts in their own way. In essence, I have allowed three people to tell this story: Firstly, Hershl himself; but when Hershl’s voice falls silent, his sons Alan and Sam step in. They fill the emptiness with their words and wisdom, which could so easily be the voice of their father.

For a long time, I was concerned that I would be unable to render an accurate enough portrait of Hershl Sperling. In my dreams over the past year, I have often seen Hershl’s face staring out at me, his gentle green eyes watching. I know that he ached for the arms of loved ones from a time too short-lived. There is a parallel between Hershl’s shattered life and my own hunt for the thousands of shards to piece it back together. I was often disturbed by the knowledge that I would never be able to find all the disparate fragments and therefore could not create a true replica of all that had existed. Then my eleven-year-old son said something that stunned me. ‘Dad, when you break a mirror, you can still see your face in every single piece that’s broken.’ It gradually dawned on me that I did not need to find every lost piece of Hershl’s shattered life, because his image was stamped in each of the fragments I already had.

What follows is an English translation by Heather Valencia of Hershl Sperling’s personal testimony relating to his ten months in Treblinka. It is one of only a handful of eyewitness accounts. In the months that followed the revolt, the remnants of the camp were systematically dismantled by the Nazis and removed. A farm was built on the site to disguise what it had been. So thorough was the Nazi cover-up that Holocaust deniers today continue to dispute its very existence. Without Hershl Sperling’s written record, and those of other eyewitnesses to the carnage of Treblinka, these denials would have greater power. For this reason alone, Hershl’s testimony has incalculable worth. The work was written at the latest, some eighteen months after liberation – probably before that. The events that Hershl describe were fresh in his mind. The tone of writing comes across as matter-of-fact and remarkably balanced, given the subject matter and the dreadfulness of the experience itself. Its focus is the systematic killings and the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and their accomplices, but also the vulnerability of the elderly, of mothers and children. However, below the surface runs another current. There is also pain and the sense that this is a kind of internal conversation, and an act of identification, with those who did not survive. Although it is a translation, the grammar of the work – although at times erratic – has generally been left as published, to retain historical veracity.