Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (4 page)

Why had Hershl carried the wrong volume of a set around for so many years? Why was he so attached to it? It no longer mattered. Hershl’s story would be with us in two to four weeks. In the meantime, I began researching.

* * *

Three weeks after the book arrived, the translation came by email, then a few days later in hard-copy form. I ran my fingers over the Hebrew letters of the original as I read aloud the English version. His was one account among ten others in the book, a mere 20 pages long. Yet it felt strange to read his words and to hear his voice again. It was an account of terror and suffering, beginning with his discovery in the underground bunker in Częstochowa and ending after the war in a displaced person’s camp – one of the so-called DP camps – near Munich. It makes no mention of his perished family in the aftermath of the bunker. Its tone reverberates with loss, but the writer is clearly also desperate to be heard and believed. If history is best represented by those who experienced it, this book was pure.

I reported to Sam. ‘Do you want me to send you a copy of the translation?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think I could bear to read it.’ He paused again, before asking, ‘But how is it?’

‘It’s very detailed and very sad. Most of it is terrifying. Incredible really, because it is so real.’

That was the way it would be for the next year. I would tell my friend about the things his father had written – I could even read sections aloud on the telephone – but he would not read it himself. It was the same for his brother, Alan, with whom I would also spend hours on the telephone. A similar system was applied to the story I was trying to write. I would describe events and discoveries to Sam and tell him about the journey I was taking, the one he was helping to guide. I would also tell him about the discoveries I made along the way, and together we pieced together the source of his father’s pain, and perhaps even his own. I knew that I would have to go where Hershl’s suffering began, and even to those places that pre-dated the pain. I would have to go to Poland, walk the streets he had walked. I needed to look into the faces of those who dwelt there.

My plane touched down at Kraków’s Belice airport on a crisp, sunny morning in early February 2007. A taxi took to me my hotel a little before noon. The hotel was fifteen minutes’ walk from Rynek Glowny, Kraków’s massive market square of giant flagstones and towering spires, but I had wanted to be close to Kazimierz. Kuzmir, as Hershl would have known it in Yiddish, is the city’s old Jewish quarter. I asked the hotel receptionist for directions and wondered what she thought about Jews – here, in twenty-first century Poland, amid the former killing fields of the Nazis and this country’s own infamous home-grown anti-Semitism. I wondered if the hatred persisted, even though only a handful of Jews were left. Had this country, brutalised by war and half a century of Communism, moved on? I had asked Sam to join me. His insights would have been important and incisive, but he said that setting foot anywhere in Poland would be too much for him to bear. For him, Poland was a graveyard, where rabid anti-Semites had aided and abetted the Nazis in the murder of three million Polish Jews, including members of his own family.

I travelled the same route through the medieval square for three days, veering southeast past the sombre façade of Grodzka Street and past the spires of the 1,000-year-old Wawel Cathedral, the most famous feature of Kraków’s skyline. I knew that King Jogaila and Princess Jadwiga had lived and were buried at Wawel, and I thought of Yaja Sperling, who had shared her name. A few more blocks and I was in Kazimierz, where Poland’s second-largest Jewish community had lived and flourished from the end of the thirteenth century until the Nazis came in 1939; the maze of narrow, crooked cobblestone streets, hidden market squares and low-slung, peeling buildings, many of which still bore the physical scars of the Second World War. This was exactly where I wanted to be before I ventured into the country’s hinterland.

Kazimierz was once an independent town outside the walls of Kraków and was named after its fourteenth-century king, Casimir the Great, who granted the charter and set in law the right of Jews to establish their communities. This was not just a big town inhabited by Jews; it was a Jewish town and an integral part of Poland’s Yiddish culture. At the same time, Casimir established the Kraków Academy, now called the Jagiellonian University, where medieval Polish intellectual life blossomed. At the end of the fourteenth century, a young astronomer called Niklas Koppernick – later latinised into Copernicus – studied there. Although the Jewish community in Kraków had lived unperturbed beside its Christian neighbours under the protection of Casimir, relations had deteriorated by the reign of Jogaila and Jawiga in 1386 and pogroms occurred with increasing frequency. In later centuries, Polish kings allowed Kraków’s Jewish community – always an essential part of the city’s commercial and intellectual lifeblood – to build interior defensive walls and passed laws to ensure their places of business remained unmolested. By 1939, Kazimierz had become one of Poland’s major Jewish communities with 68,500 Jews, no less than a quarter of Kraków’s population. Within four years of Nazi rule, all but a handful had perished in nearby Auschwitz, and a whole world was swept away.

As a child, Hershl visited the city many times, and I imagined him walking these streets as a young boy with his father, awe-struck by its clamour. I heard myself saying aloud as I walked, ‘Enjoy, Hershl, drink it all up. It cannot last forever.’ A couple of tourists turned to look at me as they passed. There are ghosts on every street here. Under Communism, Kazimierz was left in crumbling disrepair, and when I first visited in 1989, it was a haven for stray dogs and alcoholics. It would not have been wise to venture out after dark. Now, thanks in part to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film
Schindler’s List
, which was set there, Kazimierz has become Kraków’s bohemian quarter, and is drenched in a kind of bizarre, hip quasi-Jewishness. The place buzzed with cafes that bore Yiddish names, Jewish-style restaurants, Jewish art galleries. But where were the Jews? In Kazimierz’s labyrinthine streets, it was impossible not to feel the weight of the absent culture. Original Yiddish inscriptions still front doorways, an old pharmacy and the ruined theatre. The sound of Kleizmer music poured out of a nearby café. While sitting in a café with the English word ‘coffee’ written in Hebrew script in the window, I scribbled in my notebook, ‘All this Jewishness everywhere – except there are no Jews.’ In 2007, there were fewer than 200 Jews living in Kraków.

On the second day, after another morning of wandering – I wanted to soak up as much of the old Jewish quarter as I could – I met a woman in her mid-twenties in the downstairs café of a bookstore in Kazimierz. I had exchanged a few emails with her before I arrived, and she agreed to meet with me on condition of anonymity in print. I’ll call her Agnieszka. I told her I was writing about a man called Hershl Sperling, who came from Klobuck. She had heard of the little town but had never been there. It was two or three hours from Kraków, she said. I told her that Hershl had been one of the few survivors of Treblinka, that he was the father of a good friend, and that he had killed himself in Scotland many years later, still traumatised by the experience. I told her I wanted to know about the Jewish experience in Poland now, what was left of it, and if anti-Semitism still thrived here. Many Poles argue vehemently that they had no part in the Holocaust, that it was a German invention and that the death camps were established on Polish soil by the Nazis, not Poles. Yet could the Nazis have succeeded in their murderous enterprise without Polish anti-Semitism, fanned for generations by the Catholic Church, and the complicity and tacit approval of the local population? Nor did it end in 1945. Those Polish Jews who survived and returned, Hershl among them, encountered furious anti-Semitism. It is hardly surprising that almost as soon as they set foot in their old towns, most fled again. And instead of being honoured, those Poles who had sheltered Jews during the war – and there were many – begged to remain anonymous for fear that their neighbours would deride them as ‘Jew lovers’, and break into their homes to search for money the Jews must have left behind, or even kill them.

Agnieszka gulped the remains of her coffee and smiled, attentive to my words. She had looked moved when I told her about Hershl’s suicide, but she snapped a hard gaze at me when I brought up Poland’s infamous anti-Semitism.

‘I don’t want to be identified because my parents still don’t want their neighbours to know they are Jewish, and I have to respect that,’ she said. ‘I can tell you that some of us come together on Friday nights at a synagogue here in Kazimierz and it’s nice.’ She looked across the room to reflect, and then, with a shrug, added: ‘I didn’t even know I was Jewish until a few years ago, although I always suspected we were not the same as everyone else, because we never went to church. But I do think that things are changing in Poland. The young people here don’t live in the world of stereotypes anymore, the way the older generation did. There are people, many of them young like me, of very good will who want to preserve history. But you ask me if there is still anti-Semitism in Poland? Of course there is. I hear it all the time, mostly if I have to go to the small towns, although not so much in Kraków or Warsaw. But isn’t there anti-Semitism everywhere? In Poland, they don’t beat up Jews in the street or desecrate Jewish graveyards and synagogues, at least not for more than 50 years, and I have read about those kinds of incidents taking place in France and Germany and Britain.’

‘But, of course, there are so few Jews left to hate in Poland and perhaps that’s why there are fewer incidents than elsewhere.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, smiling weakly. ‘Actually, there are many Jews in Kraków, but they are all Holocaust tourists from America who come in summer, then go home after visiting Auschwitz.’

Agnieszka is part of a small but uncanny Judaic revival. Her grandparents had been hidden Jews during the Nazi occupation, and Agnieszka’s parents themselves remained secret Jews afterwards, pretending to be Catholic. When she stood up to leave, she smiled again and reached to touch my arm. She said, ‘It’s difficult to know people who killed themselves, no? It’s like you’re always connected with death. That’s sometimes how I feel here. There was once so much and now there is almost nothing.’

I sent her a couple of emails when I returned home and heard nothing back. Then, about two months later, an email arrived. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your emails for so long,’ she wrote, ‘but I had my master thesis exam, and also unfortunately my story is not so interesting. Good luck.’ I disagreed, but clearly she did not want to reveal her Jewishness to the world. That email was the end of our communication.

The following morning, I sat in a café in an imposing old building that had until recently been a derelict, nineteenth-century Talmudic study house, but was now Kazimierz’s Centre for Jewish Culture. It was Sunday morning, and I watched a group of elderly, genteel Polish women leave high mass at the Church of Corpus Christi and cross a market square that once bustled with Jews. The women flooded into this café, filled with Jewish symbols and artefacts, gossiping in Polish. It was a disconcerting sight. It suddenly became clear to me that just as stereotypes could not be applied to the Jews who once populated this nation, they are equally inapplicable to Poles. It was here I met the curator of the cultural centre, Joachim Russek, an extraordinary 56-year-old Polish Catholic, who has perhaps done more than anyone else to remind his country and that city of its Jewish heritage.

‘I believe our recognition of the thousand years of Jewish history on Polish soil is intrinsically linked to the question of who we are in our new, post-Communist and democratic reality. I say to any democracy – show me how you treat your minorities,’ he said. ‘Here, we are striving to preserve the Jewish heritage in Kazimierz and to perpetuate the memory of the centuries-long presence of the Jews in Poland, living side by side with Poles. In doing so, we promote the values of a civil society.’

‘But what about Polish anti-Semitism? And what about the future?’ I asked him.

‘Believe me, I know all about anti-Semitism in Polish culture. A few years ago when I was in America, I was introduced to a university professor, who told me his family had left Poland a generation earlier. I asked him if he spoke Polish, and he blurted out, in Polish, ‘Beat the Jew’. I can’t tell you how ashamed I felt. For centuries, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. That’s why Jews came here in the first place. We need to return to the tolerance that is our heritage. Only then will we find our rightful place in Europe.’

Later that day, on Miodowa Street in the heart of Kazimierz, I ate in a restaurant that had been decked out to look like the home of a Jewish family, probably because it had been. There were brass candlesticks on the tables, and lace tablecloths. The people who once lived in this house were almost certainly murdered, and here I was eating
cholent
, a Jewish bean and meat stew, in their home, being served by the descendents of people who hated them and may even have been complicit in their murder. I scribbled in my notebook, ‘Lame mea culpa meets gross commercialism’. I felt disgusted and left.

I met Joachim one last time that night, and I mentioned to him my thoughts about the Polish women in the café. Russek scratched his head, and said: ‘What, you prefer they go to a Nazi café instead?’ I laughed. He was right. But I was ready to leave Kraków. I went to bed early that night. My feet hurt from all the walking back and forth to Kazimierz. Besides, I had an early train to catch – the 7.44am to Częstochowa, from where I would make my way to Klobuck, Hershl’s home town.

Some time during the early hours of the morning, I was awakened by a cacophony of loud, aggressive cries in the street below my hotel room. I pulled aside the curtain and saw three young men in their 20s standing on a street corner opposite the hotel. They screamed into the night. Each of them had a skinhead haircut and a bottle of vodka, which they were gulping between cries.

The odd thing was that they were not screaming at each other or anyone in particular. This behaviour obviously cemented camaraderie between them. They were aggressive screams, filled with menace, and I suspect if anyone had wandered past there would have been trouble. The loudest of them arched his body as he cried out, his green army jacket buttoned to the neck against this cold Polish winter night. He swayed on the street corner. Then he took a long drink from the bottle and smashed it through the windscreen of a parked car. He began kicking the car viciously. The other two joined in, screaming and kicking until they were spent, then they staggered off into the Kraków night. I remembered now that Hershl had spoken of how he had been chased habitually on his way to and from school by Polish thugs, and I imagined them to be thugs such as these.

* * *

The next morning, as the train pulled out of Kraków Glowny, the city’s central railway station, the snow began to fall. Hershl must have travelled these tracks many times before the Nazis came. There remains something haunting about the sight of train tracks and boxcars anywhere in this country. In the carriage with me there was an old Polish woman in a fur coat with dyed red hair, and two backpackers wearing crucifixes. Częstochowa is the site of the Jasna Góra Monastery, a Polish Lourdes-like destination for Roman Catholic pilgrims. The city’s claim to fame is that it is the home of the Black Madonna, an icon that, according to tradition, was painted by St Luke on a tabletop constructed by Jesus. Through the window I saw rutted fields of frozen snow, passing villages and people in leather coats and hats.

At around 11.30am the train pulled into Częstochowa Osobowy. I walked through the incongruously modern glass station to the line of taxis waiting outside. The city looked bleak and desolate, although perhaps it was just the snow and grey sky. I had the overwhelming sensation that I was in the hands of the enemy. I began to feel some of the dread I imagined Hershl must have felt. The driver took me to my hotel on Pilsudskiego Street, on the other side of the tracks. The receptionist did not speak English. My room was large, dusty and cold, smelling of cigarette smoke. A small television and an ashtray sat on a rickety table. The television did not work. I deposited my bag and went in search of the bus station to catch my connection to Klobuck, Hershl’s town.