Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (5 page)

The snow was relentless and the wind icy. I made my way to the train station, hobbling through drifts with my aching feet, to ask for directions to the bus depot. No one spoke English. I was becoming exasperated and wandered into town, asking in vain for directions with the half a dozen Polish words in my vocabulary. I went into a pharmacy and found a man who knew a few words of English and he directed me to the bus station. I walked about ten yards before I looked at my watch and realised it was pointless. The bus for Klobuck was due to leave in less than five minutes. I would never make it. I stood for a moment, panicked and desperate. But then I gathered myself. Determined to get to Klobuck, I dragged myself back through the snow toward the station and approached the line of taxis. I asked four drivers if they spoke English and each of them said no. The fifth driver said, ‘Yes, I speak English,’ which turned out to be almost all he could say. But he showed me a Polish-English dictionary, which I knew would help. We negotiated a price, and I jumped in, relieved to be out of the snow and off my feet.

It turned out that Jerzy, my driver, spoke pidgin French because his grandfather had come from Lille in France to be a Polish coal miner. He said he considered himself Polish. He often touched an icon of the Madonna, which hung from his rear view mirror, usually when he went round a corner. He was about 60 and had also been a coal miner in his youth. I stated my business, and he nodded seriously. Shortly afterward, he took a right turn off the main road. We passed through the village of Krzepice and he pointed out a ruined brick building.

‘Synagoga,’ he said. I imagined the horrors that must have taken place. Jerzy seemed sympathetic, but he then said in English, ‘Poland a Catholic country. Always. Poland only for Catholics.’ Maybe this came across as more severe than intended, because of his poor English and my non-existent Polish, but it was a factual inaccuracy. In 1939, Polish Roman Catholics in fact made up 60 per cent of the country’s population. Some ten per cent were Jews. Most of the rest were Protestants, ethnic Germans and Russian Orthodox groups.

I was a long way from the cosmopolitan streets of medieval Kraków. The taxi sped through the snow, deeper and deeper into the Polish hinterland.

Pre-war Klobuck was like so many other little towns in Poland, with all the things a Polish town should have – a few thousand Jewish and gentile inhabitants, a synagogue, a poorhouse, a study house, a church and a Wednesday market. This was Hershl’s town before the Nazis came. In those days it had just two major streets that intersected near the church. Across the market square stood the synagogue, from which spread the town’s Jewish quarter, a shtetl of tumbledown houses and dirt roads. As I wandered the streets, I saw that war, progress and almost half a century of Communism had not greatly altered a beautiful little town that sat amid orchards, gardens and small lakes. The synagogue was gone, as were the Jews, but the core of the town was essentially the same. A traveller today with some knowledge of Klobuck’s history might be surprised at how close the church and synagogue stood together. It also struck me that the Jews who once inhabited this place clearly did not conduct their affairs up back streets, but here, right in the middle of town. They were an integral and highly visible part of Klobuck’s life. In 1939, when the Nazis marched in, there were around 1,600 Jews, more than a third of the population. They were a petty bourgeoisie of tradesmen and merchants. Most of the Poles were peasant farmers, but there was also a middle class, many of whom were fierce anti-Semites. Because Klobuck was a small town, Jews and Poles lived cheek by jowl, each a part of the other’s landscape. All traces of that multicultural community have disappeared, save an overgrown Jewish cemetery that is now a cow pasture. Klobuck, like every other place in Poland, was brutalised.

Klobuck is located in the valley of Jura Krakówsko just across the Silesian frontier in what was once the far western edge of the Russian empire – although in character it has for more than two millennia been Polish. In Hershl’s time, it was surrounded by forest. The town’s name is derived from a local fifteenth-century heraldic symbol – a hat, or
klobuka
in old Polish – and alludes to the Klobuck family, its medieval rulers. Local legend has it that in the year 1135, when the foundations for the first house were dug, a hat was found. One legend claims that it was a Jewish hat, the yellow, cone-shaped, pointed type that was required to be worn by adult male Jews outside the ghetto in medieval western Europe and Muslim lands.

Jews, criss-crossing ancient Slavo-Turkic trade routes from the west, east and south, had inhabited what is now Poland since the days of the Roman Empire, and perhaps earlier. However, migration to Poland en masse is believed to have begun in the year 1095 when Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade with the stated aim of wresting the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Muslims. Jews, fleeing the murderous pogroms of opportunistic peasants and roving gangs of knights in Germany en route to the Holy Land, crossed into Silesia, which was then under the rule of the relatively tolerant Polish Piast dynasty. In the same decade, Jews from Slavic Bohemia and Moravia were driven north by Crusaders into Polish lands. Jews gradually moved deeper into Poland by trade routes at the invitation of local rulers, who were seeking goldsmiths, bankers and traders to bolster the economic development of their ducal states.

Over time, poor Jews followed rich Jews as the persecution elsewhere intensified. Word of Poland’s tolerance spread quickly through the besieged Jewish communities, particularly after 1296 when Prince Henry IV of Wroclaw granted Jews legal protection and outlawed the common gentile practice of raising accusations that they killed Christian children for their blood to make Passover bread. For centuries, barely a decade passed without Jews in some western state being accused of this ‘blood libel’, and rooted in each anti-Semitic accusation – little different from so many incidents of anti-Semitism down through the ages – lay not differences in ideology or faith but human greed, spite and economic jealousies. German burghers, plotting to wipe out Jewish commercial competition, formed exclusively Christian trade guilds and often connived with the church to fan popular hatred against Europe’s Jewish communities. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in a millennium of European religious hatred, whipped up in the name of Christianity. The Black Death in the fourteenth century – also blamed on Jews by the church and jealous burghers – brought about a new wave of migration to Poland, as did the terrors of subsequent crusades and the antiSemitic preaching of Martin Luther, which in Hershl’s time was given widespread publicity by the Nazis.

Although today Klobuck lies deep within Poland’s modern borders, for centuries the town sat in a long-disputed frontier region that separated the Germanic and Slavic territories of northern-central Europe. During the Middle Ages, Jews called these western Slavic lands New Canaan, evoking a Biblical optimism. Poland’s relative tolerance partly sprang from its limited involvement in the crusades. At the time of the First Crusade, Poland had been Catholic for less than 150 years, and it was difficult for the Papacy to drum up enough support. Also, the Polish rulers, unlike the Holy Roman Emperors, did not seek to have a finger in every pie. As long as the Jews paid their taxes, and the local dukes in turn paid their tributes to the Piastes, life continued in peace. Thus a Jewish ‘nation’ was left free to flourish in Poland.

The presence of Jews in Klobuck itself is also ancient. However, details of this early history are scant. The archives of the shtetl were burned by the Nazis, along with the town’s synagogue. More Jews moved to Klobuck in the middle of the eighteenth century from nearby Dzialoszyn after fire destroyed their homes. Polish landlords held the Jews responsible for the blaze and demanded recompense, bankrupting the community. The earliest information available on Jewish life in Klobuck dates from 1808. In that year, the finance minister of the principality of Warsaw, a man named Lucztevski, issued the order that Jews must have their holy books stamped for a special tax. Lucztevski made each Jewish community responsible for the organisation of this payment and the Częstochowa community sent out a proclamation to all the outlying Jewish settlements under its jurisdiction regarding the new law. Klobuck was named among the settlements in the records.

It was hard to imagine this town before the Nazis came. I walked to the town hall, a Stalinesque concrete block across the main square from the church. A few weeks earlier I had written asking for information about the Jews who once lived here. Either they could not translate my request into Polish or chose to ignore it. Now inside, in a large, hospital-like reception area, I spoke to a middle-aged woman behind a counter.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, an exasperated look on her face.

‘French?’ I asked, hopefully. It would have been too much to ask that her grandparents were coal miners from Lille as well.

‘A little English maybe,’ she said at last. ‘But slowly, please.’

‘I am an American,’ I told her. ‘I’m writing a book about a man who came from Klobuck and I was hoping to get some information. Is there someone who can help me?’

‘Ah, American,’ she said, seeming momentarily impressed. Perhaps the woman thought I was Steven Spielberg. She paused and added: ‘But I don’t understand.’

‘There must be someone in this building who speaks English,’ I said, waving my hand around in a gesture that was meant to encompass the entire edifice.

‘Wait, please,’ she picked up the telephone, and within a few minutes a tall, thin man in a grey suit appeared. He shook my hand limply and introduced himself as the mayor’s assistant. I will call him Pawel. I told him that I was an American, that I was writing a story about a man from Klobuck and that I was seeking information about him and his community. He nodded.

‘Please, follow me.’ Pawel walked with long strides, and I followed him through the maze of corridors, past personal offices and bigger areas that held what looked like old-fashioned typing pools, until we reached a room where three women sat at desks. Pawel introduced me in Polish and I shook their hands. ‘Now,’ said Pawel, ‘tell me again what you are looking for please.’

I told him again that I was here seeking information about a man from Klobuck and Pawel translated my request into Polish. ‘What was this man’s name?’ Pawel asked.

‘Szperling,’ I said. Pawel shook his head. I added: ‘He was Jewish, and I’d like to know where he and all the other Jews lived. Can you show me where the shtetl was?’ Pawel jerked back his head abruptly.

‘There were never Jews here,’ he insisted, shaking his head. I could see a look of distaste darken across his face. This was ridiculous, and I laughed out loud.

‘Of course, there were Jews here,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see where the synagogue stood in Klobuck please.’

Pawel thought for a moment. ‘Ah,
synagoga
,’ he said at last. ‘
Zydzi
.’ I understood him.
Zydzi
, one of my few words of Polish, meant ‘Jewish’. ‘
Synagoga
, yes?’ He began speaking to the three women in Polish, then turned to me and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t help you. In Krzepice, yes, there is a synagogue there, but nothing here. Go to Krzepice. It’s better.’

Just then, however, one of the women touched my arm. She spoke in halting English. ‘Don’t listen to them. There were many Jews here before. Look.’ She pointed out the window across the square, to the right of the church. ‘Over there,’ she said, ‘all those houses were built by Jews. Very old houses, more than 100 years old. And there, next to the church was their synagogue, where they prayed.’

I walked across the empty square to the place that had once been the shtetl of Klobuck. It was incredibly quiet. On the square, buildings that had once been Jewish homes were now shops. I saw a bookstore, a pharmacy and an art-supply shop. Behind them was the shtetl proper, and a narrow asphalt road winding down a hill. There was a lot of derelict land, where buildings had either collapsed or been torn down. In Hershl’s time this was a tightly packed community. There had been a tearoom and a hairdresser and Hassidic cobblers who sewed
spatz
and repaired boots. There were grocery stores, hat makers, an ironmonger and countless tailors. A number of Jews also made a living by smuggling goods to and from Germany across the border, particularly tobacco, saccharin and silk. One Jewish entrepreneur was known for shooing his geese into the air just before the German frontier and gathering them up on the other side, where he could sell them for twice the amount without having to pay toll charges at the border. In Jewish textile shops, customers could find woollen fabric, white linen and the checked cloth worn by peasants. Now this was a muddy slope with a few ramshackle stone buildings arranged on the hillside. I followed paths to the left and right, feeling a terrible weight of sadness. I began to associate the life that had existed here with what I knew occurred later. All those Jews had one foot in the grave. Some buildings had bent roofs and cracked plaster scarred their walls. High, unkempt grass grew around them. A few were painted pink, blue and orange, like houses in a Chagall painting.

This is where Hershl came into the world on 10 March 1927, in the Szperling family home at 14 Staszysz. I knew that Hershl was the second of three children born to Icchak and Gitel Szperling, during the relative calm of the military dictatorship of Jozef Pilsudski. The eldest sibling died from a hole in his heart before the war. There was also a younger sister, whose name Hershl could not utter, but the little girl’s flaming red hair lives on in the memory of the handful of Klobuck survivors. A testimony lodged with the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem in 1953 reveals the little girl’s name was Frumet.

Together, the Szperling family operated a small livestock business in the summer, buying cattle from the countryside and selling it at various local markets. They also had a piece of land, acquired years earlier by Hershl’s grandfather, for grazing cattle and horses. Icchak simultaneously ran a tailor’s business and the family worked together repairing garments during the winter. They were not rich, but neither were they poor. In those days and in that place, they were considered well-off, at least compared with most of the other Jews in the town.

I followed another muddy pathway that bent to the left and back up the slope toward the town square. This little road had once been called Shul Street and it was where all the shtetl’s religious institutions were found. There were ritual baths, Hebrew schools, and the little study-houses of the Hassidim. At the square, facing the church, an old stone wall joined a wooden fence, behind which was more empty ground. This was the site of the synagogue. Strange, I thought, that nothing had been built on the land. Perhaps the people of Klobuck were superstitious. An icy wind blew, and I bent down and looked through a gap between the planks on the fence. I imagined I saw a group of Jewish children, among them young Hershl, maybe seven or eight years old, running down the steps inside the synagogue. Hershl, trained for his Bar Mitzvah and a life of religious observance at the synagogue’s school, knew that worshippers must enter the shul by descending a few steps to symbolically recall Psalm 1:30 – ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.’ How appropriate this quote was to Hershl’s life. Hershl’s community was deeply religious.

Hershl should have celebrated his Bar Mitzvah here, on this empty ground now covered with weeds and litter. More likely it was conducted secretly. On Passover, Klobuckers liked to say: ‘It’s not so much the seder, but the matzoh ball.’ There was also communal mourning. Elie Erlich, a young man who had emigrated to Palestine a year earlier, joined the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and fell at the Battle of Estramadura on 16 February 1938, along with 100 other volunteers of the brigade’s Jewish company, fighting against the rising tide of Fascism in Europe.

Yet Klobuck was an idyllic place for children. Little woods and meadows surrounded the town. Hershl ran in those meadows with the rest of the shtetl children to gather greenery for Shavuot. During the festival of Lag b’Omer, synagogue teachers brought their students here, where Hershl and the other children fought battles with wooden swords, one class against another. On summer evenings, the banks of the lake were crowded with young people. At the end of the summer, Jewish fish merchants rented the lake, let out the water and harvested the fish. It was here, too, that in the autumn, before the seven-day Succot festival, Hershl gathered willow-branches for the annual construction of the Sukkah, the Hebrew word meaning booth, reminiscent of the huts in which the ancient Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt.