Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (7 page)

Those who took the left fork – some 270 men, women and children – were driven towards the dark forest. There, they were given shovels and told to dig a large pit. They were then machine-gunned to death by troops into the mass grave. No Jew survived to recount precisely what happened in those woods. News of this bloody incident spread quickly through the shtetl.

The next morning, Monday 4 September, all Jews in Klobuck were ordered to gather in the courtyard outside the synagogue. Soldiers broke down doors. Some of the Jews were seen running from houses with their hands on their heads. Many were dragged out and beaten. Others were taken away, never to be seen again.

The Jews in the courtyard were commanded to go into the synagogue and bring out all the prayer books and Torahs. The Germans poured gasoline on the books and scrolls and torched them before the assembled shtetl inhabitants. Then the synagogue, the epicentre of Jewish life in Klobuck, was set ablaze, along with what remained of its holy books and the shtetl’s historical records, some going back hundreds of years.

‘You can’t imagine what that was like,’ Rubin told me, when I visited him months later. I saw anger and despair in his eyes as he remembered the incident.

This day also marked the beginning of oppression for the Jews in Klobuck. Rubin Sztajer recalled: ‘We were told to come to the centre of town each day to read the new laws for Jews only. Not what we can do, but only what we cannot do.’ All bicycles, radios, razors and cameras had to be handed over to the German authorities, as were all fur coats, gold, silver and jewellery. Every few days, new regulations were posted, insisting Jews relinquish everything from brass doorknobs, candlesticks and copper pans to lead and tin. If any of these items were discovered in the possession of Jews, the eldest member of the household was shot. Some were taken away to labour camps; others were put to work in the town itself, where they were forced to clear rubble, carry heavy loads, chop forests, and scrub toilets with prayer shawls. Some were harnessed to wagons and made to pull them like horses. All the while, they were mocked and beaten. Some elderly Jews in these work-groups had their beards ripped from their faces. Others were stripped and forced to work naked, while being prodded with bayonets. The object was not just to make these Jews work, but also to humiliate them, often in bizarre and perverse ways. A group who worked at the Klobuck mill were forced to conduct a mock Jewish funeral for a dead dog.

The war continued. The German Army thrust its way across the country, village by village, town by town and city by city, with the Polish Army in hasty retreat. By the third week in September, the Germans butted up against the western bank of the Vistula River, the land beyond which had already been occupied by Soviet troops as part of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact the previous month. Warsaw was now surrounded on three sides by Germans and faced the Soviets across the river. On the morning of 26 September General Von Brauchitich ordered the German Eighth Army to attack. The next day, at 2.00pm, Warsaw surrendered.

In the first 55 days of the German conquest of western and central Poland, more than 5,000 Jews were murdered. These were not soldiers or resistance fighters, but terrified families in their homes, the first Polish victims of Hitler’s other war – his war against the Jews of Europe.

During the early autumn of 1940, Klobuck’s Jews were instructed via posters in the market square to leave their homes and move into an area the Germans called the ghetto. European Jews had not lived in ghettos since medieval times. Rubin recalled: ‘It was the biggest slum area they could find. Each family was assigned a so-called living quarters. We had no mode of transportation, not even a horse and cart, so we took whatever we could carry.’

However, the Szperlings decided that their chances of survival were greater outside Klobuck, which had now been annexed into Greater Germany. In the middle of the night, the Szperlings slipped away through the dark, silent streets, in spite of the 6.00pm curfew. They entered the woods at the outskirts of town and walked the ten miles until they reached the new border that crossed into the so-called General Government of Occupied Poland and on to the city of Częstochowa, where the number of Jews was far greater and, according to their reasoning, safer.

Like the Szperlings, Jerzy and I arrived in Częstochowa long after dark. I felt a terrible, heavy dread come over me, in the relative safety of a taxi in democratic, free Poland.

Hershl and his family arrived on the outskirts of Częstochowa – or Czenstochow in Yiddish – before dawn on one of the first days of October 1940. Hershl was thirteen years old. The Szperlings had not dared to travel on roads, especially during daylight, because German patrols and Polish anti-Semites were everywhere. Instead, they fled across the rutted fields and through woods under the cover of night. It was a desperate journey for a mother, father and two children to walk ten miles with murderers and informants at every turn. They were killing Jews everywhere. At times, the Szperlings took refuge in the barns of peasants, where they rested briefly and ate the food Gitel had prepared and carried with her. It was harvest time, and the fields and barns were piled high with hay in the moonlight. Little Frumet was often too exhausted to walk and the three took turns to carry her. In this way, they struggled on towards Częstochowa. The details of their arrival in the city are not known, but it is reasonable to assume that the Szperlings, like many others, had bribed a peasant to hide them in his hay wagon and to smuggle them into the city. Often, and in spite of the prohibition, limited assistance was offered at a price. A second transaction must also have occurred to smuggle them behind the walls of the ghetto, otherwise entry would have been impossible – because the gates were locked between dusk and dawn and the ghetto was guarded at all times.

On the eve of World War II, this former Russian frontier garrison was a sophisticated, industrial city and home to 30,000 Jews, one third of the entire population. There was a thriving Jewish culture here, with roots stretching back hundreds of years. In the mid-nineteenth century Częstochowa became a major industrial centre for steel fabrication, and the manufacture of textiles, toys and Catholic devotional articles connected to the Black Madonna and the Jasna Góra Monastery. Jews were at the centre of this economic boom, and by 1939 they owned around 80 per cent of the city’s industry and commerce. The bulk of the remaining businesses – mainly the largest of the city’s factories – were owned by French and Belgian industrialists, whose profits flowed out of Poland into western Europe. The broad, tree-lined boulevards and neo-classical buildings the traveller sees here today in Częstochowa are the result of generations of Jewish enterprise. Jews owned almost all of the city’s small and medium-sized businesses. A large painting in the dining room of the shabby hotel in which I spent a night there depicted a Thursday market in 1919. It was a scene vibrant with the clamour of peasants, the well-to-do, Jewish factory workers and animals – goats, cows, horses and chickens – thronging amid a chaos of covered stalls and Jewish traders, many bearded and attired in the long black coats and wide-brimmed fur hats of the Hassidim. Close inspection revealed the market stalls of many of the traditional Jewish trades – tailor, furrier, cap-maker, shoemaker, butcher and baker. In the
Częstochowa Yidn
memorial book, written in the desolate years immediately after the end of the war, the reader can detect an extraordinary pride in being a Częstochower Jew, and a sense of being part of the great historical, national and cultural consciousness of Jewish people all over the world. But with the increasing Jewish participation in the city’s economic life came increased anti-Semitism. I knew that in the same year illustrated in the painting, 1919, a pogrom causing many Jewish deaths had occurred in Częstochowa. It was an ominous, 20-year-old prelude.

This was a city the Szperlings knew well. Hershl and his family often drove their cattle and horses to the Thursday market there, along with hundreds of other Jewish traders from the surrounding villages. Sometimes Icchak came alone with the animals, or Hershl was brought along to help his father. At other times, Gitel and Frumet joined them, making use of the opportunity to visit relatives. Census records reveal that many Szperlings and Goldbergs, Gitel’s maiden name, lived in Częstochowa at this time. The market was held each Thursday for good reason – so Jews, who made up the majority of the traders, could prepare for the Sabbath the following day. Icchak’s customers were the horse traders and the kosher butchers who bought directly from him at the market, which had its own kosher slaughtering house. Gitel often purchased the family’s Sabbath supplies there and returned laden in the late afternoon to Klobuck. Only when market days fell during Catholic festivals was caution required. Business boomed with the influx of pilgrims from every part of Poland, who had come to gaze upon the Black Madonna; but with them also came the fanatics who, encouraged by liberal quantities of vodka and the demonising sermons of priests, launched arbitrary attacks on Jews.

All the old rhythms of life were crushed by the German invader. Surviving Częstochower Rafael Mahler, writing in the Foreword of the
Częstochowa Yidn
memorial book, remarked, ‘The disaster of the Częstochower Jews is as deep as the ocean … our book,
Częstochowa Yidn
, was not conceived as a headstone at the cemetery of Jewish Czenstochow, but as a Book of Life … The neighbourhood of Czenstochow that Jews built and inhabited is now either utterly ruined or settled by non-Jews.’

Thirteen months before the Szperlings arrived here, on 4 September 1939, as the massacre of innocents proceeded on the left fork outside Klobuck, another episode of violence and murder occurred just as dawn broke. Some 300 Jews were murdered in what became known as Bloody Monday. The murders were accompanied by countless beatings and the destruction and looting of thousands of homes. Groups of terrified residents, both Poles and Jews, were forced through the streets at rifle point. Some were herded into trucks. Numerous witnesses have testified to seeing victims savagely kicked, beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Others were forced to stand for hours in the burning sun at gunpoint with their hands in the air. Still others were lined against walls and fences and summarily executed. The testimonies of residents recall many were still half-dressed as they were forced into the streets. The sound of gunfire from different parts of the city grew louder as the number of round-ups increased.

Elsewhere in Częstochowa, Jews were marched to trenches that had been dug as air raid shelters, were shot and fell into the pits. In the Jewish quarter of the city, near the Jasna Góra Monastery, homes were set on fire with whole families still inside. When inhabitants jumped from the windows, they were shot. Photographs held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, taken from a photo album belonging to a member of a Wehrmacht machine-gunners’ unit, record such atrocities. One such photograph shows German soldiers standing guard on a street in Częstochowa. In front of them the bodies of Jewish men are lined up on the pavement. There is a smirk on the face of one of the soldiers. The purpose of the Nazi action that day was to terrorise, degrade and subjugate.

This was just the beginning. Over the next 72 hours, hundreds more Jews were brutalised and murdered. Witnesses have testified that many Poles watched approvingly and, as in Klobuck, often acted as spotters for German soldiers who picked off Jews with rifle shots as they fled through the streets. Accounts of
Judenjagd
, or ‘Jew hunts’, detail how Poles and
Volksdeutsche
pitched in to find stray Jews the Germans had missed. On 14 September the German administration issued Order Number Seven, which transferred all Jewish industrial and commercial enterprises into ‘Aryan’ hands. In December, it became compulsory for Jews to wear the yellow star on their clothing.

Then the kidnappings began. Over the next few weeks, more than 1,000 Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 25 were taken from the streets and sent to the Ciechanow forced-labour camp in the Lublin district to construct the ‘Otto Line’ of anti-tank ditches and artillery dugouts that would mark the German frontier with the Soviet Union. The conditions were brutal and the work gruelling. Only a handful of these young men survived. On 24 December yet another orgy of violence was unleashed. Instigated by the Germans, gangs of Częstochowan Poles, as well as collaborators from other areas, rampaged through the streets and set fire to the city’s Great Synagogue and the New Synagogue, burning scrolls and an enormous library of Jewish books. The sight of the flames set off further mob violence. More Jews were beaten. More homes were looted and destroyed. The following month, a number of Jewish women and young girls were raped by SS guards in the city’s New Market Place, in spite of Hitler’s prohibition against ‘racial defilement’.

The ghetto was established on 9 April 1940 by order of the city commissioner,
SS-Brigadeführer
Richard Wendler, in the eastern, old part of Częstochowa, and it was sealed off on 23 August. This was the place the Szperlings arrived at early that morning in October 1940. The world that Hershl observed on that first day in the ghetto was miserable, overcrowded and impoverished. A population of more than 30,000 souls had been squeezed into a squalid slum, barely fit for a population a quarter of that size.

They moved into a tiny apartment, probably with relatives, crammed in with several other families, on Wilsona Street, near the ghetto wall. I discovered their address in German ghetto records, where Icchak’s profession was listed as a plumber, although this may signify that he was employed in the city’s waterworks. There was little need within the confines of the ghetto walls for a tailor and livestock trader. They tried to maintain normality, in spite of the miserable conditions, and attempted to make ends meet. Schools were forbidden on penalty of death, although many parents organised classes for small groups of children to meet in different houses each week. This was their first resistance, the education of their children.

Clothing had to be constantly searched for lice, the carriers of typhus. There was rampant inflation on the black market in basic foodstuffs. Hershl watched, day-by-day, as the winter grew fiercer and conditions became more dire. The number of orphans and beggars increased by the week. Many Jews now wandered the ghetto with their feet bound in rags and their toes black with gangrene and frostbite. Soon, corpses lay neglected on every street. Dogs tugged at dismembered limbs, and crows pecked at the flesh of bodies not yet picked up by the special patrols of undertakers who toured the ghetto with their handcarts.

The impression this made on young Hershl’s mind was lasting, yet so too was the courage he witnessed and the human dignity to which the deprived aspired. In spite of the daily struggle for survival, as well as the knowledge that any attempt at armed rebellion was futile and could only result in mass reprisals costing many Jewish lives, resistance groups organised clandestinely. We can be certain that Hershl witnessed many of these events – and that his courage in the months and years ahead remains beyond question.

The first act of rebellion in Częstochowa, however, was directed not against the Nazi masters, but against the
Judenrat
, the Gestapo-appointed Jewish Council of Elders, whose members were widely regarded by the people of the ghetto as puppets and collaborators. Their role was the enforcement of rules and regulations in the ghetto. Initially the
Judenrat
was welcomed because the kidnappings stopped and the Jews were given at least a modicum of self-government. But as time went on, the line between cooperation and collaboration blurred. In spite of the criticism that has been levelled at the
Judenrat
, it needs to be said that there were few alternatives available to these individuals. The Częstochowa
Judenrat
was regularly ordered to provide the Nazis with slave labour from the ghetto and tribute in the form of money and even foodstuffs from the starving population. Its members either obeyed or there would be murderous reprisals against the people of the ghetto.

Nonetheless, in December 1941, Hershl watched as more than 1,000 Jewish workers, his father likely among them, marched in anger after an impromptu meeting in the Maccabee auditorium to the offices of the
Judenrat
. These were the slave labourers from the Częstochowa waterworks, the railroads, and the forced-labour factories that supported the German war effort, all of this conducted under the lash of the Gestapo whip. They were tired and half-frozen from the biting cold. On their feet were wooden shoes. Paper-thin clothes covered their bodies. Their coats were torn rags. They had come to threaten a work stoppage and a hunger strike unless there was an increase to the bread rations and the minimum wage from 20 to 30 zlotys a week. There were also allegations that the
Judenrat
had skimmed food from the allocation and were distributing it at their own discretion. Members of the
Judenrat
now watched in alarm from a window on the second floor. In spite of the presence of the Jewish police force, the crowd tore off the entrance door and swept into the building.

At the door of Leon Kopinski, the
Judenrat
’s president, one worker reportedly yelled: ‘You want us to die from hunger. Give us the bread that we are owed for the work.’ Then Kopinski’s door was smashed. Kopinski relented fairly quickly. His leadership may have been self-serving and guilty of political cronyism, but he was no henchman. It was a small victory for the workers of the ghetto, but one that lifted morale enormously.

Six months later, the ghetto’s population had increased to almost 50,000, after some 20,000 Jews from the surrounding area were forced in. This small, enclosed slum now heaved with the traumatised and the hungry. Food and water were scarce and sanitation became non-existent. Many Jews lived in mass lodgings known as ‘death houses’, because large numbers of the inhabitants died from disease and hunger. The establishment of these super ghettos was the brainchild of Reinhard Heydrich, and they were set up in every city as part of the plan to concentrate Jews near railway junctions for future deportation.

* * *

My hotel room in Częstochowa drew the cold and the damp of the night. This was possibly the shabbiest and most depressing place I had ever been. Somewhere beneath me, in the vast, high-ceilinged dining area, a two-man combo with a bass guitar and a cheap organ played a medley of monotonous tunes that vibrated continuously and irritatingly up through the floor. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, but my train to Warsaw was not due to leave until 2.00pm the following day.