Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (22 page)

My daughter was angry when she found out we had complained to the school. I told her, ‘You’ve got to deal with these kind of things head-on, or else it just won’t stop, believe me.’

‘I wish I’d never told anybody I was Jewish,’ she said.

‘You should be proud of what you are,’ I told her. I pulled her into a hug. I could see how upset she was and how these daily taunts were grinding her down. ‘You shouldn’t have to hide,’ I said. ‘Look, what do you want to do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll just keep dealing with it in my way. I don’t want to make it worse.’

‘Believe me, it will get worse, especially if you don’t deal with it right away. I think you should report it, and if you don’t want to do that, I’ll report it for you and I want the names of individuals.’

She sighed as if I were being impossible. ‘It won’t help. It’ll just make things worse for me.’ The discussion was going round in circles and I was becoming frustrated. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s agree that if it gets worse or continues, either you or I – or both of us – will go up to the school to confront this. There are laws against racism, you know. You shouldn’t have to go through this. No-one should.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, stubbornly.

‘Do we have an agreement?’ I persisted.

She pouted, the way teenage girls like to, and she eventually agreed. I hugged her again, but I knew she was right. That night I sat on my back step and thought how easy it was to hate the Jews, and no number of Holocausts past or future would ever change that fact. Jews were different from everyone else, and they were a minority. The point was that we weren’t really different, they just thought that we were. I understood the roots of anti-Semitism perfectly, the Christ-killer teachings of the Catholic Church and the economic jealousies – but there was something deeper. I scribbled thoughts into my notebook about modern-day tribalism and the natural defence mechanism of the primitive herd mentality. Things that are different threaten us and must therefore be annihilated. Was that really all that human beings were?

I remembered Hershl and his fascination with wildlife documentaries. He had understood man’s animalistic ways perhaps better than anyone else, and that our precious civilisation was nothing more than a thin veneer. Was that the truth he couldn’t live with in the end? He had seen things that no human being should ever see.

Sam told me on the telephone one night, ‘If there were only twenty Jews left in Europe, they would still want to kill them. Europe is a primitive backwater for Jews. It cannot change its essence.’ Like a battle between good and evil, as long as anti-Semitism and all forms of racial hatred persisted, stories such as Hershl’s would have to be written.

The next morning, Nazi documentation from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen arrived by email. There would be more revelations now.

I waited until after lunch before calling Sam to discuss the collection of documents from Bad Arolsen. He had told me previously he didn’t think he could handle ‘that kind of thing’ during the morning and, besides, Sam was a late riser. The International Tracing Service had sent these particular papers directly to Sam, after I had applied for him – because they would only release the information to a relative of Hershl. When they arrived, Sam scanned them and emailed them to me – but he had not studied them very closely. In all the Nazi documentation that has survived, Hershl’s name appears just five times. When I called, I sensed Sam’s reluctance to look at the documents with me, but in the end he relented. I was grateful, but again I felt guilty for asking him to look.

The collection included two concentration camp documents – one from Auschwitz and the other from Dachau. Both bore the name ‘Szperling’ and three different numbers in the spiralled handwriting of some unknown, low-level Nazi functionaries.

‘It really annoyed me that they gave him more than one number,’ Sam said.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘It’s part of the inhumanity.’

On one of the documents, bearing the words ‘
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
’ across the top, one administrator had crossed out Hershl’s number, 154356, and replaced it with 110572. This was bewildering until the document bearing the words ‘
Konzentrationslager Dachau’
– which had given him yet another number, 127871 with the word ‘
Jude
’ above it – revealed he had come from Sachsenhausen, the principal Nazi camp in the Berlin region, and that 110572 must have been his number there.

‘I had absolutely no idea he was in Sachsenhausen,’ said Sam. ‘He didn’t mention it even once, just Dachau after Auschwitz. That was all he said.’

The Auschwitz document, which was undated, related to Hershl’s transfer to Sachsenhausen. A document from the International Tracing Service revealed that his Sachsenhausen number was issued on 26 October 1944. A further document confirmed that he was liberated in Dachau itself, as Sam already knew, although he had been shipped first to one of the eleven Kaufering sub-camps. Precisely which Kaufering camp he was in was not specified. However, the bare bones of the clinical documents belied the death marches, the cramped freight trains, and the torments of each new camp he entered, each one with its own number and its own brand of inhumanity.

‘He never spoke about Kaufering either.’

‘That makes, let me see –’ I counted through all the camps – Treblinka, Radom, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Kaufering and Dachau – ‘seven’ I said. ‘That must be some kind of record.’

From the late spring of 1944 onwards, the Germans were fighting a defensive war on all fronts. The Allies had advanced northward through Italy. In the west, they had crossed the English Channel to Normandy on D-Day. The bombing of German industrial sites and key military positions continued without respite. To the east, the Soviet westward advance was unstoppable. Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year Reich and a Jew-free Europe populated by German settlers and their slave
untermenschen
was now in tatters.

The more Germany’s defeat became inevitable, the more Hitler’s hatred of the Jews increased. According to the Führer, the Allied bombing of German cities was the work of the Jews. Beginning in the late spring of 1944, Auschwitz conducted the swift and frenzied annihilation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews. Hershl must have watched in dismay as those trains arrived, the chaos that followed as the wagon doors were flung open, and all the tears, the wailing, the selections and the tragic processions to the gas chambers. Hershl’s
strafkompanie
barracks at Birkenau’s BIId looked directly onto the so-called ‘ramp’ where these trains stopped – all of it sickeningly familiar to him.

At the same time, the Germans were pulling back to the fatherland. By July 1944, Soviet troops had reached the border of Poland and, in the process, had stumbled upon Majdanek concentration and extermination camp nearly intact, in spite of Nazi attempts to destroy the evidence. As the Red Army offensive pushed farther west during the second half of 1944, the SS administration began evacuating Auschwitz. In spite of Hitler’s anger, necessity dictated that the last stage of the Final Solution be delayed and the Führer finally conceded the need for Jewish slaves on German soil to support the war effort. Over the next six months, thousands of prisoners were transported to camps in Germany.

The documents from Bad Arolsen reveal Hershl was still in Birkenau’s
strafkompanie
on 10 August 1944, when the list of detainees notes that one of the prisoners was released. It is the last date in the incomplete documentation. The length of Hershl’s detention suggests that he had probably committed the worst possible crime in Auschwitz – attempted escape. However, it also meant that he had probably managed to hide the fact that he was Jewish for at least a year and a day, before he ended up as a potential specimen for Mengele. The list of
strafkompanie
detainees is particularly moving because it notes the names of some of those who had arrived with him in the Polish contingent from Radom and also the dates of their deaths, some just days after their transfer to the penal commando. The list reveals the names, dates of birth and the abbreviation ‘
Gest
’ for the German ‘
gestorben
’, or deceased. Hershl appears to have been the youngest prisoner in the
strafkompanie
by at least ten years. Many of those listed as ‘
Gest
’ were in their late fifties when they succumbed to the harsh conditions of the penal commando. Next to Hershl’s name was placed the abbreviation ‘B.A.W.’, signifying ‘for the present’ and meaning that he was currently serving his time in the
strafkompanie
and ‘for the present’ he was alive.

On 7 October 1944, several hundred
Sonderkommando
prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebelled after learning they were going to be killed. During the uprising, the prisoners killed three guards and blew up a crematorium and an adjacent gas chamber. They used explosives smuggled into the camp by Jewish women who had been assigned to forced labour in a nearby armaments factory. The Germans crushed the revolt, and killed almost all of the prisoners involved. The women who had smuggled the explosives into the camp were hanged in January 1945, an event that Hershl was not around to witness. According to Sam his father never mentioned the revolt at Birkenau.

We can never be certain, of course, what Hershl was thinking. But I suspect he would have considered the revolt courageous yet foolhardy. His system for survival – taught to him by experts and through his own experience at Treblinka, and perfected at Radom, Auschwitz and in the Birkenau
strafkompanie
– was to be invisible, and when possible to use daring, cunning and intelligence. Isolated acts of bravery were futile against the Nazis.

Sam said, ‘He was always able to act normally in abnormal situations. He never did anything hastily. He was always capable of being inconspicuous. That was something he knew from Treblinka, but I suppose it was partly instinctive as well.’

‘The less you move and draw attention to yourself, the greater your chances of survival,’ I said.

‘That’s exactly it.’

Some days before 26 October 1944, Hershl and the rest of the transport were sent through Birkenau’s ‘hole in the world’ for the last time, and they were marched north to Gleiwitz, the town on the former Polish-German border where the war had been triggered on 31 August 1939, now Gliwice. The prisoners, most of them skeletal, were not told where they were going. Many wondered if they were being taken to a field to be shot. Instead, they were marched 30 miles in a tight column of bodies, five abreast. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue. More than 3,000 prisoners perished on the road to Gleiwitz over the next few months. Upon arrival, they were crammed into boxcars and transported directly to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

‘Maybe this is how he escaped Mengele, by somehow getting himself into a transport that was leaving Auschwitz,’ I said to Sam. ‘When you’re in Mengele’s barracks, I don’t suppose it matters where you’re going, as long as it’s out.’

‘It’s possible. You know what a convincing actor he was. He’d already fooled the Germans and the Poles by pretending to be one of them.’

‘The great irony of this,’ I said, ‘is that most of your father’s time in Auschwitz was spent pretending to be a Polish political prisoner – and as bad as it was, conditions were still better than they had been for the Jews. For a start, there were no selections. Then he spent two or three months in the barracks of Dr Mengele – and as terrifying as that was, he would have been fed reasonably well and was secluded from the selections and daily violence. By the time he was marching to Gleiwitz, he must have been in relatively good shape.’ I added, ‘You know, he also missed the worst of these death marches, which took place in the freezing winter. And that was lucky.’

The train rolled slowly westward through innumerable days and nights deep into the hinterland of the Reich. It was Hershl’s third sealed wagon in as many years. The train arrived at its destination and the prisoners, dressed in their grey and blue striped concentration camp fatigues from Auschwitz, fell out of the box car half-dead, the light suddenly assailing them. SS guards stood waiting on the platform.

The documentation reveals Hershl spent less than a month at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp that had primarily held so-called political opponents and Russian prisoners of war, but was now rapidly filling up with Jews. A year earlier, it had been the centre of a massive counterfeit operation, in which more than one billion pounds worth of fake
£
5,
£
10,
£
20 and
£
50 notes were manufactured by Jewish forced labourers and injected into circulation in an effort to wreak havoc on the British economy. Six months after Hershl’s arrival it was also the starting point for one of the most gruelling death marches. More than 30,000 starving prisoners were marched northward away from the Allied and Russian advance. All, save a handful, were shot or dropped from exhaustion. But Hershl was long gone by then.

In mid-November 1944, he was shipped to Dachau, where upon arrival he was lined up with the other arriving prisoners, counted and dipped in a tub of disinfectant. The date of his arrival is noted as 17 November. The prisoners were then given a shower and issued clean uniforms that had been disinfected with Zyklon-B. Following this, they were kept in quarantine for two weeks in an effort to prevent the spread of disease, a precaution that had been introduced in the wake of a typhus epidemic the previous year.

Dachau was not an extermination centre like Treblinka. Nonetheless, the dual aim of Dachau was the use of manpower and the dehumanisation of its workers through a regime of savagery. Located on the grounds of an abandoned gunpowder factory near the medieval town from which it took its name, about ten miles north-west of Munich, it was the first concentration camp. It began its brutal operations within weeks of the Nazi takeover in 1933. Guards began murdering inmates from the very first days of the camp’s existence. The total number of dead may never be known. Soviet prisoners of war were summarily executed by the thousand, and civilians were arrested and sent to the camp by the Gestapo for
Sonderbehandlung
, or ‘Special Treatment’, another Nazi euphemism for murder. Camp records reveal there were 28,838 Jews brought from Auschwitz to Dachau between 18 June 1944 and 9 March 1945, Hershl amongst them.

In the early days of Dachau, before World War II, living conditions were relatively good, at least as a prison. However, the camp deteriorated as the war progressed, and by the time Hershl arrived, it was already overcrowded and disease-ridden. After the two-week quarantine, prisoners were assigned to work in one of Dachau’s 123 sub-camps.

Hershl was transferred to one of the eleven Kaufering camps, where – as the fury of the Allied bombing raids on German military installations increased – prisoners were used to lay roads and dig out massive semi-underground chambers for the construction of German warplanes. Bomb-proof production of the Messerschmitt fighter jet, the Me 262, was the goal. Conditions were brutal. Each prisoner had his tin cup and spoon tied to a string belt. Without these items, they would not receive their meagre rations at the end of the day. Witnesses have noted that prisoners dropped and died with extraordinary speed. Todt, the private German civil and military engineering company in charge of the operation, proved itself to be just as brutal as the SS in their maltreatment of prisoners.

The Kaufering camps, all between 40 and 50 miles south-west of the main Dachau camp, were located near the town of Landsberg, where Hitler had written
Mein Kampf
during his imprisonment after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The first Kaufering camp had been set up in June 1944, but by the end of September workers were so weak that many of them were transported back to Auschwitz for gassing.

‘My father told me the Germans used him for road building work,’ Sam said. ‘He told me that they harnessed him like a horse or ox, and made him pull things. German women in the town used to laugh and mock him and throw stones at him while he worked. That was something he sometimes spoke about, presumably because it wasn’t as painful for him as Treblinka. He spoke about Dachau and Auschwitz as if they were some kind of strange adventures. But Treblinka was a different story. He always said it was Treblinka that had done the damage.’

Conditions at the Kaufering camps, all of them created solely to house the Reich’s slave labourers, were awful. The guards reeked of alcohol and the prisoners reeked of urine, sweat, and terror. Inmates were bullied as they laboured twelve to fourteen hours a day with little food or water and were routinely beaten. In the ten months before liberation in April 1945, more than 14,000 prisoners were either murdered, died of malnutrition or dropped from exhaustion. They slept in semi-underground wooden huts with dug-out earthen floors. After the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces in January 1945, the the
muselmänner
were locked in their huts, which were then set ablaze. The ones that managed to get out were shot.