Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (24 page)

The following day, the 1,000-year Reich ended with Hitler’s suicide, a single pistol shot to the head. As Soviet shells rained down on the Chancellery, Hitler’s body and that of his mistress, Eva Braun, were carried from the bunker to the courtyard. Their bodies were doused in gasoline by those who still remained faithful, and set alight. He left this world still blaming the Jews.

I imagine Hershl rising slowly from his hospital bed and moving to the door. Outside, bodies are still piled around the camp. American soldiers stride confidently about the grounds. Around them, the sick and demented move as if through a fog. A few weeks earlier, Hershl had turned eighteen. It was a new and terrifying world, and certainly not the one he had known before the Nazis came.

Hershl found himself in Dachau in the aftermath of liberation in a strange limbo between the trauma that lay behind him and the uncertainty that stretched ahead. This was the post-war chaos of Europe. Physically, he also lay between life and death. He was pencil-thin and ill. Beyond the doors of the army field hospital, there extended a reminder of the mass carnage that had occurred. A gruesome exhibition of corpses remained. An inspection team noted on 6 May 1945 that around 1,500 bodies were still strewn about the camp. The US Army, caught between the need to improve conditions and the determination to expose to the world the crimes of the Nazis, wanted to create a public record of the atrocities they had found. Within days of liberation, Dachau teemed with political observers, journalists and film crews. One of those was Hollywood director George Stevens, whose footage of the liberation and the immediate aftermath was soon played on newsreels in American and British cinemas. Hershl witnessed these scenes first-hand from the hospital door. It struck me now how almost every aspect of the Holocaust had touched him – from the panzers that ploughed toward Klobuck on the first day of the invasion, through the ghettos, death trains, the tortures and exterminations of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Mengele, concentration camps in Germany and liberation at Dachau. I wondered how anyone could ever hope to recover from so much horror.

In my search for clues, I scoured my notebooks, which were piled high on my desk and stuffed with scribbled pieces of paper I had slotted between the pages. I was convinced the answer to Hershl’s survival and his death lay in the memories and thoughts of his sons, because his suffering had been transmitted unconsciously to them over many years. I found one notebook, dated 23 March 2007, a time when I was just starting to write Hershl’s story. The notes were scribbled in a small, brightly lit Arab cafe on Finchley Road in London, where I had gone to eat with Sam, at about 7.00pm.

‘I eat here quite a lot,’ Sam said, smiling amiably. ‘The food’s good.’ He joked with the Moroccan waiter as we sat down on plastic chairs at a Formica table. I ordered some kind of couscous, and Sam ordered fish and chips.

‘Fish and chips in an Arabic café?’ I asked.

‘They make good Western food, too. Sometimes I have couscous or a kebab.’

We got down to the business of his father’s liberation. I began by telling him some of the things I had discovered in books about Dachau – about how it had been the Nazi’s first concentration camp, and that from its beginnings in 1933 had been intended for political prisoners, the majority of whom were not Jews. Its prisoners included the children of Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 sparked World War I. It was toward the end of 1944, I told him, that Dachau really began to fill up with Jews, when they were emptying the camps in the east as the Russians advanced westwards. On liberation, about a third of the 32,000 prisoners were Jewish. Now the waiter returned and asked what we wanted to drink. I ordered a beer, and Sam ordered coffee.

‘I haven’t drunk alcohol in years,’ Sam said. ‘It just makes my headaches worse.’

Again, I tried to jog his memory about anything Hershl might have said to him about that time. The drinks came. Sam was silent for almost half a minute. At last he said, ‘There wasn’t much about the period just after the camps. I do remember that my father told me that when he was in the hospital, there was a man in the next bed to him who warned him that they had to be wary of the Americans. He said they might still try to hurt the Jews and it was possible they might put them back into camps and start killing them again.’

‘That’s an understandable viewpoint,’ I said, sipping my beer. ‘Given what he had been through, I imagine he didn’t know who to trust, even his liberators.’

Hershl and the rest of the survivors in Dachau were kept in the camp until the typhus epidemic was brought under control. DDT was used to kill the lice, I told Sam. Many survivors described a feeling of numbness after liberation. I had read how they watched American soldiers in the courtyards, wearing big gloves and throwing baseballs back and forth with an energy and confidence that seemed almost superhuman. At the same time, the survivors shuffled back and forth through the camp. Most of them appeared demoralised beyond any hope of rehabilitation, beaten spiritually and physically, with no hope or incentive for the future. However, Hershl awoke in that hospital bed gripped with anger.

On a scrap of paper inserted between two folios of my notebook, I had recorded a comment from Alan about a week later. I had called him because sometimes Hershl provided different aspects of his story to each son. Alan told me: ‘He was very angry at the Americans for not giving him food right away. But of course there were good medical reasons for that.’

Many of the liberated perished the day the Americans arrived, after consuming the cans of food that were distributed. The survivors were not accustomed to such nourishing fare and many died after the first mouthfuls. The former inmates called these people ‘canned-goods victims’. Even when survivors knew the dangers, the food was irresistible. After weeks of eating three meals a day, many still complained of extreme hunger. Some survivors raided a local plant and devoured raw meat. Others got hold of DDT powder and used it to thicken soup. Another survivor died after consuming rat poison. These were deeply ingrained survival mechanisms that had become part of their being. Hershl hoarded food his entire life. I remembered the stacks of cans in the Sperlings’ kitchen cupboards.

I saw that I had scribbled my own thoughts below Alan’s remark. I had written, ‘It is almost impossible for us in our modern twenty-first century western lives to imagine looking at a scrap of rotten food on the street and consider consuming it. Few of us have experienced that kind of desperation, knowing that eating it will keep you alive for a few more days, perhaps long enough to survive.’

Our meals came. ‘You know that Alan probably has several months’ supply of food in his house at any time,’ said Sam. ‘My parents did the same thing.’

As Hershl recovered in the camp hospital, he still obsessively stuffed his pockets with food, unable to forget the bread that was given to prisoners once a day. Bread equalled life. I imagined him stuffing it into his shirt and creeping into bed. I imagined him recalling the gnawing hunger of Treblinka and Kaufering, and resolving to save the bread until the following morning, because the hunger during the work period was the worst. Witnesses have told of survivors, weeks after liberation, scouring garbage cans for eggshells. In the first few weeks of freedom, Dachau’s former prisoners were dying at a rate of 200 a day.

I suggested to Sam, ‘Perhaps his annoyance at the Americans was also related to a panic that set in after he realised he no longer had his tin cup and spoon. I’ve read about how these things were like symbols of life to Dachau prisoners, because losing them meant death.’

‘Maybe that was part of it. I don’t know. He never spoke about a tin cup and spoon.’ Paul A. Roy, one of the US commanders of Dachau, recalled:

Food shortages were alleviated almost immediately, partly because the Seventh Army provided several truckloads of food during the first week after liberation, but also, incredibly – amid the starvation and malnutrition – warehouses full of food were also discovered in Dachau itself, as were mattresses, blankets and other supplies. Fresh produce was requisitioned from the local population, although there was considerable German opposition.

Meanwhile, there were tens of thousands more survivors from Dachau’s sub-camps. They also needed to be cared for, as did the stragglers who had broken away and were just now coming out of hiding and those who had collapsed, like Hershl.

‘His system must have been in shock,’ I said. ‘Then there was the loneliness and outrage he must have felt, and the sheer chaos of liberation itself.’

‘Yes, but you see, he had hope then,’ Sam pointed out. ‘Hope is probably the most powerful drug known to Man. I think a lot of it had to do with his age. I don’t mean just physically. But I think eighteen is an age of youth and hope, and optimism against all the odds. I think people are naturally optimistic at that age.’

‘So, after the initial shock, when all the rage and the desire for revenge had subsided, came a basic human faith in possibilities.’

‘That’s it.’ After a moment he added, ‘You know, he told me he had thought about going out and taking revenge after the war, just going out and killing Germans, but in the end he decided against it. In the end, it was a question of morality. He didn’t want to become like the perpetrators, like the Nazis.’ I sensed pride in Sam’s voice.

‘I think that’s incredible,’ I said, and I pulled from my bag the translation of his father’s account, which he did not want to see, but I read him one line. ‘He was talking about the people being shoved into the gas chambers at Treblinka, and he wrote, “These screams go up to heaven, demanding revenge”.’ I added, ‘There it is.’ I wanted to say something encouraging, but found myself unable. ‘I’ve read so many things about how lost these survivors were for a long time after liberation.’

‘But he did have optimism then. He still wanted to live then. He told me that he felt better for a couple of years after the Americans liberated him. His mother had told him he would survive to tell the story and that he would go to Scotland. Remember that he knew he had relatives in Scotland. Although he loved his father, he was closest to his mother, and I think he felt a certain closeness to that side of the family.’

‘I guess he began the process of writing to his Uncle Louis almost right away, and beginning the immigration process as well.’

‘I’m sure that he did, but it took a long time to happen.’

‘It must have taken a long time for him to recover. I mean physically.’

Sam finished his meal and pushed his plate away. He took another sip of his coffee before speaking. ‘I have a photograph of him from that time. I think it’s at Dachau. It’s weird to look at. He’s painfully thin.’

‘Can I see it?’ I asked.

‘I have it in the flat. I’ll see if I can find it when we go back. I have all the photographs.’ Then he added, ‘Alan doesn’t want any of them. He finds looking at these photographs too upsetting.’ However, he didn’t show me the photograph later that night. I could tell it was difficult for him. He said it would take a while to locate it. A few months later, I pestered him about it and eventually he scanned the picture and emailed it to me.

I studied it closely. In the black-and-white photograph, Hershl leans on the ledge of a large, arched window of a brick house. It must have been taken just a few months after liberation, judging by the length of his hair, full and thick, not yet thinning into the classic male-pattern baldness he possessed when I first knew him 30 years later. He stands rake-thin in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and an open collar. His trousers are light and slightly formal, like the bottom half of a suit. Both pieces of clothing hang from his skeletal body; they were most likely part of the allowance of two shirts, two undergarments, two pairs of socks, a pair of shoes and a ‘good suit’ that was given to all former prisoners before their discharge from Dachau. He has a vague smile on his face and his ears stick out slightly comically. Yet a profound melancholy haunts his expression. For Hershl, this was still a time before the ghosts came.

* * *

The idea had been to repatriate the survivors as quickly as possible to their countries of origin, but it soon became clear this could not be achieved for the Jews because their families and communities had been devastated. The policy of the relief organisation UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), whose task it was to care for these refugees, was useless because it was based upon the assumption that the survivors would simply pick up their old lives. As the American authorities tried to clear the camp of the former inmates, Jews rejected outright the nationality labels that were imposed on them.

Most of them, plagued by illness and exhaustion, now found themselves in a world in which they had no place. At the practical level, the way out of Germany was blocked. As Jews, most were not welcome in the countries they had come from, especially in the east. In Poland, not even the murder of three million of its Christian citizens by the Nazis had cured the country of its anti-Semitism. Many Poles even applauded Hitler, because he had taken care of Poland’s ‘Jewish Problem’. Except for some sick children and a few young adults, there were no offers of refuge or immigration from anywhere around the world, even Israel, where the British Mandate allowed only 1,500 survivors to enter Palestine each month. Instead, some 330,000 Jews were now categorised in Germany as displaced persons, and hundreds of D.P. camps were established to alleviate the crisis.

In Dachau, efforts were made to connect survivors. On 25 June 1945, Rabbi Abraham Klausner, an army chaplain who was assigned to one of the camp’s field hospitals and later became the first Jewish advisor to General Eisenhower, published a list of some 25,000 names. This had an enormous impact on the camp, and it became a vital tool for survivors desperately trying to locate one another and their families. The names had been collected from survivors who had either seen someone or had heard that someone had been seen elsewhere. The list was typed by a group of survivors on paper that had been discovered in a warehouse in Dachau. Some 1,000 copies of this list were produced and distributed in the D.P. camps.