Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (29 page)

‘This is Felicia, my sister,’ Sylvia said.

‘Hello,’ Felicia said, and shook my hand weakly.

Sylvia offered coffee and I settled on black tea. I noted that Felicia was more confident than her younger sister. Sylvia invited me to sit and went off to the kitchen. I explained to Felicia what I was doing, although I assumed she already knew, and she nodded and smiled. I told her that I was missing a good deal of information about her cousin’s arrival in Scotland. I told her I was interested in his behaviour – how he reacted and how people reacted to him after what he had been through. I wanted to know if there were already signs of his ultimate fate. I also told her about my trip to Poland earlier that year and I pulled out my laptop to show her photographs of what was left of the shtetl her father had come from. She smiled, but seemed quite unimpressed – although perhaps she was also unimpressed that I was delving into family matters that were none of my business.

Then she surprised me. Felicia told me she did not know Hershl had been in Treblinka.

‘I knew he was in a concentration camp, but that was all,’ she said. I concluded, privately in my notebook, that in spite of being cousins she and Hershl could not have known each other very well. She was hard to gauge, because her responses were guarded. I wondered if Hershl’s suicide disturbed the sisters; perhaps they harboured some guilt about the way Hershl’s life had unfolded and the way he died.

Sylvia came back with the tea. She too looked at the photographs of pink and brown houses amid the Polish mud. She seemed more interested than her sister, and appeared genuinely pleased when I offered to send her copies of the pictures.

‘I was hoping you might remember something of Hershl when he came to Scotland,’ I said.

‘You mean Henry,’ said Felicia.

I had forgotten Hershl was the Yiddish rendering of his name, and that he only spoke Yiddish in his home and to his immediate family.

‘Yes, Henry,’ I said. ‘Do you speak Yiddish?’

‘We spoke English only in the house,’ said Felicia. ‘Yiddish was very much considered the language of the past.’ She smiled, but seemed uncomfortable. ‘We didn’t see much of him, you know. So I don’t know how much help we’ll be.’

‘How old were both of you when Henry arrived?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I would have been eight,’ said Sylvia. ‘And Felicia would have been nine.’ Then she added: ‘It’s funny that you mention Yiddish, because I remember my father lying in bed, writing letter after letter in Yiddish when I was very young. He must have been writing to Henry and maybe to the authorities for permission to bring him here.’

‘I don’t suppose you have kept any of that correspondence?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid we wouldn’t keep that kind of thing,’ said Sylvia.

I told the sisters how after liberation the survivors – about 300,000 people – had been housed in displaced persons camps in Germany because they could not go home and every country had more or less closed their doors to immigration. However, following a statement in the British Parliament in late 1945 and a slow start in 1946, the official machine swung into action. In 1947, reports from the time reveal that more than 10,000 applications for British citizenship for refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were granted. Hershl was among them. He left Yaja, his young wife, behind in the D.P. camp in Tirchenreuth and promised her they would reunite as soon as it could be arranged. Their parting must have been painful, knowing as I did how deeply they loved one another.

I imagined him on the deck of a steamer, thin as a coat rack. He carried with him a fragile hope and the clothes on his back, plus a few possessions in a bag he clutched, among them the pale green book – proof-positive of the unthinkable mass murder he had witnessed – his naturalisation papers, and the sponsorship details from his Uncle Louis. He was twenty years old, but he had lied about his age so he could be legally adopted as a minor. He was still painfully thin and could have passed for a boy considerably younger. A few hours later the shipped docked, where he passed through immigration and using pidgin English learned from listening to Americans, he made his way by tram to Liverpool Street station in London. From there, he travelled on to Newcastle, where the eldest Goldberg brother, Sam, now lived. Hershl stayed only a few days before making his way north to Glasgow, where Louis was waiting for him. The train arrived early in the morning.

Sylvia said: ‘He just appeared one day at the dining room table. I remember waking up that morning and going downstairs, and there he was, sitting and eating breakfast.’

‘And how long was it before Yaja arrived?’ I asked.

‘You mean Yetta?’

‘Yes, Yetta.’

‘I suppose about a year, but I think they moved out soon afterwards.’

‘What else do you remember?’ I asked.

‘I suppose I remember he was very thin, and he was wearing a white shirt,’ Sylvia said. ‘I remember feeling a bit annoyed also, because my sister and I were never allowed to eat breakfast at the dining room table, but here was this stranger doing just that.’

And what must Hershl have observed, this young man, whose childhood had been obliterated and whose experiences were already far beyond those of any age? I remembered Sam had told me Hershl had felt the loss of his mother most acutely and therefore felt naturally close to her side of the family. He had expectations of them, as they did of him. Hershl had also told Sam that Sylvia was cute and had reminded him of the sister whose name he could not utter. Sylvia had been the same age as Frumet when she died. Yet he must have felt like an alien at this table, in this house, in this affluent neighbourhood – or anywhere in the outside world after all he had been through.

By the time Hershl arrived in the autumn of 1947, Louis had already made his fortune in a dress factory that during the early part of the decade had become connected to the war effort. Louis had originally called his factory Goldberg’s, but changed the name to Gilbert because Goldberg’s was already the name of a busy department store in the city. In 1947, with the hardships of rationing still in place, bartering became a way of life throughout Britain, and Louis grew richer on the rampant black market.

‘Did your father explain to you what was happening at the time, I mean with Hershl?’ I asked.

‘He just said, “This is Henry, your cousin, who has come from Germany and he’s going to be staying with us for a while.” And that was that,’ said Sylvia. ‘We just accepted it. I think his English was understandable, because we didn’t speak a word of Yiddish in our house.’ Another testament to Hershl’s language skills, I thought.

Before long, however, it was clear that things were not going according to plan. It was obvious that neither Hershl nor the Gilbert family had the remotest understanding of each other. How could he understand these people? How could they possibly understand him?

Felicia said: ‘We were a house of three girls, including my mother. I think Henry was the son that my father never had, but because of his circumstances, he couldn’t give back. My father did everything for him. He fed him, clothed him, gave him work in the factory and paid him. He even bought him a flat. Later, he even helped him set up in business.’ I asked her about her relationship with Hershl – I wanted to know if it was close or distant. ‘We didn’t really have a relationship with him. How could we? I mean, the way he was.’

I also asked her about a dispute that Sam told me had occurred over Hershl’s education. Soon after his arrival, Hershl enrolled himself in Stow College in Glasgow to improve his English – which he did, very quickly. Sam told me that after a week or two in college, one of the teachers came to the house to see Louis. He told him Hershl had shown some educational aptitude, and that he had expressed interest in becoming a doctor or a dentist. The teacher said he would help as much as he could, but funding was required for the tuition fees. Louis refused.

Felicia turned her head to one side as if she were slapped. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said, coldly. Then she said, ‘If he hadn’t got that money from South Africa, I always thought that maybe he would have tried harder to make it.’

‘What money from South Africa?’ I asked, slightly stunned by the response. Sylvia and Felicia looked at each other. Between them, they told me a story about how the Sperling family’s financial fortunes had changed in 1956 with the death of their Aunt Florie, younger sister of Hershl’s mother. Florie had emigrated from Klobuck to Umtata in South Africa, after an arranged marriage in the early 1930s. Following the death of her husband, she came to Glasgow and moved in with her brother, Meyer. When she died, in accordance with her will, Florie’s inheritance was split between Hershl and his Uncle Meyer. Childless Florie had divided her inheritance – a sum of about
£
50,000 – between the two neediest members of the family.

Felicia, speaking about one of the Sperlings’ trips to Israel, said, ‘I can tell you, Henry didn’t get on very well there. He went there and spent money like water. Israel was a much poorer country in those days, and that kind of behaviour just upset people. Henry was always emigrating or going somewhere, but he always came back to Glasgow. I think he felt safest in Glasgow, because it was the place where he had first come.’

Conversations with Alan and Sam later revealed that Hershl, who was always by nature generous, had distributed some of his inheritance to Yaja’s family in Israel. This may well explain Felicia’s accusation that Hershl had spent money like water. Meanwhile, Sylvia added: ‘I think he also didn’t get the sympathy he was looking for, because of course there are a lot of Holocaust survivors in Israel and no-one was interested in his story.’

‘Maybe there could have been a better support system in place for survivors,’ Felicia conceded.

‘Well that must certainly be true,’ I said. ‘He’d been through a lot. He always struck me as an intelligent man, whose attempt at living life was crushed at the get-go. He never had a chance.’

‘It’s funny,’ Felicia said. She tilted her head. Her eyes looked straight at me. I was struck by the harshness of her stare. ‘I never thought of him as intelligent,’ she said, ‘but in those days people associated education with intelligence, and of course he had had no education. I always thought of him as more cunning than intelligent.’ I asked for a specific example. ‘I wouldn’t tell you – even if I could remember. I don’t want anything bad written about him.’

How was it possible to survive Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz, where he had managed to pass himself off as a gentile, and not be cunning? I now realised that it must have been apparent to him that if his closest living relatives could not understand him or the terrible fate that had befallen the millions of others, the rest of the world could not grasp it either. Perhaps they understood the dead, but it was the living they could not fathom. Did they not wonder at his tortured cries in the night, even though, to them, he was normal and ‘cunning’ during the day? They could not have known about the horrific images and the all-encompassing loneliness that engulfed each moment of his life, about the fires of burning flesh, or the man begging to die beneath him in the forest, or the terror he still felt when he remembered the eyes of Mengele, or even about the adrenaline rush he felt when he held stolen goods.

Sylvia’s husband arrived. We shook hands, and he flopped on the couch.

‘Well,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Any buried family treasures?’

‘Not in this family,’ said Sylvia.

On my way home, I detoured again past the sandstone tenements of Westmoreland Street, and I imagined I saw Hershl standing on the corner, his pale green eyes gazing helplessly at the world.

* * *

The following day, I called Sam. As I was reading some of my notes on my conversation with Sylvia and Felicia to him, he interrupted. ‘I think I know where their bitterness comes from.’

‘Where?’ I asked, then tried to answer my own question. ‘I got the impression that neither Hershl nor Louis lived up to one another’s expectations, and that there was tension between them. Maybe, from their point of view, they were kind and generous relations to him, but he shrank from them and they shrank from him. It must have been difficult to have a disturbed Holocaust orphan in their home – who must have suffered, but, save an Auschwitz tattoo, showed no outward scars.’

‘For sure,’ said Sam. ‘But I think Louis had other plans. I think he wanted my father to become more involved in his business. I can’t prove any of this, because it’s just what my father told me. There was also a story about Louis wanting him to marry some distant female relative, which astonished him, because, you know, he was already married. I think Louis wanted him to forget about my mother and leave her in Germany, but he wouldn’t do it.’

Louis died in the mid-1950s and was therefore unable to defend himself against these claims of what appear to be perhaps benevolent manipulation. When I told him that Felicia had described Hershl as ‘cunning’ rather than intelligent, and she had ‘associated intelligence more with education’, he laughed.

‘When did he have the time to go to university? He didn’t even make it out of primary school.’

‘What about your father’s life in the years immediately after he left their home? How much do you know about that? I know it was still before you were born.’

‘You need to talk to Alan about that,’ he said. ‘He was there.’

* * *

Hershl and Yaja were married for the second time on 6 February 1948, shortly after her arrival from the Hook of Holland. I purchased a copy of the marriage certificate from the Glasgow City registry offices. Their address is given as 6 Otterburn Drive, the Gilbert residence. His age is recorded as eighteen, even though he was twenty, and his occupation listed as ‘furniture warehouseman’. Her occupation is ‘domestic servant’. Louis Gilbert and his wife Annie are named as the witnesses. Unlike the first wedding in Germany, this was merely a civil formality. Yet it must have been a happy day. I imagine Hershl finding the proceedings vaguely ridiculous, because neither thought much of national laws. He laughed about it later.