Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (21 page)

‘More crazy things turning out to be true,’ I said.

‘He liked Kunte Kinte. I think he related to him, the way he kept trying to escape and just wanted to be free.’

* * *

My wife and I were too late for the hourly bus that ran between Auschwitz Main Camp and Birkenau, the site of the gas chambers and the ovens, so we ended up taking a taxi and the driver charged us a small fortune. Birkenau was the site of the notorious Block BII, where the penal commando spent its nights and mornings, conducting its mindless drills, roll-calls and daily executions.

During the four-minute taxi ride – we would have walked had we known the way – my wife said ‘What an awful job Dr Piper has. I can’t imagine having to work everyday in that place and analyse SS documents about death and murder and punishment.’

I agreed, but before I could answer, Birkenau loomed up before our eyes. We walked along the remains of the single track, which cut through the archway in the dark brick of the main guard tower – the so-called ‘hole in the world’ – and into the camp. The vastness of the place was overwhelming, driving home the scale of the Nazis’ extermination plans. Hershl had not arrived here on a train, but probably in a truck with the 43 other Polish prisoners who were sent to the
strafkompanie
that day. Again, we did not bother with the museum. I had come here to look at BIId, the barracks where Hershl had been confined, and to try to get a sense of what he must have felt. We consulted the rectangles on the Birkenau plan, and moved through the enormous camp. While some of the buildings had been reconstructed, Hershl’s barracks was a ruined pile of bricks. It was surrounded by barbed wire and we couldn’t get in. The outline of the building was barely visible; the roof was gone and its walls were rubble. All the same, I imagined a sad young man here, free of Treblinka, but still suffering. I imagined I could feel his presence and see him standing amid the ruins, head bowed and motionless.

In spite of being isolated from the rest of the prisoners, the
strafkompanie
was housed next to the Auschwitz
Sonderkommando
, the men who dragged the bodies from the gas chambers, burned the corpses in the crematoria and cleaned the wagons. Terrible memories must have surfaced as he watched those Jews return from their tasks each day. Sometimes through the barbed wire he would have seen the trains unloading their victims on the ramp, and the procession of death that followed. That ramp was where Dr Josef Mengele stood each day and, with a movement of his hand, sent those ‘unfit for work’ to the left, signifying death in the gas chambers, and to the right those he deemed healthy. Guards marched up and down the ramp calling ‘
zwillinge
,
zwill
inge
,’ – ‘twins, twins’. Escape was almost impossible. Electrically charged barbed-wire fences surrounded the killing centre.

A few days later, Sam told me, ‘My father spoke about the people who ran to touch the fences to die on purpose.’ Then he asked, ‘Did they tell you anything about his tattoo and how he got from the
strafkompanie
into Mengele’s group?’

Hershl’s Auschwitz tattoo – the bluish-black number 154356 – was, as previously mentioned, placed atypically on his upper inside left arm. Altogether 404,222 numbers were issued. Of these, 270,726 went to men and 133,496 went to women. Everyone, including children – excluding those selected for extermination – received a number as soon as they arrived. To Hershl, the significance of his tattoo was enormous. He believed it had aided his survival, possibly by marking him for one of Mengele’s experimentation programmes, for which in the end he was not selected. In the 1960s Hershl had met other former Auschwitz prisoners in New York, who were also tattooed this way, and they, too, were convinced that the positioning had saved their lives.

Sam said, ‘It was neater than the other Auschwitz tattoos I’ve seen, and the lettering was bigger and bolder, and its position was different.’

‘Dr Piper thinks that some of the Radom prisoners were probably tattooed the same way,’ I told him. ‘And that it probably had nothing to do with Mengele.’

Dr Piper had brought in a Mengele scholar when I was there, a dark-haired, serious woman with glasses, who refused to smile and spoke only Polish. She said she was unaware of Mengele-specific tattoos. Then I asked Dr Piper if he had ever seen a tattoo like Hershl’s before, and he said probably no more than 100 out of the thousands that he had studied. He also said – and now I looked in my notebook and read Dr Piper’s quote directly to Sam – ‘There is no explanation and there is no mention of Mengele near his name. There are not enough records and there is no information about the way the tattoos were made. But I have been here 43 years, and I exclude nothing.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Sam. ‘If my father had been tattooed with all the prisoners from Radom, and at the same time as them, presumably he would have known that. He wouldn’t have spent such a long time trying to find out if it meant something significant.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘What do you think about it?’

‘It’s not a mystical thing; he believed the tattoo had a practical purpose. I think there is no doubt it had something to do with earmarking him for Mengele’s experiments. But the information to prove that has simply not been found.’

‘You know, Sam, Mengele didn’t conduct any of his experiments on Poles at Auschwitz – to my knowledge, it was only Jews and Gypsies.’

‘I see what you’re saying. At some point, they must have discovered he was Jewish.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, they certainly knew that he was Jewish in Dachau, because my father said there were German women calling him names like ‘Jewish pig’, while he was doing slave labour on the roads in the town.’

Given the time that he spent in Auschwitz, it seems likely this discovery came during his time in the
strafkompanie
. The dangers of such a discovery anywhere in the camp, let alone while serving in the feared penal commando, cannot be overstated. If he had been found out after an attempted escape, or any other of the major offences, he would have been executed immediately. It is safe to assume that he was sent to Birkenau penal commando as an offending gentile, and that from his arrival at Auschwitz on 2 October 1943 until his internment on 10 February 1944 in the
strafkompanie
, and probably for several months thereafter, Hershl successfully passed himself off as a Christian Pole. Conditions for a Pole in the penal commando may not have been any better than those for Jews at Auschwitz, but at least there were no selections, and it was always an improvement over Treblinka.

‘My father was always an extremely convincing actor,’ said Sam. ‘He could carry out a bluff and give nothing away. One time, he even flew from Israel to Britain on someone else’s ticket. He had been able to convince the security people he was another person. And you know what Israeli security is like. Another time, one of those times when he’d disappeared and the police found him in Ayr, he managed to convince the hotel manager and the police that he was Swedish.’

So Hershl committed an infraction during his time in the
strafkompanie
. It occurred to me that perhaps he had tried to run away again. Under typical procedure, he would have been stripped for whipping in the execution yard of Block BIId, and perhaps it was at this point he was revealed as a circumcised Jew. He was lucky not to be murdered on the spot. As an alternative, he may have been sent into a selection and from there was pulled for Mengele’s ‘special work detail’. If Hershl and Sam were right, then Hershl had already been marked out and was pulled from the
strafkom
panie
specifically for Mengele’s experiments. A third possibility is that he served his sentence in the penal commando and his Jewishness was discovered some time later.

Nonetheless, it is possible to estimate the date of Hershl’s arrival in Mengele’s barracks. During the summer of 1944, Mengele’s sterilisation program sought out relatively healthy young men and women in their late teens and early twenties. The initiative aimed to develop a cheap and efficient method of mass sterilisation that could provide another weapon against Germany’s enemies. They experimented with all manner of techniques, including massive dosages of X-ray and surgical castration. Sam’s father was among those ‘perfect’ specimens.

Mengele, always eager for a new specimen for his research programme, had looked directly into his eyes. Yet by then Hershl would have been skilled in the technique of ‘looking but not looking’, which had been taught to him by his surrogate father, Samuel Rajzman in Treblinka. He was inspected but never chosen. Mengele’s victims were spared from beatings, forced labour and random selections in order to maintain their good health. Here was luck contributing to the survival of Hershl Sperling.

The subjects selected for Mengele’s experiments were housed in three special barracks. The doctor reserved one barrack for his twin subjects, which also held dwarfs, the physically disabled and other so-called ‘exotic specimens’. This barrack was known as ‘the zoo’. The Angel of Death holds a special, nightmarish place in Holocaust history. He was driven by a desire to advance his career through notoriety in scientific publications, and he believed he had found his great opportunity in Auschwitz. He attempted to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes and conducting amputations and other brutal surgeries without anaesthetic. There was another barrack for pregnant woman and yet another for his castration victims. The majority of prisoners who had any connection with Mengele died.

‘Do we have any idea how or why he escaped from Mengele’s experimentation?’ I asked. ‘Did he ever hint at anything?’

‘Nothing, except the tattoo. My father said Mengele had inspected him several times, and made him look this way and that way. It wasn’t just once, but he was never chosen.’ He let the silence hang for a moment. Then he added, ‘My father told me once there was someone he knew in this barracks, and that guards had come in the middle of the night to take him. My father said when he returned one of his testicles had been removed. He was in agony, because they had done the operation without anaesthetic. That was the kind of thing they did. This wasn’t just a one-off encounter. This was a man my father knew very well in Auschwitz. He survived and my father kept in contact with him. Before I was born, when Alan was a child, they visited him in Israel. This was a real person who had had his testicle cut off.’

I called Alan to ask what he remembered about this visit in the 1950s. Like Sam, his brother possessed acute powers of recall.

‘I have a very clear memory of that day,’ Alan told me over the telephone. ‘It was a hot, stifling room in Tel Aviv and we met a man who was a little older than my father. I was maybe seven or eight. I remember my father and him were having a conversation in Yiddish. They were speaking as if I wasn’t there. Then I heard them talking about these terrible things. I don’t remember the exact words, but I knew what they were talking about. English and Yiddish were the same to me then. I never spoke about it with him later. When you grow up in a house with a Holocaust survivor – and in our case it was both our parents – you learned from a very early age that you didn’t ask about anything that was discussed. You just absorbed it and then it messes you up.’

* * *

A week after I returned from Poland, I went through a terrible period of hardly sleeping for a couple of months. I spent my nights immersed in thick volumes of Holocaust study. My mind was in turmoil. I argued with my wife and my children. My days were spent writing long tracts of mediocre accounts of human atrocities, which I later eliminated with angry strokes of red pen.

Over a period of three nights, I watched all nine hours of Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah
documentary, absorbing barbarity after barbarity. Another night, sitting at the kitchen table with my notebook and a tall glass of Scotch in my hand, I traced my gloom back to Poland. I had not wanted to return and I was sickened by it. The source wasn’t even Auschwitz or Treblinka, I realised, but Poland itself and the hatred that had made the German killing centres possible.

Running parallel to this was a crisis with my daughter and her secondary school. I had been blissfully unaware of it, until one Friday evening she and I went to the store for some ice cream. I parked in the little lot around the corner, gave her money and she ran in. A couple of minutes later, she ran back to the car, a panicked look on her face.

‘Where’s the ice cream?’ I asked.

She could hardly catch her breath and her face was red. A group of teenagers had harassed her at the entrance to the store, and some were shouting at her, ‘Jew, Jew, Jew.’

I was furious. I got out of the car. ‘Come with me,’ I said.

We went round the corner toward the shop and when the teenagers saw my daughter coming back with her father, they took off. But they stopped a little farther up the street and I walked toward them. I pointed at their faces and I threatened them. Then they smirked and denied they had done anything wrong.

‘Consider yourselves warned,’ I said, and we walked in to get the ice cream.

‘Did you know them?’ I asked my daughter.

‘They’re from school,’ she said. We didn’t go directly home, but drove around the streets a little bit, talking. It gradually emerged that as the only Jewish kid in a school of about 1,000 pupils, she had become the brunt of daily anti-Semitic taunts. What Jewish child in Europe has not suffered this humiliation? She was probably the only Jew the children had ever come across, and still, here it was. Where did this ugliness come from, in this little town in Scotland? Was it learned from their parents, who had learned it from
their
parents?

My wife and I complained to the school and we were told: ‘It’s not really racism. They’re just picking on her. It would be the same if she were fat or wore glasses. They’re just looking for something to pick on.’ Perhaps that kind of low-level tolerance of anti-Semitism is at fault, a kind of thin end of the wedge. The Scottish government at the time was running a ‘No Place for Racism’ poster campaign around the country. Although it was clear recognition of a problem, it seemed it did not apply to Jews. The school’s response either implied that a little bit of racism was acceptable or that they recognised the problem, but had neither the will nor the inclination to confront it.