Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (23 page)

* * *

Closer scrutiny of the concentration camp documents revealed some startling details about Hershl, but far more about the oddities of Nazi form-filling requirements. The Auschwitz and Dachau papers state at the top that he was arrested under ‘
Schutzhaft
’. Translated from the German as ‘protective custody’, this was a term commandeered by the Nazis and used as a euphemism for the paralegal round-up of political opponents and Jews. The Auschwitz paper notes that Hershl had received six years of elementary schooling, which took his education to the summer of 1939, a couple of months before the Nazis arrived in Klobuck, when Hershl had been twelve years old. The same document states his occupation as ‘worker’, but mistakenly identifies his mother’s maiden name as ‘Kolberg’ instead of Goldberg, and gives Hershl the middle name of Israel, which he did not possess. Also somewhat bizarrely, his occupation on the Dachau document is stated as ‘
schlosser
’, the German for locksmith.

When I first saw this reference to ‘
schlosser
’ I grew somewhat excited because the locksmiths had played an extremely important role in the Treblinka uprising when they copied the key to the armoury, and thus allowed the insurgents access to weapons. I asked Sam if Hershl had ever demonstrated any knowledge of the mechanics of locks.

Sam laughed and said, ‘He wasn’t a locksmith. I can tell you he knew absolutely nothing about locks. He was useless at fixing anything. I remember he couldn’t even screw on a toilet-roll holder in the bathroom.’

Most peculiar were the descriptive physical details listed about Hershl on his ‘personal sheets’. The Nazis considered such information extremely important in their identification of Jews. The shape of his nose, which in Auschwitz was thought to be ‘straight’, was said to be ‘normal’ in Dachau. Oddly, my recollection is that Hershl’s nose was slightly hooked, something I would have thought the Nazis might have latched on to. However, perhaps it simply was not hooked enough for them to characterise it as a stereotypical Jewish nose. His mouth, it was said, was distinguished by a hanging lower lip in Auschwitz. But in Dachau, his lip was considered normal. I would concur with the Dachau description, because I recall nothing distinguishing about his bottom lip. It certainly did not hang. However, in both camps, his earlobe was regarded as ‘attached’, which in the pseudoscience of Nazi racial theory was regarded as a particularly Jewish trait. The noting of these characteristics was in part an attempt to associate Jews with images of the devil in medieval Christian folklore, all of which reappeared in Nazi propaganda – the huge, hooked nose, thick lips, bleary eyes and fat fingers. The issue of the earlobes was a Nazi twisting of the genetic terms dominant and recessive, which to them meant superior and inferior. All good Germans were handsome, blond, courageous, proud, with small noses, thin lips and, apparently, hanging ear lobes.

Hershl had two teeth missing on leaving Auschwitz one document reveals, but he had apparently lost another by the time he got to Dachau, a month or so later. His height was noted as 170 centimetres in Auschwitz, but he had lost five centimetres on arrival at Dachau.

‘All these discrepancies,’ said Sam, in a tone of mockery, ‘don’t really display Teutonic efficiency. It’s odd actually.’

‘It’s almost like the Auschwitz guy was in a hurry and he just made a cursory inspection and filled in some stereotypes, but the guy in Dachau took a slightly closer look,’ I said. ‘It also seems a little weird to me that they required his signature on these concentration camp forms, as if there was some kind of pretence going on that he had agreed to be there.’ I then asked Sam, ‘I take it that is his signature.’ Sam looked at the signatures at the bottom of the two documents. His voice seemed to tighten and I realised the sight of them had upset him.

‘Yes, that’s definitely his signature,’ he said, after a moment. The other documents that arrived included a copy of his
schreibstubenkarte
, or registration card from Dachau. It was dated 17 November 1944, the day he arrived at the camp. His new number and the word ‘Dachau’ on the card was typed – but next to it, in a handwritten pencil scribble, was the word ‘Kaufering’.

A few days later, I called Alan to tell him what I had discovered. He said, ‘I had no idea he was in Dachau, let alone any of the other camps. I thought he was in Treblinka and then liberated in Auschwitz, I knew he was liberated by the Americans, but to tell you the truth, until I was about seventeen I didn’t even know that Auschwitz was in Poland and that it had been liberated by the Russians. I thought Auschwitz was in Germany. It just shows you how little this kind of thing was discussed in our house.’

* * *

By the beginning of April 1945, the Allies had tightened their stranglehold on the heartland of the Reich and American and British bombers now flew virtually unchallenged across German skies. Hitler moved his headquarters from his Chancellery building in Berlin to a deep underground network of bunkers that lay just behind it. Poland had fallen and the Red Army pushed through Prussia and Hungary. On 2 April, Soviet and Bulgarian forces captured Nagykaniza, the centre of the all-important Hungarian oil industry. Germany lost the ability to power its tanks and aircraft. In the west, American and British forces surrounded the economically vital Ruhr pocket, whose industrial towns had been devastated. The Allied armies continued to push deeper into the Reich’s fast dwindling territory. Germany was now not only starved of fuel, but also essential medical supplies. Hitler refused to surrender, and to the end he was determined his enemies would not survive. Nonetheless, his concentration camps were in a state of chaos. On 11 April, the Gestapo headquarters contacted the administration at Buchenwald concentration camp, informing them that they were sending explosives to blow up the complex and its inmates. But the authorities there had already fled and the inmates were operating the camp. They sent a return message telling the Gestapo that Buchenwald had already been blown up. A few hours later, American troops arrived. One of those liberated that day was Elie Weisel, the Nobel Prize winning author.

Meanwhile, transports from the evacuated camps in Germany arrived continually at Dachau, resulting in a dramatic deterioration of conditions. The front was in a constant state of retreat. From the beginning of 1945 until liberation, some 15,000 people died in Dachau. After days of travel, the prisoners arrived weak and exhausted, often near death. There was little food or water for them on their arrival in a camp already overcrowded and lacking basic sanitation. Typhus was rife and prisoners died in ever increasing numbers.

On 12 April, the day of President Roosevelt’s death, General George Patton’s US Third Army crossed the Kyll River on the Western Front and advanced into the heart of the Reich, a spearhead that had been launched ten months earlier from the beaches of Normandy. The following day, the Russians took Vienna. Hitler issued a proclamation to the speedily retreating German troops on the Eastern Front. He promised: ‘A mighty artillery is waiting to greet the enemy.’ But the German Army was beaten and Allied bombers cut off the lines of retreat. This mighty artillery that Hitler had warned of would be just a few small battle groups of Hitler Youth with anti-tanks guns. In spite of Germany’s increasing hopelessness, armed units were still employed in moving and killing Jews. A handwritten note, now held in Bad Arolsen and dated 14 April 1945, bears the signature of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. The note reads: ‘A handover is out of the question … No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.’ That same day, the Ruhr pocket was crushed by the US First and Ninth Armies, and a British air raid on Potsdam killed 7,000 people. French forces overran Stuttgart and, in Italy, Polish forces entered Bologna. In Berlin, the Red Army had reached the city’s southern and eastern suburbs and the city’s defences were pierced.

On 18 April, Allied bombers carried out a final and massive air attack on Berlin, already piled with debris and blackened. The following day, as Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday with a party 50 feet below the ground in his bunker, Berlin shook with the sound of Soviet artillery. Hitler was now the Reichsführer in name only. To those who saw him, he was an old man, stooped, skin greyish, his face deathly pale. He shuffled when he walked, his left leg stiff from the explosion of the assassination attempt the previous July. Faithful Himmler, who had been one of the guests at the party, in an attempt to secure his own future once the war was over, made contact with the Red Cross in Sweden and tried to strike a deal with the Allies by sending 7,000 women prisoners from Ravensbruck concentration camp to Scandinavia. That same day, 20 Jewish children and 20 Russian prisoners of war who been taken from Auschwitz to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg for medical experiments were hanged.

On 22 April, Hitler ordered an all-out counter attack against the Russians in the suburbs of Berlin. The attack was to be led by SS General Felix Steiner. Later that day, Hitler held a military conference in the tiny bunker conference room and was told of the catastrophic state of affairs. The Russian and US armies would shortly link up at the River Elbe. In the south, the Americans were continuing their rapid advance on Munich, and the Americans and the British had taken up positions in the north. To the east, the Oder Front had collapsed. During the meeting, news also arrived that Russian troops had broken through the defences to the north of Berlin. Hitler then asked what had happened to Steiner’s counter-offensive. He was given disastrous news. Steiner had been unable to muster enough of an army and the attack was never launched. Steiner had also disappeared, clearly having decided this counter-attack was nothing more than a fantasy. The fall of Berlin was inevitable. On hearing the news, Hitler flew into a rage – a widely reported and infamous outburst – lashing out against the Jews. He told those assembled that the war was lost and that he would shoot himself when the end came.

As the US 42nd and 45th Infantry progressed toward Munich, some time between 24 and 27 April 1945, an estimated 12,000 prisoners from the eleven Kaufering camps – those who could still stand, Hershl among them – were mustered and marched toward Dachau. Around 2,400 prisoners were packed into trains and mistakenly attacked by Allies from the air. Meanwhile, those that were incapable of travel were locked in huts and burned.

The following day, members of the Twelfth Armored Division came upon the first Kaufering camp. They had been through 511 days of combat but what these battle-hardened soldiers saw at Kaufering was worse than anything they had witnessed on the battlefield. I found video footage of their experience in a short film made by the Abilene Christian University in Texas. It was devastating, showing the piles of twisted, emaciated bodies that littered the camp and in ditches, desperate expressions on the faces of the dead, interspersed with the traumatised recollections of the liberating soldiers. One of them, Carold Bland, said, ‘We drove in. There was a few of the Jewish prisoners, some almost crawling … I never believed a human being could look like that and still be alive.’ Another former solder, Brad Dressier, said:

This was what Hershl had left behind on the march toward Dachau. When the Bad Arolsen records first became publicly available in 2007, the Associated Press was given access to the files on condition that the victims were not identified. I discovered their report during my research. The documents examined included a sixteen-point questionnaire the Allies had given mayors and witnesses in several German towns in the days after the war – a unique picture emerges of a weakened SS brutally driving thousands of dying prisoners for days along the roads on no more than pieces of stale bread. In those questionnaires, most of the population claimed to have seen nothing. However, one German woman wrote:

An SS officer on a motorcycle threatened to kill his own men if any prisoner received food or drink from the townspeople, she said. Sam recalled, ‘My father told me he was rummaging through garbage for food.’

At some point during the march, Hershl did what he had always tried to do – he broke away from the group and escaped. Whether he hid or ran, was shot at or even pursued, we do not know. He was certainly starving, desperate and as close to death as he had ever been in his life.

‘He told me that he broke into a house and held up the people inside,’ Sam said. ‘He didn’t just go in and ask for help. He actually forced his way into the house. He was armed with some kind of weapon, maybe a stick or a knife. I don’t know whether the people in this house were sympathetic to him or hostile, but he went into the kitchen and began gorging himself with food. Then he collapsed unconscious.’

The documents sent to Sam and me from Bad Arolsen stated that Hershl had been ‘transferred to the Concentration Camp Dachau/commando Kaufering’ and that he was ‘freed as a prisoner of the Concentration Camp Dachau by the American Army’. In fact, in the end and teetering on the edge of death, Hershl had freed himself.

Dachau was liberated on 29 April 1945. A few days later, he woke up in an American field hospital in the camp, where he was informed that he had been liberated. There is no possibility now of finding out how he had arrived there. He was malnourished, exhausted and had contracted typhus.