Free Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling by Mark S. Smith

Christian-Polish side of town. I sat down and ordered a pizza – all that was on the menu – and a beer. I was served by a teenage boy with good English. He told me how every summer the young people of the town would swim in a small, nearby river. It was the river where Hershl had learned to swim, and I thought about him floating face down in the River Clyde in faraway Scotland. The teenager told me his ambition was to travel in America. He said he wanted to meet people of different nationalities and different faiths, and I thought that there was hope for this town, this country. It also felt better to be off my feet, and my head began to clear with the first bite of warm food. But something was out of place in my mind, and I decided to call Rebecca Bernstein in Canada. It was morning in Winnipeg and she would surely be awake by now.
    ‘Rebecca,’ I said, ‘I’m in Klobuck.’
    ‘You’re in Klobutsk?’ she asked, using the Yiddish name for the town.
    ‘Yes, I’m in Klobutsk.’
    ‘You’re crazy,’ she said.
    ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Rebecca, I need to know something about Hershl in Klobuck. I need to know what it was like to live next door to him when he was a child. I also need to know what happened here, and what happened to Hershl.’
    I could hear her breathing and gathering herself to speak. At last, she said: ‘I used to call him Hershele. It was a special name for the nicest and kindest little boy you could imagine. I was eleven and I think he was a year older. I really loved him you know, but there was another girl that lived across the street he liked better than me. But we were all friends, all the children from that corner of the shtetl, and we all used to swim together and play together. It was a wonderful time. Then the Germans came and everything changed.’
     

 
    By 1939, the map of Europe was already changing as a consequence of German opportunism and aggression. In 1936, Hitler moved troops unopposed into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, directly contravening the Treaty of Versailles. Neither France nor Britain took action against him. Although the Rhineland had been intended as a buffer zone between France and Germany, the French were clearly unwilling to fight for it. Emboldened, Hitler now turned his gaze east.
     
    In 1938, the dictator annexed Austria, whose prime minister was soon assassinated. That same year, the Munich Conference gave Hitler Sudetenland, under the pretext of alleged privations suffered by ethnic Germans. The region now became the new protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared: “We have peace in our time.” The remainder of Czechoslovakia, powerless to resist, fell to Germany on 21 September, 1938.
     
    Less than one year later, on 1 September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began.
     

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
    ‘It’s not your fault,’ she snapped. ‘The Jews from Klobuck, those of us who survived, we all used to meet every year in Florida. Every year, I used to ask about Hershele, if he was here, what happened to him. We’d heard that he survived, but we didn’t know where he was. Every year, I used to look for him, hoping that one time he would come, but he didn’t.’
    She asked if Hershl had grandchildren. I had to tell her Hershl’s two sons were also haunted by the terror of the Holocaust. ‘You never know, but I don’t think there will be any grandchildren. I can’t speak for them, but I don’t think either of them want to bring children into a world where they will suffer like they did.’
    ‘That’s the real tragedy. I have a beautiful grandson, who is already 28. But Hershele was in Treblinka. That explains it. All those people went there to die and he had to watch it. My parents died in Treblinka, but I was taken to a work camp near Klobuck, and I survived. My parents ran away from the ghetto in Klobuck to Częstochowa, where we had relatives. But then the