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

Częstochowa ghetto was liquidated. I haven’t even got any pictures. I’m 80 now and I can’t remember my mother’s face anymore. But I do remember my little Hershele. He was such a wonderful little boy, always so kind. I could never forget him.’
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    In 1939, Klobuck lay just twelve miles from Germany. Hitler’s rise to power, nourished by his racial ideology, focused at first on the country’s deep sense of humiliation after its defeat in World War I and lingering resentment over the loss of the former German territories of Prussia and the city of Danzig. The Jews were blamed, in typically brutal language, for everything from the defeat in 1918 and the subsequent economic hardship, to rising inflation and even prostitution. Hitler demanded that the German people take up the ‘harsh racial struggle’ against the Jews. Germany could only become great again if the Jewish people were removed. But he did not just mean the Jews in Germany. His plans called for the annihilation of Jews everywhere. By attacking Poland, he could stake his claim to Prussia and at the same time launch a massive strike in a secondary war against the Jews in their largest community in Europe.
    It began bizarrely, late in the evening of 31 August 1939, in the German border town of Gleiwitz, some 80 miles south of Klobuck. A small group of German operatives entered the town and, at gunpoint, seized control of the local radio station. They proceeded to broadcast in Polish a message urging the residents of Gleiwitz to rise up against Germany.
    As part of the ruse, they brought along an ethnic German named Franciszek Honiok, who had been arrested the previous day as a Polish sympathiser, and murdered him with a lethal injection. Then they dumped his body outside the station and fired gunshots into it to make it look as though Honiok had been killed during an attempt to overrun the station. The idea was to make Germany look like a victim of Polish aggression. Honiok’s was the first death of World War II.
     

 

    The fact that he had been killed by lethal injection was ominous. The order for the Gleiwitz attack came from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst , or SD, the Reich’s intelligence service. Heydrich had taken a special interest in the Nazi’s euthanasia program. The headquarters were at Tiergartenstrasse 4, in Berlin, thus the codename T4. Under this initiative, some 80,000–100,000 Germans – physically and mentally disabled children and adults – were secretly killed by lethal injections or in gassing installations designed to look like showers. It was a vile foretaste of what was to come. Less than two years later, Heydrich would present the plans for the gassing of almost two million Jews in the death camps of Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. That murderous scheme was later named Operation Reinhard in Heydrich’s honour. Hershl had called them ‘Reinhard’s camps’.
    At exactly 4.00am the following day, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein slipped its moorings in Danzig harbour and shelled a Polish transit base on Westerplatt. The war had begun. In the south, Klobuck found itself in the unfortunate strategic position of sitting directly in the path of the German Eighth and Tenth Armies and the Fourth Panzer Division. An hour later, these forces crossed into Polish territory.
    News of the advance crackled by radio through the shtetl and the rest of Klobuck. The town went into a panic. Those Jews who had not yet heard about the German invasion were awakened by noisy crowds in the street. Icchak and Gitel Szperling had switched on their wireless early, as was their habit, and a sense of dread descended almost instantly. If they looked from their upstairs window, they saw a steady stream of citizens fleeing eastward out of the town. Against the advice of his wife, Icchak went out to make ready their horse and cart. Gitel woke Hershl and he in turn would have been instructed to wake Frumet. He was twelve and