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Authors: Mark S. Smith
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There were grocery stores, hat makers, an ironmonger and countless tailors. A number of Jews also made a living by smuggling goods to and from Germany across the border, particularly tobacco, saccharin and silk. One Jewish entrepreneur was known for shooing his geese into the air just before the German frontier and gathering them up on the other side, where he could sell them for twice the amount without having to pay toll charges at the border. In Jewish textile shops, customers could find woollen fabric, white linen and the checked cloth worn by peasants. Now this was a muddy slope with a few ramshackle stone buildings arranged on the hillside. I followed paths to the left and right, feeling a terrible weight of sadness. I began to associate the life that had existed here with what I knew occurred later. All those Jews had one foot in the grave. Some buildings had bent roofs and cracked plaster scarred their walls. High, unkempt grass grew around them. A few were painted pink, blue and orange, like houses in a Chagall painting.
This is where Hershl came into the world on 10 March 1927, in the Szperling family home at 14 Staszysz. I knew that Hershl was the second of three children born to Icchak and Gitel Szperling, during the relative calm of the military dictatorship of Jozef Pilsudski. The eldest sibling died from a hole in his heart before the war. There was also a younger sister, whose name Hershl could not utter, but the little girl’s flaming red hair lives on in the memory of the handful of Klobuck survivors. A testimony lodged with the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem in 1953 reveals the little girl’s name was Frumet.
Together, the Szperling family operated a small livestock business in the summer, buying cattle from the countryside and selling it at various local markets. They also had a piece of land, acquired years earlier by Hershl’s grandfather, for grazing cattle and horses. Icchak simultaneously ran a tailor’s business and the family worked together repairing garments during the winter. They were not rich, but neither were they poor. In those days and in that place, they were considered well-off, at least compared with most of the other Jews in the town.
I followed another muddy pathway that bent to the left and back up the slope toward the town square. This little road had once been called Shul Street and it was where all the shtetl’s religious institutions were found. There were ritual baths, Hebrew schools, and the little study-houses of the Hassidim. At the square, facing the church, an old stone wall joined a wooden fence, behind which was more empty ground. This was the site of the synagogue. Strange, I thought, that nothing had been built on the land. Perhaps the people of Klobuck were superstitious. An icy wind blew, and I bent down and looked through a gap between the planks on the fence. I imagined I saw a group of Jewish children, among them young Hershl, maybe seven or eight years old, running down the steps inside the synagogue. Hershl, trained for his Bar Mitzvah and a life of religious observance at the synagogue’s school, knew that worshippers must enter the shul by descending a few steps to symbolically recall Psalm 1:30 – ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.’ How appropriate this quote was to Hershl’s life. Hershl’s community was deeply religious.
Hershl should have celebrated his Bar Mitzvah here, on this empty ground now covered with weeds and litter. More likely it was conducted secretly. On Passover, Klobuckers liked to say: ‘It’s not so much the seder, but the matzoh ball.’ There was also communal mourning. Elie Erlich, a young man who had emigrated to Palestine a year earlier, joined the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and fell at the Battle of Estramadura on 16 February 1938, along with 100 other volunteers of the brigade’s Jewish company, fighting against the rising tide of Fascism in Europe.
Yet Klobuck was an idyllic
This is where Hershl came into the world on 10 March 1927, in the Szperling family home at 14 Staszysz. I knew that Hershl was the second of three children born to Icchak and Gitel Szperling, during the relative calm of the military dictatorship of Jozef Pilsudski. The eldest sibling died from a hole in his heart before the war. There was also a younger sister, whose name Hershl could not utter, but the little girl’s flaming red hair lives on in the memory of the handful of Klobuck survivors. A testimony lodged with the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem in 1953 reveals the little girl’s name was Frumet.
Together, the Szperling family operated a small livestock business in the summer, buying cattle from the countryside and selling it at various local markets. They also had a piece of land, acquired years earlier by Hershl’s grandfather, for grazing cattle and horses. Icchak simultaneously ran a tailor’s business and the family worked together repairing garments during the winter. They were not rich, but neither were they poor. In those days and in that place, they were considered well-off, at least compared with most of the other Jews in the town.
I followed another muddy pathway that bent to the left and back up the slope toward the town square. This little road had once been called Shul Street and it was where all the shtetl’s religious institutions were found. There were ritual baths, Hebrew schools, and the little study-houses of the Hassidim. At the square, facing the church, an old stone wall joined a wooden fence, behind which was more empty ground. This was the site of the synagogue. Strange, I thought, that nothing had been built on the land. Perhaps the people of Klobuck were superstitious. An icy wind blew, and I bent down and looked through a gap between the planks on the fence. I imagined I saw a group of Jewish children, among them young Hershl, maybe seven or eight years old, running down the steps inside the synagogue. Hershl, trained for his Bar Mitzvah and a life of religious observance at the synagogue’s school, knew that worshippers must enter the shul by descending a few steps to symbolically recall Psalm 1:30 – ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.’ How appropriate this quote was to Hershl’s life. Hershl’s community was deeply religious.
Hershl should have celebrated his Bar Mitzvah here, on this empty ground now covered with weeds and litter. More likely it was conducted secretly. On Passover, Klobuckers liked to say: ‘It’s not so much the seder, but the matzoh ball.’ There was also communal mourning. Elie Erlich, a young man who had emigrated to Palestine a year earlier, joined the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and fell at the Battle of Estramadura on 16 February 1938, along with 100 other volunteers of the brigade’s Jewish company, fighting against the rising tide of Fascism in Europe.
Yet Klobuck was an idyllic
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