By Katherine Waters
Sun Staff Intern
NORWICH – An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor spoke to an audience of Norwich Middle School students last Friday, relating the experiences of her ordeal and how it has changed her life.
Helen Sperling began her presentation with a simple fact: “I am a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust.”
From that point on, she told students about her experience as a young woman living in Nazi-occupied Poland.
“I was very well loved, very spoiled, and very independent,” said Sperling, referencing her childhood. She said her family was large and celebrated many birthdays and holidays at her grandparents’ house and then her house after her grandparents died. But it was in 1939 when the German Army first marched through Sperling’s hometown near Warsaw, Poland and forever changed her life.
Prior to the German occupation of her native country, Sperling said she and her parents knew what was going with the rise of Adolph Hitler.
“We knew what was going on in the world, but we didn’t want to believe, to see the truth.” She remembered the German occupation began innocently enough. “At first they wanted (Jews) to register; we should have known,” she said.
As the situation grew more serious, Sperling remembered the German soldiers would tell other members of the community about the Jewish people. “I want to tell you some of the things Germans told people about Jews: All the Jews were dirty and all the Jews were lazy,” she said. The Germans also spread that the reason they were there was to teach the Jews how to work.
In order to do that, Sperling remembered, the Germans would convince the young Jewish people that if they were able to get jobs, they would save their family from harm.
“We were separated into the useful Jews and the useless Jews,” she said, and if the young did not work to save the “useless Jews,” which were the very old and very young, they would be moved to a ghetto, concentration camp, or be physically harmed.
However, the labor did not help in the long run. Sperling’s family was moved into a ghetto soon after the occupation of Poland.
“At one point in the game, we were going to be separated from the general population,” she said. She reminded the audience that she and her family always knew what was going to happen, but they still did not want to believe it. “We believed that once the world learned what was happening to us, they would come.”
The help the Jewish people believed would come, did not, and soon Sperling’s family was transported to a concentration camp where she was separated from her family. “My entire family went one way, and I went the other,” she said quietly. She explained her survival was 99.9 percent luck and .1 percent hope that she would not be selected to go to the gas chambers.
For the entire time Sperling was in a concentration camp, she worked twelve-hour shifts, creating air craft shells to be used by the German army. When the women working realized there was one hour in the middle of the night when they were not watched while making the shells, they organized. The women began cutting the shells too short and drilling too many holes. The only thing the Germans could do was to melt them back down and have them made again. “In practically every camp there was some resistance,” Sperling said.
In February 1945, the women with Sperling began to realize the end of the war was near. At first there was an increase in deaths, but in April, there was a change in plans and the soldiers began to march the women out of the concentration camps on a death march. Five days into the march, Sperling saw the S.S. women, who had been the toughest guards, emerge from a truck driving next to the marchers in civilian clothing. “We knew they were going away,” said Sperling, and at that point they knew that it was over.
Soon after, Sperling saw her first American soldier. “You can’t imagine how much American soldiers have in their pockets. I don’t know how they won the war,” she said about her first meeting with them. After recovering in a French nunnery, Sperling was sponsored to move to the United States, where she has lived ever since.
Her message to the young Norwich audience was simple: “Don’t be a bystander.” She reiterated the fact that if they had known better or if the rest of the world had stood up against Hitler faster, more people could have survived.
Sperling told of an old Jewish belief that every generation contains 36 people who were born righteous to help their fellow man. “Do it,” she said, “Save the world.”