Bordentown Regional students listen and learn
By:David Koch
BORDENTOWN TOWNSHIP Frederick Spiegel did not have a normal childhood.
When he was 1, his father died from what might have been a brain tumor. He doesn’t know. This is because it was a time and place when Jewish people like his family were denied medical care.
Mr. Spiegel was born in Dinslaken, Germany, in 1932 as the National Socialists (the Nazis) came to power.
By the time he was 13, he had lived through the concentration camps of World War II.
"The images I’ll always keep with me are the huge piles of dead in front of the barracks thousands of human bodies," said Mr. Spiegel. "They were rotting away for weeks."
Fred Spiegel lived to tell his story and he did so to a group of high school students at Bordentown Regional High School Tuesday.
A group of 30 students in Bette O’Malley’s Advanced Placement English class heard Mr. Spiegel’s experiences as part of their study on the Holocaust.
"We read the novel ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, and also a series of short stories," said Ms. O’Malley. "But as a speaker, he really is our culmination of our study on this."
Ms. O’Malley’s English class sat for 45 minutes as Mr. Spiegel told his experiences from 1932 to 1945.
Before the Nazis took power in 1932, Mr. Spiegel’s family had lived in Germany for hundreds of years. His father was a highly decorated soldier of World War I.
But when the Nazis came to power and things became harsher for Jews, many members of the Spiegel family looked for a way to leave.
Many of Mr. Spiegel’s relatives had already moved to Holland, when Mr. Spiegel’s mother accepted a position as an au pair in England.
In 1939, when Mr. Spiegel was 6, he and his older sister Ethel left for Holland. Mr. Spiegel stayed with his Uncle Adolf in the Dutch town of Gennep close to the German border.
Too young to realize the significance of what was happening, Mr. Spiegel said that he thought it was all just an extended vacation.
Fred’s mother came to Holland on Sept. 1, 1939. She intended to stay a week with her children before going to England, but her brother told her to leave right away.
The day Ms. Spiegel arrived in Holland was the day Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany and the Nazi government.
Ms. Spiegel’s plan was to keep her children in Holland until she could gain visas for them to come to England.
"She felt there would be a war, but Holland was neutral and she thought it was safe," said Mr. Spiegel.
But on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded neutral Holland. Mr. Spiegel was only 7 at the time, but he remembers it as a beautiful, sunny day.
"I woke up in the morning, and there were lots of planes in the sky, but they were German planes," said Mr. Spiegel.
Down in the street of the small Dutch town, German tanks and soldiers were marching. When Mr. Spiegel walked into the kitchen of his aunt’s house, there was a German soldier with a rifle stopping for a cup of coffee.
Life returned mostly to normal for the Spiegels despite the German invasion.
"At the beginning, nothing much happened," said Mr. Spiegel. "Slowly but surely there were food rations, but then they started making laws affecting Jews."
Jews had curfews and were only allowed to shop at certain stores. Eventually, Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David that was sewn into their clothes. The penalty for walking outside without the yellow star was deportation to a camp.
Of course, nobody at that time knew what a camp was.
"No one could imagine in their most vivid imagination gas chambers," he said.
Mr. Spiegel and his family were eventually sent in 1943 to the transfer camp of Westbrok in northeastern Holland. Westbrok was a transfer camp for prisoners on their way to other camps.
One day in May 1943, Mr. Spiegel and his cousin, Alfred, were waiting in line with a 100 other people to be taken to another camp.
While in line, Mr. Spiegel, only 10, started to scream. He doesn’t know why he screamed, but shortly afterward his cousin also started to scream. Their combined screaming was so loud that the German guards took the boys out of the line.
Although Mr. Spiegel did not know this until after the war, his screaming saved both their lives.
The train he and his cousin were about to board was heading to Sobibor, one of the most notorious death camps located in Poland.
"From the beginning of May 1943 to August 1943, 30,000 Jews were sent to Sobibor from Westbrok, and only 19 survived," said Mr. Spiegel.
A few months later, Mr. Spiegel’s cousin would be put on another train, also going to Sobibor.
"Before he left, I thought we would see each other again in a few months, but he had a premonition that we wouldn’t," said Mr. Spiegel. "And of course, he was right."
The only reason Mr. Spiegel and his sister were saved from the same fate as their cousin was because of their uncle, Max, who told the commander of Westbrok that Mr. Spiegel and his sister were British citizens.
"He (the commander) knew his job was to kill all the Jews in Holland, but there was always the idea that we could use them for something," said Mr. Spiegel.
Jews who were citizens of other nations were often used by the Nazis as exchanges for money or other goods.
Even though Mr. Spiegel and his sister weren’t British citizens, their uncle’s plea worked and instead of being executed like most children, they were sent to the Bergen-Belsen in January 1944. Mr. Spiegel was only 11.
Life grew even harder in Bergen-Belsen for Mr. Spiegel.
"The food was very little. We had one piece of bread a day, something that was supposed to be soup, and something black that was called coffee," said Mr. Spiegel.
People slept in straw beds that were filled with lice and camp guards were afraid to enter the prisoner’s barracks because of rampant typhoid.
Mr. Spiegel said that in the 16 months he was at Bergen-Belsen, he only took two showers.
Many people such as Bordentown senior Margaret Bretz have asked Mr. Spiegel how he could have survived Bergen-Belsen.
Loss of memory was one way, said Mr. Spiegel. "When you’re starving, your brain doesn’t really function anymore. So I don’t remember any of the details."
Mr. Spiegel told students that it was also youth that helped him and his sister survive.
"When you are younger, the more hope you have," said Mr. Spiegel. "When you’re younger, you think tomorrow will be better."
Fred Spiegel was eventually liberated on April 13, 1945. But even before then, many people in the camps knew that the Allies were coming.
"By April of ’45, we could hear thunder in the distance," said Mr. Spiegel. "This wasn’t thunder of course but the distant guns of the British army."
Before the British could liberate Bergen-Belsen though, Mr. Spiegel and hundreds of other prisoners boarded a three-car train and headed for Germany. Six days later the train stopped in a gully near Magdenburg, Germany.
The train’s engineer had abandoned his human cargo because a group of American soldiers was nearby.
"Little by little you could see soldiers come over the hill and into the gully," said Mr. Spiegel. "They didn’t want to come close to us. They were afraid of us. We were like some apparition they had never seen before."
Eventually, Mr. Spiegel and his sister were put on an open flatbed train, and sent back to Holland. Sick with Typhoid, Mr. Spiegel ended up at a convent that was used as a hospital after the war. It took him two weeks to recover.
By November 1945, Mr. Spiegel and his sister were on a boat to England to be reunited with their mother.
"It wasn’t really normal for me, but it was as normal as you could get," said Mr. Spiegel.
But Mr. Spiegel did eventually return to a normal life. He stayed in England until 1952 and then moved to Israel. From Israel, he went to Chile with his mother and sister, and finally settled in America in 1963.
He worked for the Israeli airline El Al for 32 years as a salesman. Mr. Spiegel is now retired and lives in Howell Township.
Every time Mr. Spiegel tells his story however, it leaves the audience stunned. Eventually, the high school students began to ask questions.
Ms. O’Malley asked the eternal question though for anyone who studies the Holocaust, "How could anything like this happen?"
"Number one reason is that the rest of the world didn’t care," said Mr. Spiegel. "That’s the most important. When you are a bystander, and you don’t care, a lot of people take advantage. You cannot ignore what happens to other people, because eventually it catches up with you."