Holocaust Survivor Regina Spiegel speaks to a group at the Woodbridge Campus about her experiences during the Second World War.

“Everything seemed to be going my way,” Regina Spiegel recently told the large audience at the theater at the NOVA Woodbridge campus. The Polish winter was her biggest complaint in life. The topic turned serious as the guest speaker talked of her experience as a survivor of the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz on April 8.

She remembered the exact date that the German army attacked her village in Radom, Poland: Sept. 1, 1939. The building shook with the force of the army. Spiegel ran from her home, where her mother, Brandla, was preparing a traditional Shabbat dinner, to see what was happening.

“All of a sudden, I saw something I couldn’t imagine. They dragged an old man from his beard behind a truck. I was 13, but I grew up fast because I knew we were in trouble.”

Spiegel listed the tyrannical actions Hitler used. Jewish children were prohibited from going to school, families were required to give up valuables, workers were prohibited from jobs and banks closed all accounts held by Jews and seized their assets.

It was the children who suffered the most and were the first to be eliminated. They were the largest group of victims because they were largely of no use to the Nazis. Children got sick. Children could not perform heavy labor.

Within three days of their arrival, the Nazis ordered Jews moved to what they termed “a Jewish neighborhood.” Spiegel’s family was forced into the Radom ghetto.

“They took barbed wire, put guards in front, and made all the Jews go in. Within weeks the starvation got so bad,” Spiegel recalled. “It was unreal.”

Two families were assigned to a little room. Spiegel had a big family. It was so crowded that there was not enough room for each person to lay down when it was time to sleep.

Those were not the only changes to her once charmed life. There was the armband, a white band with the Star of David. She had always been proud of the Star of David, but now its meaning was twisted into something she was supposed to feel ashamed of.

Spiegel’s mother told her to flee to her sister Rozia Spiegel’s town in Pionki, about 30 kilometers away.

“Why me?” Spiegel argued. However, there was no arguing with her mother.

“I want to tell you, all the years in the camps, I never forgave myself for not saying goodbye… So I always encourage, do that, because you don’t want to go around with something like this in your head,” Spiegel advised her listeners.

Her sister was a dentist in a farming community. She was not wealthy, although she made a decent living. When the Germans invaded, things changed. Because farmers sold food, a commodity high in demand in wartime, their fortunes improved.

The farmers began going to the dentist. It was there that Rozia provided free service to one farmer in exchange for mediating between her and a Polish guard at Spiegel’s camp in Radom so that she could bribe him to let Spiegel escape. The bribe worked.

Those who could get into a labor camp making munitions for the Nazi army had a chance at surviving. So, that is what Spiegel’s sister did. Once again coming to the aid of her little sister, she arranged for falsified documents to be drawn up to state that Spiegel, then 14, was 16 years of age.

Meanwhile, Spiegel’s sister had an 18-month-old baby that she sent to live with a Polish woman thinking that he would be safe. When Spiegel’s nephew was almost two years of age, the Polish woman caring for him turned the baby into a Gestapo office and told the officials that she was not the mother.

Unwilling to deny her child and allow him to be put to death, Spiegel’s sister confessed that it was true. She and the child were to be sent away in a cattle car. Before she could be sent away, she ran with the child. But they were both shot in the back while attempting to flee.

At this time, Spiegel met Sam Spiegel. It was he who looked after her, made sure that she stayed in line, obeyed the rules and comforted her. If someone called in sick to work, then that person was hanged so that workers knew what would happen to them if they faked being sick in order to avoid work.

The day eventually came when Spiegel was transported to Treblinka, a large concentration camp. Around 900,000 people died there, most within days of their arrival. The ironic thing was that Spiegel and the others from her village had been convinced to voluntarily go to Treblinka. The camp officials said that it was better than the slave labor camp they lived in.

They were told that Treblinka had a school, a hospital and that they would be fed. It was true that Treblinka was not the worst labor camp. There, they did receive a little bit of food. If the kitchen cook knew a person she would dig a little deeper in the pot and give a piece of potato. Spiegel’s stay in Treblinka lasted until 1944. Then she was moved to Auschwitz.

When she arrived in Auschwitz, the train doors were opened as German soldiers yelled, “Aus, aus! Marchen!”

Spiegel understood these words, “Out, out! Move it!” because of their similarity between German and Yiddish.

Sam Spiegel understood more than Regina Spiegel. He perceived what was going on. He turned to her and said, “If we ever get out of here, meet me in my home town.”

She replied, “Why yours and not mine?” Spiegel still had it in mind to return home and to tell her mother that she had been wrong. She would never see her mother again.

New arrivals were forced to strip and to give up every picture and possession that they had. Then they were forced to shower. Spiegel was fortunate. She emerged from her shower with her head shaved bald. Most new arrivals did not emerge at all — carbon monoxide gas came out instead of water in their showers.

Here, Spiegel’s sole possession consisted of the one set of striped clothes that she had to wear and a thin blanket. About Auschwitz Regina said, “That place was indescribable. The guards checked role twice a day as if obsessed with us running away. But nobody ran from Auschwitz.” She stayed there for about five weeks, though she is not completely sure. One lost a sense of time there.

One day her friend, Astusha, was feeling very bleak. Spiegel said to her, “Look, the sun is shining. Maybe [Hitler] isn’t so powerful as he thinks. The sun is shining, and he can’t close up the sky.”

After Auschwitz, Spiegel was sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Bergen-Belsen was an altogether different kind of hell, named after the town in which it was built. This was the prison in which Anne Frank and her sister Margot perished shortly before its liberation by the British army. There was practically nothing to eat, only whatever was found on the ground. Spiegel was then to be sent to Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

It was April 20, 1945, and the German army knew that their reign was nearing its end. The liberation armies were moving across Europe. Spiegel remembers one of the guards saying that the prisoners should be happy as they boarded the trains. It was Hitler’s birthday, and the prisoners were going to be given a piece of bread. At that moment, the whole sky turned black. The allies had dropped a couple of bombs on the trains that they were going to board.

“Thank God, they were not too accurate,” Spiegel stated. The trains were overturned, and whoever was able to move ran to the woods.

The allied soldiers who dropped the bombs sat at the edge of the woods thinking that German sharpshooters were hiding there.

“You see, we were 4,000 women. So no matter how quiet you try to be, 4,000 women are not gonna be so quiet,” Spiegel said, and a soft chuck rippled through her audience.

Eventually a few of them exited their hiding place and were told that the war was over. Spiegel bled from a shrapnel wound to the head. The women were invited to “shoot up some Germans.” But she could never shoot someone because they were German. “That is not our way,” she stated to NOVA students.

Her voice quaked with sorrow as she lamented that she will never know why Hitler chose to kill her family, a wonderful mother, her beloved father, her sisters and her brothers. Two brothers did manage to survive.

Spiegel works at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

By: Annie Ryan

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