By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My neighbor Herman Spiegel always seemed like a regular guy. Retired from engineering work, he shot balls into his front yard basketball hoop. He loved to tend to his flower garden. He enjoyed walking his two dogs. Oh, and did I mention that he also survived the Holocaust?
Herman’s story is a harrowing one. At age 5, he lived in Kolomyja, Poland (which now is part of western Ukraine), with his parents and 3 siblings, a brother (Jacob) and two sisters (Hilda and Lunia). His father Moses was a prosperous merchant, spoke several languages, and had a diverse group of friends─Polish, Ukrainian, and German. Young Herman fished in private lakes and the family vacationed in the nearby Carpathian Mountains
The family’s happy lives changed dramatically with a Russian occupation in 1939, followed by the invasion by Nazi Germany beginning in 1941. Their property and assets were confiscated and he and his family were forced into various Jewish ghetto camps. They found places to hide during regular raids on the camps. His deaf younger sister Lunia, however, did not hide fast enough and was killed in one raid. Herman said his mother Sally never stopped grieving.
Many of their other friends or acquaintances were exterminated in the Belzec death camp or summarily executed in the nearby Szeparowce Forest, but not all of their friends were lost. A Ukrainian friend stored their possessions, a Polish woman offered loaves of bread, and a German gave Moses work papers so he could leave the camp and try to smuggle back food for the family. Yet, their circumstances steadily deteriorated, leading Herman’s father to make the decision that it was time to try to escape.
In October 1942, they left the camp. “It was midnight,” Herman said in 2010 in an oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. “We were wearing all our clothes when we walked in a line towards an open board in a wooden fence. I believe my father knew it was there. We followed him into the deep snow.” (see: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512672) For the next year and a half they fled from place to place, lived in barns and hay lofts in the countryside, trying to survive the Nazi assault on the Jews. A German friend eventually helped them. “For five months,” Herman said, “We hid in his stable and never spoke above a whisper.”
Finally, Russian forces liberated the family in 1944, well before the Nazis fell. After spending half of his life up to age 11 in such dire straits, Herman soon made his way to the United States, got an education, and married his wife Ruth Ellenbogen. Work brought them to Utah and eventually to live across the street from us. Herman and Ruth patiently watched our active young children playing around their house. They brought us Christmas presents, we sent them Hannukah gifts. Herman never discussed his Holocaust horrors with me, but mentioned them from time to time to my wife Vicki, whom he called the “mayor of the neighborhood.” I first read about them in detail after he died in 2011.
Ruth still lives right by us. I often gaze out from my front window at her house. The dogs are gone, but I can see Herman’s basketball hoop and his beloved flower beds. As I gaze, I think about him. I am amazed how the ordinary and the extraordinary can co-exist in one place and person, sometimes when we do not even know it, and I am reminded that when we meet someone at any given point in time, we usually have no idea how they may have suffered or endured simply to reach that moment.
(You can read more of Herman’s story in two articles by Eileen Hallet Stone in the Salt Lake Tribune, found at: http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=50441551&itype=CMSID and http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=50609728&itype=cmsid#gallery-carousel-446996)
