Author reunited with his liberator

By Cheryl Orson

Fred Spiegel, 75, recently attended a reunion – not of his graduating college class, but with a man he has since come to know as his liberator.

On April 13, 1945, Carrol "Red" Walsh, a then 24-year-old U.S. army tank commander, became a liberator to hundreds of passengers on a death-camp bound train. Now 86, and a retired state Supreme Court judge, Walsh was reunited with Spiegel via a class project to record veterans' stories that is being conducted at Hudson Falls High School in New York. Walsh's grandson is one of the students recording these stories for posterity.

"It was a moving experience," said Spiegel stating the whole school participated and the students were very interested in learning more about how these men's paths crossed to begin with over 50 years ago.

Spiegel was just 6 years old when his life was swept up in the winds of pre-World War II Europe in 1938. By the time it was over, he was seasoned survivor of all of 13, mature beyond his years.

In November of 1938 he and his sister were sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Holland. The U.S. had already closed its door to those trying to flee, and the British controlled what was then Palestine. His mother had secured work as an au pair in England, but she was unable to obtain visas for her children.

In May of 1940 the Germans invaded Holland, and life would never be same. Even as a small child Spiegel began to notice subtle limitations suddenly forced upon Jews: the wearing of yellow stars, restriction on travel, expulsions from school and curfews at night. Then in 1943 came a new law in which Jews were forced to move out of the provinces of Holland.

By April of that year, Spiegel and sister and aunt and uncle were sent to the first of what would be many concentration camps, a forced labor camp called Vught in the south of Holland. Among the others he remembers being sent there were political dissidents, black marketers and other "undesirables" all labeled by different colored and shaped patches they were made to wear on their arms. He was already 11 and just beginning his long journey.

After six weeks, forced to live in unbearable circumstances and made to subsist on rotten food, many children became sick or died. The Germans then decided to evacuate the camp and Spiegel was moved, along with sister, uncle, aunt and cousin to another camp, Westerbork. But he now knew that this, too, would only be temporary.

"Every Tuesday trains went east to work camps," Spiegel recalled of the cattle cars used to move Jews to the death camps.

He arrived on a Sunday and was separated from his relatives. On Monday, he and his cousin's names were called to board one of the trains.

"I was sort of scared," he said remembering the crowd of over 2,000 people being herded into the trains and not being able to see his uncle or aunt.

His cousin started screaming not to get put on the train. Spiegel joined in. This caught the attention of German guard who took the two wailing children out of the cattle cars, cars he eventually found out were bound for the Sobibor death camp, Of the 35,000 Jews taken to this place, only 19 ever returned.

Most people at the time however, Spiegel said, "hoped to go back home." His uncle, though, after this scare, decided to act. As a World War I veteran, he applied for and received deferments for himself and his family and his nephew and niece, essentially exempting them from being deported. With their mother in England, the uncle also attempted to claim Spiegel and his niece were British citizens, but the Germans weren't buying it.

Then a man came into Spiegel's life who would save himself and his sister not once, but twice -- Joshua Birnbaum, who gathered together what he called "his children" to be kept under his care in an orphanage. He told the Germans to leave "his kids," including Spiegel and his sister, alone.

In November of 1943 though, as the camp swelled to over 10,000 people the deferments were canceled, and most of the children wound up being put on trains -- trains now headed for Auswitz. There were no survivors.

Spiegel and his sister somehow remained until January of 1944 when their names were called.

"This felt different," Spiegel said, being told by a German guard that "you people are lucky.

Loaded on aging passenger trains, not cattle cars, the pair, along with others who were left, traveled for three days. They were then unloaded and marched toward their destination, greeted by German SS guards with fierce attack dogs at their new temporary home - Bergen-Belsen.

"This was very different," said Spiegel of the new camp with men and women being separated into different barracks and kept apart with barbed wire. "There were no sanitary conditions. We were covered in lice," he said recalling being fed rotten turnip soup. And then came the outbreak and spread of deadly typhus. The Germans, fearing the disease, remained outside of the camp

Siegel was now 12 and left to own devices. The camp was run by the previously rounded up Greek Jews, who resented the newcomers and stole what little food they had. This ended in the summer of 1944 when the Greek Jews were dismissed from their position of authority.

In the winter of 1944, the camp received a new commander - Joseph Krammer, who was shocked that Jewish children were still alive and saw it as his job to kill the all the surviving Jews. Rations were cut. People died by the thousands of disease and starvation. Amid all of this, camps from the east, including a large group of women brought to Bergen-Belson, were being emptied as the Russians fought from their front.

In March of 1945 Spiegel said he thought he heard thunder. "That's not thunder, that's gunfire," he said he recalls a German guard telling him.

The Hungarian prisoners were sent east. Others, too sick to travel, were left behind. He and his sister, along with others who remained, were loaded onto yet another train and traveled eastward for six days. Then the trains suddenly stopped as the engineers abandoned their posts and soldiers appeared. Among which, unknown to Spiegel, was his liberator, Walsh.

"People got excited," said Spiegel, who was by then only one week away from his thirteenth birthday, but already more mature than a full-grown man. It was Friday the thirteenth, in April of 1945. "I realized we were liberated, but it didn't sink in," he said, stating by that time all soldiers pretty much looked alike to him.

By May he and his sister were sent back to Holland and placed in different hospitals to recover. Then an old friend appeared, once again collecting the handful of "his children" who survived - Josuha Birnbaum. For the second time in their lives, Spiegel and his sister were once again safe in an orphanage.

The Dutch Red Cross was later able to reunite them with a surviving uncle and aunt. They then sent a telegram to his mother in England telling her that her children had survived.

Today Spiegel tells his story to schoolchildren all over New Jersey, as he recently did when being reuniting with Walsh who liberated him and hundreds of others from the death camp-bound train all those years ago. When asked how he could recall his turbulent childhood so precisely and stoically, Spiegel explains he has become emotionally "detached" from his past, "like telling someone else's story."

"But when I hear someone else's story," said Spiegel of other survivors' tales, "I cry. It's a terrible experience. You can't really explain it, only touch it a little. You can't explain the horror."