Once The Acacias Bloomed
by Fred Spiegel
15.95, Cover: paperback, ISBN: 0-9674074-6-X, ©2004

Chapter One: Dinslaken
The Park

Once I lived in a small town in Germany called Dinslaken at Bismarckstrasse 61. Dinslaken was a small town at that time, about 20,000 inhabitants. I was born there on April 21, 1932, to a German Jewish family. My family had been living in this general area for hundreds of years. My father, Sigmund Spiegel, loved to play Fussball (soccer) and I have a picture of him together with his teammates on the 1913 Dinslaken soccer team. He had been a sergeant in the German army in World War I and was badly wounded in the battle of Verdun. He had received many decorations for valor in battle, including the Iron Cross. My uncles and grandfather had also served in the German army. My father died in December 1933, when I was one year old, so I do not really remember him except from stories my mother and other people told me.

After my father's death, my grandfather, Louis Spiegel, came to live with us. One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather playing skat, a German card game, in the evenings at our house with his friends and neighbors. My grandfather was well known and friends with nearly everybody in town. Behind our house there was a nice park and grandfather used to take me there for walks and to play with the neighborhood children. He would sit on one of the park benches and talk to his friends, while keeping a watchful eye on me.

Around 1936, when I was four or five years old things started to change and my park was not so nice anymore. Older kids started to pick on me, tried to beat me up, threw stones and dirt on me, and called me "dirty Jew." Then my grandfather's friends also started to curse him and he decided it was time to get out of the park. When I went home I asked my mother, "How come those kids call me Ôdirty Jew?Õ Am I dirty? I took a bath this morning." After a few more incidents, we did not go to the park anymore, even though it was almost our back yard.

After that my grandfather started to take me to the Jewish Orphanage to play. The orphanage had been established many years earlier for the whole area called the Rhineland. It was much safer there in the huge house with the large fenced in yard. The older kids kept an eye on me while I played with the other little kids in the orphanage. It was really fun and I soon knew a lot of the kids. However, I longed to play in the park, the beautiful park by our backyard, with its big lawns, lake, and tall trees. But this had become too dangerous for a Jewish child. I never played there again.



Chapter Two: Dinslaken
Kristallnacht

November 9, 1938. That day and the next few days I will never forget for the rest of my life. I was six and a half years old, still living in Dinslaken. I was living with my mother, my older sister Edith, and my grandfather.

I had started going to school a few months before. As Jews were not allowed to go to the local schools anymore, we went to the Jewish school, which had been established many years earlier. I remember Mr. Weinberg, the teacher, because he rented a room in our house. There was just this one teacher, plus a few teacher's aides.

My Aunt Klara was visiting us that day, November 9. It became dark early, and that evening I went to visit the elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Brockhausen, who rented a third floor apartment from my mother in our house. I had become very friendly with them and even though non-Jews were not supposed to rent from Jews any more, they had refused to leave. They invited me to come next morning and join them for breakfast, something I had often done in the past.

I woke up early the next morning, November 10. Looking out the window, I noticed a lot of smoke coming from the direction of the synagogue. Also groups of men were running around armed with pick axes and all sorts of other tools. I had no idea what they were doing and what was happening but it looked scary and threatening. I asked my mother, but she also did not know what was going on. Then I decided to go upstairs; maybe they knew something. After all Mr. Brockhausen was a retired policeman, surely he would know. When I arrived upstairs they were up and waiting for me. They did not know what was happening; at least that was what they said. However, when I asked them about the smoke, they said the synagogue was on fire, but the fire engines were there: "Not to worry, Fritz. The fire will surely be put out soon."

Mrs. Brockhausen was preparing the breakfast, when suddenly I heard a deafening noise downstairs coming from the direction of our apartment. Then I heard somebody smashing down the door and the noise of breaking glass. My mother and sister started to scream. I wanted to run downstairs, but Mr. Brockhausen held me back. I could clearly hear things being smashed downstairs and being thrown out of the window on to the street below. Finally I went downstairs. The entrance door to our apartment, which was partly glass, had been smashed. Upon entering I found that many things had been totally destroyed, the windows broken, and much of our furniture and crystal was on the pavement below. My mother, sister, and Aunt Klara were standing on the balcony crying. My grandfather had been arrested and taken away by two policemen. Mr. Brockhausen came in and tried to calm everybody. Soon the two policemen returned. We were told we could not stay in our apartment and had to go with them. On the way out, we passed by the downstairs apartment that was empty because the Abosch family, a Jewish family who had rented it from my mother, had been expelled to Poland a few weeks earlier. Their apartment was totally destroyed.

People were standing in the street and watching as the Jewish families left their houses and some of them spit at us and threw stones and sand. We passed by the synagogue -- still burning. The policemen brought us to the Jewish school, where we were told that we had to stay overnight. Apparently after we left our apartment, some of the Nazis came back. They tried to set the house on fire. Mr. Brockhausen stopped them, claiming the house belonged to him.

In the middle of the night my mother woke me up. She wanted me to say goodbye to my babysitter from the orphanage, Francisca Grabownik. As I found out years later, the children still living in the orphanage were terribly abused during Kristallnacht. The Jewish community had then decided to take the thirty children from the orphanage to Cologne (Kšln), Germany, from where they were sent afterwards to Belgium and Holland to try to keep them out of harm's way. That night was the last time I ever saw Francisca. Most of the about 30 children living in the Orphanage at the time of Kristallnacht did not survive the Holocaust. According to the diary kept by Yitzhak Sophoni Herz, director of the orphanage at that time:

The police ordered us to get ready for a march through the Center of Dinslaken. I was to be responsible for preparing this march. The news that there would be a Judenparade (a parade of Jews) through town spread like wildfire. The people of Dinslaken stood three and four deep along the sidewalk to await the Judenparade. Most people cursed and taunted us but on the faces of a few there was disgust at the proceedings. In front of the parade were two policemen, flanked by uniformed Nazis. The little children of the orphanage were forced to climb into a hay wagon and four older boys were forced to pull this wagon.

The Jewish cemetery, where my father and grandmother were buried, was not spared either. It was completely vandalized; headstones were smashed and overturned. A few days after Kristallnacht we left our house in Dinslaken. My mother sent Edith and me to live with relatives in Holland. The border into Holland had been closed for refugees leaving Germany; however, after the Kristallnacht pogrom the Dutch authorities relented and allowed children who had relatives living in Holland to come into their country.