Holocaust SurvivorIndividual
Jeanette Spiegel was born October 17, 1923 in Vienna, Austria to the Jewish couple Ossie and Etta Koenigsberg, and had an older sister Irma. Her father owned a furniture store and they lived in an assimilated borough of Vienna. She remembers the Nazis marching into Vienna March 15,1938 as the Austrians cheered them on with open arms. Jeanette was sent on a Child Transport to Belgium in January 1939 and hid in plain sight keeping a step ahead of the Gestapo until April 1944 when she was arrested for being a Jew and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In January 1945 Jeanette escaped a Death March and made her way back to Vienna in hopes of finding family. She was the only Survivor.
Jeanette Spiegel lives in NYC with her husband of 65 years, Herbert Spiegel. She has three children, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren with a third on the way, and one rather large British Blue Shorthair cat named Clementine.