Holocaust survivor Michael Spiegel passed away on July 10, 2026, at the age of 89 in Tomball, Texas.
Spiegel was born April 30, 1937, in Paris and was smuggled out of Vichy France at age 3 in the trunk of a car. He never saw his mother again.
He remained in hiding until Americans liberated his town in 1945. Eventually, he arrived in the U.S. through Ellis Island via the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Spiegel’s parents were Polish, having first met in Belgium before moving to Paris in the late-1920s. In 1939, his father boarded a ship to the U.S. to join his sister, who had moved there a decade before.
By the time Spiegel’s father was able to send for his wife and two children, it was too late to get them out.
In desperation, Spiegel’s mother took his sister to a convent in Nantes. Spiegel ended up in the home of a Christian couple in central France. He never saw his mother again.
“I only remember a big woman holding me in her arms as I was crying my heart out, not wanting to get in the trunk of a car to take me out of Paris,” Spiegel told the JHV in 2024.
After saving her children’s lives, his mother began working for the underground organization Save the Children, whose purpose was to get endangered children out of France. She was turned in by French police to the Germans and murdered in Auschwitz.
In 1946, members of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society found Spiegel, reunited him with his sister and found transportation for both to be reunited with their father in Brooklyn, where the children spent the rest of their formative years.
Spiegel earned a civil engineering degree and became a U.S. citizen at 21.
He moved to California, where he met and married Susan Sharon Goldenberg. For more than 20 years, he had an international career that took him to Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
He and Susan raised three children, and they moved to the Houston area in 1998.