Paula Spigler was just 17 when her mother got sick from hunger in a Nazi-occupied ghetto in their native Poland. It was 1941. World War II and the Holocaust were underway. But Spigler’s mother was going to die.
She died in her daughter’s arms.
But before she died, she said in Yiddish, “My child, I must go. But you are young, and you must live.”
Spigler shook her to try to keep her alive.
“I had nobody else,” the daughter recalled.
But she listened. Paula Spigler lived.
She survived four years in Nazi ghettos before being liberated by the Soviet Union. Then she returned to her native Lodz, met her future husband Leon Spigler and emigrated to the United States.
The couple had two children: son Manny and daughter Ruthy. And those children both married and had their own children. Then those kids grew up, got married and had children of their own.
Today, Paula Spigler has six granddaughters and 10 great-grandchildren. Many still live close to her senior residence in Langhorne.
On June 24, Spigler turned 100.
“It was God’s miracle,” she said of her survival.
Spigler tried to jump into the grave with her mother after she passed. But a friend stopped her.
In 1934, years before the Holocaust, the young girl, then 9, also lost her father. Spigler recalled him smoking, so she guessed that he died of emphysema. All she remembered was visiting him in his hospital bed, jumping in and shouting, “Daddy, where are you going?”
But after her friend stopped her from jumping in with her mother, Spigler decided that she wasn’t going anywhere. She subsisted in the ghetto by working on a sewing machine and crafting ladies’ undergarments.
The work earned a small amount of food, which was all she needed. The teenage girl didn’t eat much.
“I made it,” she said.
After the war, Spigler moved back to Lodz with three other girls. They lived in an apartment together until two of them moved to Israel. That was when Spigler’s future husband moved in.
They arrived in Philadelphia in 1949. After moving to Northeast Philadelphia, the family joined Adath Tikva Montefiore, now part of Ohev Shalom of Bucks County.
The children grew up and married, but they didn’t move far. Marcy Spigler, Manny’s wife, now 75, has known Paula since she was 15. The Holocaust survivor always treated her “like a daughter, not a daughter-in-law,” Marcy Spigler said.
Today, Marcy and Manny Spigler and their three daughters and their families live in Haverford, Wynnewood and Drexel Hill. Marcy Spigler drives to Langhorne to see Paula Spigler once or twice a week. She talks to her on the phone more often than that.
Paula Spigler knows everything that’s going on with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“I love them so much,” she said.
Each night, the survivor also talks to her mother, father and late husband (he’s been dead for 28 years). She may have called her survival God’s miracle, but she said she still didn’t understand God’s ways.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Plenty of rabbis ask the same question.”
“I am very lucky. I have a beautiful family. They are my life,” she continued. “And God spared me to survive, like my mother said. I am young and I must live.”
Paula Spigler is not young anymore, but she’s still determined to live. More than 50 family members and friends celebrated her 100th birthday with her at a clubhouse in Flowers Mill. A klezmer band played. Everybody danced.
As she’s grown older, Paula Spigler has also told her story. She has spoken at many schools. And in 1997, she sat for a 2 ½-hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation.
“It’s important for the world to know,” she said. “It shouldn’t come again.”