Susan Cernyak-Spatz (1922–2019)

Susan Cernyak-Spatz, née Eckstein, was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Her parents were Ernest and Frieda Eckstein. In 1929, the family moved to Berlin, where she attended Lyceum (higher education girls’ school). Following the rise of the Nazi regime to power, the family fled to Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1942, during World War II, Susan and her mother were sent to the
ghetto at Terezín (Theresienstadt). Her mother was deported eastward and killed. Susan, aged 20, was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. She survived two years in the camp, the horrific winter death march away westward in 1945, and a short spell at Ravensbrück. Susan spoke English, French, Czech and German, and after being liberated worked as an interpreter for the American and British military. In 1946, she married Bernard M. Fishman, an American serviceman, in Brussels, and moved to the USA. The couple had three children before divorcing in the 1960s. Susan graduated from Southwest Missouri State College in 1968, and earned a doctoral degree at the University of Kansas in 1972.

She taught German language and literature at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte from 1972 until her retirement in 1992. At UNC, she created the university's Holocaust Studies program. As a professor emerita, and into her nineties, she continued giving interviews, lectures to community groups, and talks to high school students in the USA and Germany on her experiences during the Holocaust. A video documentary of her story, Surviving Birkenau, was released in 2018.

She published a memoir in English, Protective Custody: Prisoner 34042 (2005), and another in German, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück. Drei Stationen meines Lebens (2008). She also wrote a textbook, German Holocaust Literature (1985), and co-edited Language and Culture: A Transcending Bond -- Essays and Memoirs by American Germanists of Austro-Jewish Descent (1994, with Charles S. Merrill). She also translated several works from German into English, including Bernhard Frankfurter's The Meeting. Her hypenated surname came from her second marriage to Turkish-born Henri Cernyak, and her third marriage to Hardy Spatz.