Holocaust survivor Susan Cernyak-Spatz will give a talk titled "Perpetrators Through the Eyes of the Victims" on Thursday evening, Sept. 17, at Appalachian State University. Her presentation will begin at 7 p.m. in Belk Library 114. The talk is free of charge and open to the public.
Cernyak-Spatz, who is a Professor Emerita of German Literature at UNC Charlotte, was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. In 1929, she moved with her family to Berlin, where they witnessed Hitler's rise to power. They fled to Prague in March 1938. Her father managed to escape to Belgium shortly before the German invasion of Poland, but the Nazis arrested and eventually deported Cernyak-Spatz and her mother.
At the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Cernyak-Spatz suffered at the hands of German guards as well as from a range of diseases, including typhoid and scarlet fever. However, her connections in the barracks and the fact that she could speak English, French, Czech, and German helped her obtain a job in the camp's administration offices, away from the often deadly outside work details. Cernyak-Spatz survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and the women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück. Her mother died in the Theresienstadt ghetto.
In July 1946, Cernyak-Spatz emigrated from Europe to the United States. She completed a dissertation on German Holocaust literature in 1971, working under the direction of the prominent author and German literature scholar Ruth Klüger, another survivor. In 2005, Cernyak-Spatz published her memoirs, copies of which will be available after the talk.
"She won't just give a straight survivor narrative," said the new director of ASU's Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies Thomas Pegelow Kaplan. "We wanted to bring Susan Cernyak-Spatz back to campus because she is not only a survivor, but a teacher and an academic who went on to work in areas closely related to the horrors she experienced in the Holocaust."
"Many Holocaust survivors are already deceased," Pegelow Kaplan observed. "In a few years there will be no one left, so we should speak with survivors while we still can. She is part of the experience of the modern world, of genocide and mass murder, which, sadly, will be with us for a long time to come."
Cernyak-Spatz's talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and the ASU chapter of Hillel. For more information, call 828-262-2311 or email thomaspegelowkaplan@appstate.edu.