Foto dell'autore

Susan Cernyak-Spatz (1922–2019)

Autore di Protective Custody: Prisoner 34042

1 opera 14 membri 2 recensioni

Opere di Susan Cernyak-Spatz

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1922-07-27
Data di morte
2019-11-17
Sesso
female
Nazionalità
Austria (birth)
USA
Luogo di nascita
Vienna, Austria
Luogo di morte
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Luogo di residenza
Vienna, Austria
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Istruzione
Southwest Missouri State College
University of Kansas
Attività lavorative
professor
Holocaust survivor
memoirist
public speaker
translator
Organizzazioni
UNCC
Premi e riconoscimenti
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
Breve biografia
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.

Utenti

Recensioni

This is not a book you want to like.

And it is not important whether I rate this book 5 stars or none, it’s a book that needs to be read not rated.

Most books I read are about the human experience, are about what it feels like to be alive and to be an individual person. Protective Custody is an account the total dehumanisation of individuals that was orchestrated by the Nazis and their helpers in Europe.
Susan Cernyak-Spatz gives a very open account of at first being persecuted across the continent and later of her experience as prisoner in Auschwitz. It is the frankness of her recollections that make this book an important witness of what still is probably the most horrific act of violence and organised indifference committed against other human beings.
And still what I carry with me from the book – after I purge the images of death and violence from my mind – is neither sympathy nor hatred, but an urge to deny ignorance or indifference the chance to flourish.
Easier said than done.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
BrokenTune | 1 altra recensione | Aug 21, 2016 |
Excellent depiction of author's experiences at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Very blunt and honest.
 
Segnalato
donttalktofreaks | 1 altra recensione | Jan 3, 2006 |

Statistiche

Opere
1
Utenti
14
Popolarità
#739,559
Voto
½ 4.5
Recensioni
2
ISBN
1