LANDIS — “My number is 34042.”
Dr. Susan Cernyak-Spatz can never forget that number. Living through two years in a Nazi death camp during World War II carved it on her mind like Adolf Hitler’s Nazis tattooed it in blue on her left forearm.
Cernyak-Spatz survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of Germany’s five death camps […].
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Cernyak-Spatz was, she says, lucky. When she arrived at Birkenau in 1943, she was 18 years old and childless, good for labor. Preteen girls, women past their mid-30s and women with children went straight to the gas chamber, she said.
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Cernyak-Spatz […] is a retired language professor. She still teaches one course a year on the Holocaust at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and travels extensively speaking about it.
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“He didn’t exterminate a race,” Cernyak-Spatz said of Hitler. “He exterminated innocent babies, old people, young people, brilliant writers, brilliant artists, brilliant scientists … for no other reason than he wanted it.”
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Then the soldiers started killing them. At first, German SS soldiers forced Jews to dig a pit, then lined them up and knocked them into the pit with bullets from their machine guns — line after line of Jews.
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It also cost a lot of ammunition, which the German army decided it couldn’t afford with a war going on. So the Nazis looked for a more efficient means of mass murder.
They settled first on trucks, into which they packed Jews and ran carbon monoxide exhaust. But they could only kill about 150 people at a time that way, so they built the death camps.
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So fierce was Hitler’s hatred, trains carrying Jews to the death camps were given priority even over troop trains carrying soldiers to battle, Cernyak-Spatz said. When she stepped off the train and onto the platform at Birkenau, the results assaulted her senses.
“The first thing you noticed was an absolutely incredible stink,” she said. The noxious, sickly sweet odor hung in the air with a dusky vapor billowing from smokestacks and staining the distant sky, she said.
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“Then they took them directly in the direction of that smoke,” Cernyak-Spatz said. Soon, those who survived learned what burned in those buildings.
Guards led prisoners into the large buildings, told them to take off their clothes, hang them on hooks. And remember, tie your shoe laces together, they said, so you don’t lose a shoe.
The Nazis had told Jews to dress in their warmest clothes for the journey to the “work” camps, Cernyak-Spatz said. After the gas chambers, they gathered those clothes for their own use.
For the years during the war, “that is how the whole German nation was clothed … in the clothing and property of dead Jews,” she said.
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The mass killings in the gas chambers took only about eight minutes, Cernyak-Spatz said. For those not selected to die right away, death could come more slowly, usually after a couple of months of hard labor and near starvation.
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“Infection in Birkenau went directly into gangrene,” she said. “And you were ready for the gas.”
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Newly arrived prisoners got a bowl — only a bowl, no utensils. They used it to eat and drink. And when they had to, when a guard wouldn’t let them use a bucket outside at night, to eliminate their own bodily waste.
When they had to do that, they dumped the waste out beside their bunks, which were stacked three high. Cernyak-Spatz said one of the first lessons at Birkenau was “to find a top bunk.”
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Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews died in the chambers at Birkenau every day. Some went willingly, Cernyak-Spatz said.
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She also survived scabies, hepatitis, scarlet fever and probably other illnesses, she said.
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Source:
www.salisburypost.com/2000may/051300a.htm
BY SCOTT JENKINS
SALISBURY POST