Susan Cernyak-Spatz, née Eckstein, was born in Vienna in 1922. In the following twenty-three years she experienced many of the terrors of her fellow European Jews: early Nazi oppression in Berlin; post- “Anschluss” Vienna; Nazi occupied Prague; and deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the true horrors of the Nazi “Final Solution” awaited her in Birkenau, the woman’s camp in Auschwitz where she survived her internment, beginning in January, 1943, for two years. These months of hell were followed by a “Death March” and incarceration in Ravensbrück from which she and a group of fellow inmates walked away to freedom.

After the Liberation, she worked for the American Counter Intelligence Corps as an interpreter, and then for the British Military Government, also as an interpreter. She was reunited with her father in August, 1945 in Brussels. She married an American GI and came to America on July 4, 1946. She has three children and continues being active in the field of Holocaust studies which she has also presented in Germany in yearly lectures for over a decade.