Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 25, 1990 TAG: 9004250238
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE RELIGION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In a symposium on the Holocaust at Hollins College, Cernyak-Spatz described her experience as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps during World War II.
There was no single key to survival, said the University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor. But survivors learned to "not look back, not look forward . . . living, existing day-by-day, hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute."
The determination that she was "not going to give in - no matter how filthy or stinking or disgusting" her existence became was critical for her, Cernyak-Spatz said.
And while survival has created enormous psychological problems for some other Jewish survivors, Cernyak-Spatz said she felt the responsibility to make sure no future Holocausts occur.
That is what motivates her to teach about the Holocaust and to speak at events such as Tuesday's symposium, one event in the week-long Days of Remembrance commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust in the Roanoke Valley.
The symposium consisted primarily of questions for Cernyak-Spatz from the audience of about 75. The event was taped for a future broadcast on Blue Ridge Public Television.
Cernyak-Spatz was 18 when she was deported to the Nazi camps in May 1942. In January of the next year she received the tattoo - the number 34,042 - she displayed to the audience Tuesday. Three years to the month after her deportation, she was liberated.
Survival was a combination of "luck, not showing fear . . . getting an inside [the camp] job." Ten percent of the transfers to the camps were kept from the gas chambers and ovens to work as slave labor in German factories, Cernyak-Spatz said.
"It was the perfect slave-labor market." The Germans had calculated exactly the number of calories it took for the work expected of the prisoners and knew they would last about 2 1/2 months.
"When one batch of prisoners was worn out," Cernyak-Spatz said, they were sent back to the camps for execution and a new batch brought out for work.
Cernyak-Spatz said she eventually got a job as a typist for the camp building department. The longevity that came with that position provided some meager measure of security, along with the fact that she spoke two languages and could respond to the orders of her captors in German and of the camp administrators in Slovakian.
In response to a question from the audience, Cernyak-Spatz said she has adopted a "deistic attitude" that God had created the world, then left humans to run it without further intervention. Although humans haven't done a very good job, "that is one God I could accept."
"My theory [is that] there cannot be a God who would have sat in his heaven and looked down on the chimneys" at the death camps and not intervened. "No god who claims to be just could have."
The symposium speakers said new issues related to the Holocaust continue to be raised today.
Cernyak-Spatz and Allie Frazier - a Hollins professor who has studied the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews - decried the "trivialization" of the Holocaust in popular literature and films, which they described as generally misleading.
Revisionists who contend that the Holocaust never happened are well-funded and getting their literature onto college campuses across the nation, Cernyak-Spatz said, "but I am here to tell you it did happen."
"The blueprints for the Holocaust still exist.
"The company that designed the gas chambers [at Auschwitz] is still in business in Germany. There still exists a blueprint for the `final solution,' " the Nazi euphemism for the plan to exterminate the Jews.
"If we forget, it can happen again."
by CNB