Surviving Birkenau: The Dr. Susan Spatz Story

SURVIVING BIRKENAU, vividly and emotionally narrated by Dr. Susan Spatz at the age of 96, recounts her astonishing life, from an idyllic childhood in Austria to the unimaginable horrors she and her family suffered at the hands of the Third Reich. Born in Vienna in 1922, Spatz was an only child who lived a life of privilege until the Nazis invaded, and she and her mother found themselves "in the trap," experiencing many of the terrors of her fellow European Jews: early Nazi oppression in Berlin; post-"Anschluss" Vienna and Nazi-occupied Prague. But, after being deported to Theresienstadt, the true nightmares awaited in Birkenau, the notorious woman's death camp in Auschwitz. After three years of brutal internment and a transfer to Ravensbrück, a death march led not to the grave, but to freedom. In SURVING BIRKENAU, Dr. Spatz recounts her experiences with remarkable clarity, from the decision by her mother that virtually condemned her to death through her eventual escape.