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, where Hitler’s soldiers carried out what they called “The Final Solution” and what the world knows as the Holocaust.

Six million European Jews died at the hands of Hitler’s minions. At Birkenau, one of three main camps at Auschwitz, they perished mostly in gas chambers made up to look like large shower buildings, their bodies burned in one of four crematoria.

The Nazis killed 5.5 million non-Jews as well, including gypsies, homosexuals and Christians who opposed Hitler. But with no group did they deal so calculatedly as Jews.

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.

It began on a platform where the Nazis forced Jews out of train box cars into which they’d been packed like cattle for travel to the camp. There, Jews experienced the first of what they would come to know and fear as daily “selections.”

To the sixth-graders to whom she spoke at Corriher-Lipe Middle School on Thursday, the Holocaust may seem as historically distant as this country’s Civil War, Cernyak-Spatz said. But in her memory, the horror of it is “just like yesterday.”

No reason

Cernyak-Spatz, a small woman with a big voice and short-cropped brown hair, 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.

She stressed to Corriher-Lipe students on Thursday that the Holocaust was not a single event, but an efficiently conceived and executed process that began “the minute Adolf Hitler came to power” as Germany’s dictator in 1933.

To rally the German people, pull the country out of depression and set the nation on a path toward realizing his own dreams of Aryan conquest, Hitler needed a scapegoat, she said. He chose the Jews, who he called a race, not the religious group they are.

“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.”

The label didn’t matter. Hitler had found his sacrifice. And beginning with a propaganda machine that cranked out anti-Semitic tracts emblazoned with the motto “The Jews Are Our Undoing,” he set out to slaughter that scapegoat.

Because they were Jews

Cernyak-Spatz lived with her family in Vienna, Austria, until 1938, when the Nazis marched into the city. The invading army “mercilessly beat and mistreated the Jews,” she said. Eventually, the Germans told the Jews to leave immediately.

The family fled, leaving almost everything they owned behind — from the clothes in their closets to the food in their refrigerator. They landed in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

But the Germans followed. And this time, they had a list of every Jew in the city and had begun the mass killings, murdering nearly 2 million Jews in Poland by 1941, Cernyak-Spatz said.

The invaders ordered the Jews in Prague to turn over their property, because “from the Jews, they could rob without anybody stopping them,” Cernyak-Spatz said. And they robbed them of everything, down to gold fillings.

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.

“But that got a little too traumatic for the poor SS men,” Cernyak-Spatz said, her slightly-drawn mouth curling sarcastically. “I felt very sorry for them.”

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.

The first selection

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.

Then, the selection began. The Nazis separated families, those who could work to one side, those who couldn’t to another. The second group loaded onto trucks.

The women on the trucks asked where they were going. Don’t worry the drivers told them, you will be reunited with your families.

After a nice hot shower.

“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.

Inside Birkenau

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.

At Birkenau, the Nazis took their prisoners’ clothes and gave them the uniforms of dead Russian soldiers to wear. The uniforms had bullet holes in them and were spattered with blood.

They gave them one pair of shoes that, like the uniform, would be the only pair most got. Unlucky women got clogs, Cernyak-Spatz said, because those were easily lost in the always-muddy camp and tended to rub blisters that became infected sores.

“Infection in Birkenau went directly into gangrene,” she said. “And you were ready for the gas.”

The Nazis shaved their prisoners and stuffed the hair into mattresses, used it for insulation and wove it into cloth.

Then they tattooed the Jews’ forearms with the numbers that replaced their names, became their identities.

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.”

The barracks were built to hold 300 women, but at any given time they housed between 600 and 800, sleeping two or three to a bunk, she said. If they could sleep through the constant moaning, crying, screaming and pain.

The camps provided a steady flow of slave labor for factories that German companies convinced the army to build near the camps, she said. When one worker gave out, he or she went straight to the gas chamber, and another took his or her place.

Men or women, it usually took two to three months for a person to give out under the strain of the labor, little sleep, sickness and near starvation.

Prisoners got a meager bread ration, “sawdust salami” and little else. “Interesting things looked edible ... some grasses, some weeds, live frogs,” Cernyak-Spatz recalled.

‘Dying was easy’

Each day, the prisoners lined up outside their barracks. Each day brought a new selection. The sick and prisoners too weak to march in line went to the gas chamber.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews died in the chambers at Birkenau every day. Some went willingly, Cernyak-Spatz said.

“Dying was so easy,” she said.

But she was determined not to die. Other women carried her when she couldn’t walk with typhoid fever. All she could do was keep her eyes wide open, because the Nazis looked for “apathetic eyes” in the selections.

She also survived scabies, hepatitis, scarlet fever and probably other illnesses, she said.

She met a woman in her barracks who worked inside the camp’s administrative building. She helped Cernyak-Spatz get a job there, too.

Because the officers didn’t want to be exposed to the vermin and disease rampant in the camp, they gave the women who worked for them a set of clothes once a month and let them shower a couple of times a week, she said.

It also kept the women from walking through the selection every morning, she said. And that gave them hope.

“Maybe another month, another month, the war would end,” she said. “Regardless, if you didn’t have to walk through the selection in the morning, you were possible for survival.”

She worked in the offices for two years, from January 1943 until January 1945, when the Nazis told all the prisoners they were leaving the camp. With the Russian army advancing, they went on a forced march through deep snow and no roads deeper into Germany.

“The order of the day for that march was a bullet in the head for anyone who couldn’t walk,” she said.

For a reason Cernyak-Spatz can’t explain, the camp commandant told the prisoners to take the warmest clothes they could find from the warehouse for the march. About 500 prisoners survived.

Cernyak-Spatz also survived a second march from another camp near Berlin, where the Nazis turned her over with other Jews to the advancing Allied armies.

Remember

After the war, she found her father in Brussels, Belgium. He had been protected by a camp commandant because of his status as a World War I officer in the German army, she said.

Her mother did not survive the death camps.

In 1946, she came to the United States and began a new life. But she’ll never forget the life she led, and the death she escaped, in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

She doesn’t want others to forget the horrors of the Holocaust.

That’s why, though some survivors of Auschwitz had their tattoos removed, she never will.

That’s why she stood patiently on Thursday pulling up her shirt sleeve to show the sixth-graders the blue tattoo on her left forearm: 34042.