Last Stop Auschwitz

by Eddy de Wind

  One of the most tormenting experiences that is so well depicted in Last Stop Auschwitz is how painful the separation of loved ones was, and when the narrator’s thoughts turn so often to his wife, Friedel, one can understand his constant dread of what might be happening to her and his uncertainty about whether they would ever be reunited. While the closing pages of this memoir are painful in their descriptions of grief, this book serves as a testament to her life.

  “Practiced in hate, the SS was an organ for the oppression of their own German people and related nations,” de Wind writes. “They rehearsed their methods on the Jews, Russians, and Gypsies under the motto of racial purification… In the camps, the members of the SS were able to satisfy the sadistic tendencies that had been aroused in them, and because they were given these opportunities of satisfaction, they remained obedient followers of Hitler until the end.”

  It’s an extraordinary case to make and one that challenges us to question whether evil is an incarnate element of the human experience, a malevolence that lies dormant within each of us, which can be awoken at any time if we do not remain vigilant against the forces that still threaten the world three-quarters of a century after the end of the Second World War.

  This is only one of the many moments of great insight that mark this memoir out as something valuable. When the Slovakian doctor mentions that “Home is a relative concept. My whole family has been wiped out here,” the reader is surprised to realize that the prospect of liberation from the camps might have provoked mixed feelings in the inmates. Naturally, from the moment of arrival, each man, woman, and child would have wanted to return to the cities and towns from which they had been taken, but the prospect of returning alone, of going back to a place and time that had been so changed by loss and poisoned by trauma, must have caused unexpected dread. It’s no wonder that so many of those who managed to survive the war found themselves experiencing such guilt about being among the living that they were unable to continue. Perhaps the word “survivor” is itself a misnomer.

  As this book is published, some of those who were in the camps as children or young people are still alive to tell their stories. Soon, they too will be part of history, and both we and future generations will rely on narratives like Last Stop Auschwitz to guide our memories and stand as a testimony to those who died. In the literature, we continue to remember the lost millions who achieve immortality through the work of writers such as Eddy de Wind.

  John Boyne

  September 2019

  A Note on the Author and the Text

  How did Eddy and Friedel end up in Westerbork? What were Eddy’s experiences after the Red Army liberated Auschwitz? And what happened to Friedel? This Note on the Author and the Text, written by the De Wind family, is an attempt to answer these and any other questions a reader of Last Stop Auschwitz might have.

  At the outset it’s important to note that Auschwitz was the fulcrum of Eddy de Wind’s life, the event upon which everything turned. For him, there was Auschwitz itself, before Auschwitz, and after Auschwitz. It overshadowed everything.

  Before Auschwitz

  Little is known about Eddy’s childhood. He became emotionally overwhelmed when the subject was broached, and he would often be overcome by grief for all that had disappeared. We do know that Eliazar de Wind, known as Eddy, was an only child, born on February 6, 1916, in the Piet Heinstraat in the Hague. His mother and father, Henriëtte Sanders and Louis de Wind, had a number of successful chinaware shops and Eddy was raised in part by nannies. His parents were neither strict nor religious and they paid little heed to the rules of Judaism. Being born into this well-assimilated, prosperous, middle-class Jewish family gave Eddy a good start in life, but when he was just three years old, his father, Louis, died of a brain tumor. More misfortune followed. Around the same time, Eddy pulled a kettle full of boiling water off the worktop. He suffered serious burns, spent six months in hospital, and was left with large scars on his face and chest.

  His mother remarried, but her second husband, Louis van der Stam, also died, in 1936, of a heart attack. Eddy was now twenty and studying medicine at the University of Leiden. When Henriëtte married for a third time, to Louis Zodij, Eddy annoyed him by calling him Louis the Third. Zodij had a twelve-year-old son from a previous marriage, Robert Jacques, who came to live with them. During the Holocaust, Eddy’s mother and Louis Zodij were deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Robert Jacques met the same fate.

  Because of the events of his childhood, Eddy and his mother developed a close bond. Just how close became clear in 1942, during the war.

  Eddy was intelligent and interested in the world around him. Fortunately the setbacks he had suffered in his youth did not prevent him from building a successful social life. In the evenings, for instance, he would regularly meet with friends to discuss world developments. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and communism were his favorite topics of conversation.

  After completing secondary school, he began studying medicine in Leiden. As he explained it, he had always wanted to be a doctor because he’d had a lot of trouble with asthma as a child and had always loved it when his mother played the doctor. Eddy was a good student and enjoyed life. He had a Christian girlfriend and at night he performed regularly with the Rhythm Rascals, a jazz band in which he played the clarinet. He liked to spend any free days sailing his dinghy.

  Both of Eddy’s parents came from large Jewish families. Some of his relatives worked in the diamond industry, but most were hard-working people running small businesses. Attending university was still unusual in families such as Eddy’s, and they were proud of his achievements.

  Although the increasing threat of Nazism had been hanging over the Netherlands from the early thirties, life was looking rosy for Eddy. The German invasion of May 1940 and the occupation of the Netherlands would have come as a terrible shock.

  The War

  In early 1941 the German occupiers forced the Dutch universities to exclude all Jewish staff and students. With the help of his lecturers at Leiden, Eddy was able to accelerate his studies and he was the last Jewish student to receive a degree. He relocated to Amsterdam to be trained as a psychoanalyst, something that had to be done in secret, in his teachers’ homes. He moved into an apartment on the Nieuwe Herengracht, a beautiful, quiet canal near the Jewish quarter, which was home to most of the city’s then 80,000 Jews.

  The occupiers were tightening the noose around the Jewish community and Eddy became deeply worried. He was convinced that the Germans would put into practice the theories that Hitler had expressed much earlier in Mein Kampf. Nonetheless he was surprised when he was arrested. On February 22 and 23, 1941, the Germans rounded up 427 young Jewish men in Amsterdam, Eddy amongst them. This roundup, the first in the Netherlands, was in retaliation for the death of the Dutch Nazi and paramilitary Hendrik Koot, who was killed in a street battle with Jewish and non-Jewish resistance fighters. Eddy related the events in a 1981 newspaper article in the NRC Handelsblad: “I had gone into town to pick up my bike.[… ]Somewhere in the Jewish quarter I was stopped by a German soldier: ‘Bist du Jude?’ Why did I answer, ‘Ja’? If I’d replied, ‘Man, are you crazy? Me, a Jew?!’ I would have saved my life in that moment; now I had almost certainly thrown it away.”

  Together with the other men, he was taken to a square between two synagogues, now called the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, where they had to squat for hours while being beaten by German soldiers. Finally they were carted off in trucks to a prison camp in the small town of Schoorl. After their arrival, they were beaten again, harder this time, forced to run the gauntlet while the soldiers hit them with their rifle butts.

  For Eddy, the uncertainty and fear were worse than the blows. At that point, he and the other men had no idea what was going to happen to them.

  The 427 men were given an “examination” and those who were too ill were exempted from deportation. Eddy saw an opportunity; just as he would later in Auschwitz, he now benefited from bei
ng a doctor. He knew the symptoms of tuberculosis and, helped partly by his asthma, was able to simulate this contagious disease. Together with eleven others who were also considered “too ill” for the transport, he was released. Running fast and zigzagging through fear of being “shot while trying to escape,” he reclaimed his freedom. The other 415 men were sent to Mauthausen, a hard-labor quarry in Austria. Only two survived the war. Those who were released didn’t fare well either. Of the twelve who were declared unfit for transport, Eddy was the only known survivor.

  This first roundup led to what was later called “the February Strike.” Tens of thousands of the people of Amsterdam refused to accept what was happening to “their” Jews and, under the leadership of the communist party, downed tools. Tram drivers and conductors stopped work. Dock and shipyard workers followed. Factories closed. Shops and offices emptied. It was an act of unprecedented courage. Unfortunately, but inevitably, the strike was violently suppressed.

  At the annual commemoration of the February Strike, it is always said that only two men survived that first roundup: Max Nebig and Gerrit Blom. Eddy is never mentioned. This is probably because he wasn’t one of the 415 who were carted off to Mauthausen, but one of the twelve who were exempted.

  After his release from Schoorl, Eddy did his best to resume his life. In 1942 things got too hot for him in Amsterdam and he went into hiding with friends of his mother’s in the Hague. As he found being cooped up in the house all day very difficult, his host proposed a solution: Eddy should flee to Switzerland. He set out, together with his then fiancée, but at the very first stop, in Antwerp, things went wrong. They couldn’t find the house where he was supposed to report, presumably because of an error in the handwritten address. After a few days of searching, the couple were forced to abandon their mission and return to the Netherlands.

  This is the story that Eddy would later tell. It is also possible that he sabotaged his flight himself. He had such a strong, deep bond with his mother that, in the end, he might not have been willing to abandon her. Shortly after his return to the Netherlands, an event took place that supports this possibility.

  Eddy’s mother was picked up and taken to Westerbork transit camp. At the same time, the Jewish Council, the body that mediated between the occupiers and the Dutch Jews, was looking for Jewish doctors who were willing to work in Westerbork as volunteers. In return for their services, the doctors were given an assurance that they would be allowed to stay there and would not be deported out of the country; they were even allowed to have every second weekend off to visit home as a free man. Eddy volunteered for duty on the condition that his mother would be allowed to remain in Westerbork and would not be put on a transport farther east. The promise proved worthless. When Eddy arrived in Westerbork a few days later, his mother had already been deported to Auschwitz.

  Westerbork was a neatly maintained settlement with a well-functioning administration made up primarily of Jews. There was enough to eat and there were facilities of all kinds, such as a hospital and a theater. But ultimately, of course, the Nazis were in charge and every week there was a transport with a thousand Jews being shipped off to the east on a freight train. Almost all of them going to the place that was shrouded in rumor and uncertainty, yet feared by almost everyone as possibly their final destination. A place in Poland whose name they only heard on the freight train: Auschwitz.

  Eddy was one of the head doctors in Westerbork’s small hospital and worked hard. He found one of his tasks unimaginably difficult: he had to “examine” prisoners who had been named for deportation. Those who were too ill received an exemption. Prisoners were constantly begging him to list friends or relatives as too ill for the transport, but the doctors had to be very cautious, as their work was regularly checked by the Germans. It was an impossible task that continued to torment Eddy long after the war, not least because even then some people were still angry with him for not listing a family member as unable to travel.

  In the hospital Eddy worked with an eighteen-year-old nurse called Friedel—Frieda—Komornik. Originally from Germany, she had ended up in the camp after an arduous flight. Eddy and Friedel fell in love and he broke off his engagement with his fiancée. To be together, they had to marry. That too was possible in Westerbork. For months afterward, Eddy and Friedel lived in a “room” that was separated from the hospital ward by a flimsy cardboard partition. It was far from an ideal situation for a newly married couple. But they had each other and were happy enough, given the circumstances. Until fate struck again. Despite the agreements Eddy had made with the Jewish Council, on September 14, 1943, he and Friedel were put on a transport to Auschwitz.

  Auschwitz

  Immediately after the Germans left Auschwitz, Eddy described his experiences there in the notebook from which this book is reproduced. Sometimes he told his wife and children more about what had happened. He certainly suffered from the feelings of guilt that afflict every survivor: Why did I survive when all those others didn’t? Besides unimaginable luck, it seems that it was also his love and longing for Friedel that kept him going.

  A particular strength of Last Stop Auschwitz is that it was written during the war and in the camp itself. The text has not been adapted or influenced by changing memories or knowledge that was only gained later, after liberation. This makes the story very honest and gives it great historical value.

  It is often extremely confronting. A striking example is the story that Eddy tells about the period when things were going very badly for Friedel. He took it upon himself to speak to the Lagerarzt and asked him to save her life. That seems a ridiculous request in a place where extermination was in large part the reason for its existence, and was the fate of so many of its prisoners, but astonishingly, the Lagerarzt agreed to his request. The story is even more astonishing when you realize the identity of that Lagerarzt: Josef Mengele. It was a name that meant so little to the prisoners at the time that Eddy didn’t find it necessary to mention it in his notebook. But it is the name of a man who is now seen as one of the greatest war criminals in history. It is a disturbing thought. Specifically because it makes us realize that the executioners of Auschwitz were not simply beasts or creatures from another planet, but ordinary people, who were capable of making “humane” decisions.

  Does this event make Mengele less evil? Eddy answers this question himself in a conversation he has with Friedel about the inconsistent, seemingly inexplicable way the older members of the SS sometimes made kind decisions. He writes: “I don’t think that’s a point in their favor. On the contrary. The youngsters have been raised in the spirit of blood and soil. They don’t know any better. But those older ones, like the Lagerarzt, show through those minor acts that they still harbor a remnant of their upbringing. They didn’t learn this inhumanity from an early age and had no need to embrace it. That’s why they’re guiltier than the young Nazi sheep, who have never known better.”

  In other words, the fact that Mengele saved Friedel’s life, and in doing so showed that he knew what humanity was, makes his behavior in Auschwitz even more reprehensible.

  The book ends with the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, but it took several months for the war to be over in the Netherlands too. In that period, Eddy joined the Red Army, who arrived in the camp, and stayed there for a number of months to treat the sick. He then traveled to the rear to help treat the wounded soldiers. In an afterword Eddy wrote for the 1980 republication of the Dutch original of his book, he described what happened:

  After the SS had taken the great majority of the prisoners away on death marches to camps deep in Germany, a few thousand people were left behind in the Auschwitz hospital. Within several days of the first Russian troops entering the camp a female medical officer arrived, a major. I was asked to stay in the camp until the last Dutch patients (who managed to stay alive) had been transferred to Russia—and later to Holland. For three months I did all kinds of difficult medical things, carrying out amputations and minor operations, th
at were actually far beyond my capabilities. I had a busy life and ate copious amounts of American canned chicken and beans. What’s more I had found a fur coat in “Canada” (the storehouse for all Jewish possessions), which I sold at a market.[… ]During the remaining five months in Auschwitz and in Russia I used the money to buy a lot of eggs and cream, so that by the time I returned to Holland in July I had quite a good nutritional status. I don’t remember how I was psychologically. The reconstruction of events from so long ago is a precarious business.[… ]I remember very clearly that, shortly after the entry of the Russians, we were taking turns near the gate to dance on a large portrait of Hitler we had found in one of the administrative buildings. I don’t recall what I felt while doing so. I suspect that rather than a fine way of venting my hatred, I found it ridiculous.[… ]There was one feeling I definitely had: I have to let everyone know what happened here. If I record it now and everyone finds out about it, it will never happen again. At the same time I wanted to leave it all behind me, as if I could liberate myself from all that was haunting me by getting it out and down on the page. An illusion. I got my hands on a very thick notebook, and have it still, in which I wrote an endless account in very small letters every day, sitting on the side of my bed in the former Polenstube.[… ]No one can doubt the facts and situations described. This is in contrast to today’s books and TV scripts which critics—because of unwillingness or otherwise—can suggest are influenced by the falsification of memories.

  During those post-liberation months, Eddy had no idea if Friedel was still alive. At first he was convinced that she was dead, that she must have died on the death march. As the stories of the death marches trickled through to Eastern Europe, he heard that there were survivors and regained hope. On May 23, 1945, soon after the liberation of the Netherlands, he sent a letter from Czernowitz in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, to the Red Cross in the Netherlands. He enclosed a letter to Friedel, in the hope that she might still be alive and that the Red Cross might be able to locate her. It was a letter full of longing and uncertainty.