by Eddy de Wind
Now that the Netherlands had finally been liberated, he wanted to get there as soon as possible. A long journey through Eastern Europe and over the Mediterranean ensued. Eddy had left the Netherlands in a goods wagon; he returned in a passenger train. From Marseilles he traveled through Germany and crossed the Dutch border near the city of Enschede on July 24, 1945. As he didn’t have any papers, he was taken to a reception center to be interviewed by a Red Cross worker. He began by giving his personal details, his name, and where he has been. And then the miracle happened. The Red Cross worker interrupted him to say that a Mrs. de Wind from Auschwitz had returned shortly before him; she was in a nearby hospital. On the day of his return to the Netherlands, Eddy was reunited with Friedel.
After Auschwitz
Friedel and Eddy returned from the war intensely damaged. Eddy’s problems were, above all, psychological; Friedel was also very traumatized, but her wounds were physical too. She was infertile and suffered from ill health for many years. Almost all of their family and friends had been murdered and they had no home to return to. It was some time before Eddy and Friedel were able to live together. Initially, she was hospitalized and Eddy lived at the home of his psychiatrist. The Netherlands was so preoccupied with the reconstruction of its infrastructure and society that there was little time for their personal story.
Bravely, Eddy and Friedel picked up their life together. Eddy sold the few family possessions that were left after the war, and they used the money to build a house on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Eddy continued his training as a psychoanalyst and began his own practice. But Auschwitz affected everything he did; as a psychoanalyst he specialized in the treatment of people with serious war trauma. As early as 1949, he published his seminal essay “Confrontation with Death” in which the concentration camp syndrome was described for the first time.
Ultimately Eddy and Friedel’s shared suffering and the pain from their trauma proved too great for their relationship. In 1957, twelve years after Auschwitz, they separated.
At drawing lessons Eddy met his second wife, a woman with a very different background. She was from Amsterdam, a good bit younger and not Jewish. They went on to have three children together.
Although energetic and a hard worker, Eddy was regularly overcome by the traumas he carried with him. He was treated at various times, including in the clinic of Jan Bastiaans, the professor of psychiatry who specialized in the treatment of war traumas, where he also underwent experimental treatment with psychedelic drugs to help him process his traumatic past.
The pain and sorrow sometimes came from unexpected directions. Divorcing the wife with whom he had been through so much led some people to think poorly of him. And a section of the Jewish community saw his marriage to a non-Jewish woman as a betrayal. Every year Eddy went to the memorial service of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. Although many of those present saw him as a hero for dedicating his working life to helping the victims of war, there were some who turned their backs on him because of this “betrayal.”
As a psychiatrist, Eddy published regularly and was in demand as a speaker at international conferences, specifically concerning the later consequences of war trauma. He was also successful in his second specialty, sexology, helping to found the first Dutch abortion clinic and publishing a survey of sexual preferences entitled Variation or Perversion.
Later in his life, Eddy understood increasingly that traumas do not cease to exist with those directly involved, but that survivors pass them on to their children. He set up a foundation to gather research into and knowledge of this subject, the Stichting Onderzoek Psychische Oorlogsgevolgen, or SOPO (the “Foundation for the Investigation of the Psychological Consequences of War”). It was an ambitious project in which he was able to engage many international specialists.
In 1984, three years before his death, he was given a royal honor by being made an officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau, something he saw as more than just recognition of the good work he had done. For him the honor was an acknowledgment of his survival having had a purpose.
While working on SOPO, Eddy suffered a severe heart attack. A difficult period followed in which he grew weaker and weaker.
His confrontation with his approaching death took him back to Auschwitz and he fell victim to terrible fears and nightmares. After more than a month of illness his damaged heart failed completely. Eddy died on September 27, 1987, at the age of seventy-one.
A Note on This Publication
After his return to the Netherlands, Eddy realized that most people were so happy that the war was over that, after an initial flurry, there was little interest in his stories about the death camps. Reconstruction was the priority. Nonetheless, he decided to persevere with his resolution to let people know what had happened so that it could never happen again and it wasn’t long before his story was published. The text about his experiences in Auschwitz, which he had written in the space of a few weeks sitting on the side of his wooden bed in the camp, was adopted virtually word for word, and at the start of 1946, Last Stop Auschwitz was published by the communist publisher De Republiek der Letteren, with the title Eindstation Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the publisher went bankrupt shortly after the book came out and it was only available to the general public for a short period and soon forgotten. Amongst Dutch survivors, however, the book has long been treasured as one of the most important on Auschwitz.
Consumed by the reconstruction of his own life, Eddy decided to leave the book for the time being. It wasn’t until 1980 that he made a new attempt at its publication and a complete reprint appeared with the publisher Van Gennep. Eddy’s motivation for republishing was a somber one, as he was increasingly concerned about what he had hoped would never happen: a revival of intolerance and political violence, including in the West.
Rather than being merely a historical report and a reckoning with what had happened, he saw Last Stop Auschwitz as a universal story illustrating how some people can continue to support and love each other even under the most extreme circumstances, retaining a certain freedom of their mental faculties, as well as a story that shows how intolerance and an extreme sense of superiority can lead to the most unimaginable deeds.
The 1980 edition of the book was successful but, much to Eddy’s disappointment, the publisher failed to keep the book in print. This is not to say that Eddy put it out of his head. He still realized that it was important for everyone to read what had happened in Auschwitz, and he worked on an English translation of his story until shortly before his death.
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Eddy’s original notebook is now being exhibited all over the world and the book is being published worldwide. It is a tribute to all those who have suffered under terror and political violence. It is also the fulfilment of the wish Eddy expressed at the end of his story: “I have to stay alive to tell all of this, to tell everyone about it, to convince people that it was true…”
This Note on the Author and the Text includes a section of the afterword that Eddy de Wind wrote for the 1980 republication of Last Stop Auschwitz in the Netherlands. Further use has been made of various sources, including texts from Eddy de Wind’s notebook that were not included in the original publication of Last Stop Auschwitz, Red Cross archives, the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, as well as the article by Eddy published in the NRC Handelsblad of February 14, 1981.
The De Wind family
Amsterdam, August 2019
“Confrontation with Death”
by Eddy de Wind
The Dutch original of this article was first published in Folia psychiatrica, neurologica et neurochirurgica Neerlandica Vol. 52 (1949), December, 459–466. It was first published in English, in a different translation, in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis Vol. 49 (1968), 302–305.
Immediately after liberation people were keen to read everything that was published about the concentration camps. Even in those early days, some writers tried to make so
ciological and psychological conclusions in their work. The public devoured it all uncritically, but soon became sated. Financial worries, fears of new global catastrophes, and, above all, disillusionment about post-war relations dulled people’s interest. At the same time, it is not pleasant to be constantly reminded of the suffering of others, while also feeling as if one is being held responsible because of real or alleged failings regarding those who have died or undergone great hardship.
I would spare the listeners all of the horror stories about the camps, if it were not for the fact that we—the former inmates—are still astonished every day by how little is known in the Netherlands about what happened there, especially in Polish camps like Auschwitz. Those who wrote about their experiences shortly after liberation did it mainly to try to find some peace of mind. By writing about the camps, one conquered one’s pent-up emotions. It is understandable that readers, who had to take over this burden, soon had enough of it, and the interest for camp literature began to wane. Unfortunately, people threw the baby out with the bathwater by failing to subject the former inmates’ academic conclusions to closer inquiry.
Several years have now passed and the memory of the camp is beginning to lose some of its torturous, affective character. What was once the most hideous reality now seems like a horror film we saw in our childhood years. Fear and rage still rush at us together with the remembered images, but they are like wild animals that have been caged… They can no longer pounce; we have distanced ourselves from them.
Thanks to this distancing we can consider what we experienced more objectively. We no longer feel caught up in the atmosphere of the camp, but think about how to convey it at our desks, studying it the way a chemist observes reactions in test tubes. We see the camp with its streets and barracks, and inside them—as reagents—the people. We let the circumstances affect them and watch the way they change. The experiment takes place…
We are familiar with many of the Germans’ experiments: dermatological, surgical, and numerous others. I have studied the protocols (in Nuremberg), which the “SS Lagerärzte” wrote for Brandt, the “Führer’s” personal physician… I shall spare you the horrors. But there was one experiment I couldn’t find any report of, the experiment “Camp.” The Germans are not aware of the meaning of the camp as a social psychological experiment. It is up to us now to draw up these protocols.
Much has been written about man in mortal danger. I remember the well-known publication in which Dr. M. G. Vroom describes the experience of deadly peril during bombing raids. In this situation, however, and also for troops at the front, the threat of death has a different meaning than it does for the inmates of a camp. For the former the threat is acute, whereas for the latter it is chronic and, unlike soldiers who have a sense of fighting for their lives, prisoners are also defenseless.
We immediately think of the experiences of Dostoyevsky, which he—autobiographically—describes for us in The Idiot: “But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die—is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad?”1
Later in The Idiot we read about a condemned man who is standing on the scaffold: “What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again?[… ]He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it.”2
Running through these quotes, we see two lines of thought.
First, that it seemed inconceivable to Dostoyevsky that someone could have the certainty of a death sentence and not go insane.
Second, that as soon as death has become a certainty, the tension becomes so unbearable that one longs for death as the only escape from the tension.
Of the four and a half million Jews who arrived in Auschwitz, 4,000 at most (one per thousand) survived.3 Most of those who died knew the inevitability of death. Nonetheless, they did not go mad. Let us investigate how that was possible. To understand the thoughts and emotions of camp inmates confronted with death, we need to review what the Jews had been through before their deportation to Auschwitz.
In Amsterdam and in Westerbork, for instance, the mentality of the Jews was characterized by a tremendous repression of reality. Despite the fact that everyone could rationally understand that they too would one day be compelled to make the journey to Poland, everyone convinced themselves that they would avoid it, and the gassing in Poland (discussed on BBC radio as early as 1941) was something people simply didn’t want to hear about; reality was fobbed off with the words “British propaganda.” It was only when they were on a train crossing the Dutch border that everyone realized just how fictitious the sense of security that had been maintained with Jewish Council stamps and all kinds of German lists and other assurances had been.
Because of this repression of reality and their fictitious sense of security, the great majority of Dutch Jews never made any attempt to save themselves through flight or resistance, as opposed to Jews such as those in the Warsaw ghetto, who were realists with centuries of training in resistance to antisemitism.
The Germans cunningly promoted this process of repression in the Netherlands by making Westerbork a “good” camp, where many facilities were provided.
Deportation still remained inevitable and when, on the train to Poland, repression became unsustainable, another defense mechanism took effect: people succumbed to a hypomanic mood. The crowd was like a frightened child who sings in the dark to hide his fear. One pulled out a guitar, a second started to sing, infecting a third with his cheerfulness, and soon the whole cattle-truck was singing along. The perversely cheerful mood was intensified by the sight of bombed cities in Germany and, consciously at least, the fear of the camp disappeared completely.
When the train then stopped for a long time in the yards at the railway station of the town of Auschwitz, there was only one longing: to set off again and reach the camp as quickly as possible. Nobody realized that this arrival would probably be their end…
After many hours the train started rolling again, only to stop soon afterward at a long embankment in the green countryside. Standing on the embankment were shaven-headed men in striped convict uniforms. As the train pulled up they rushed over to the wagons and jerked open the doors.
In that instant the repression was still in effect. A doctor who had made the journey in the same wagon as me with his wife and child remarked, “Look, they’re prisoners from a concentration camp. They have to help us with our baggage.”
This man was like a tourist on a merry mountain hike who is oblivious to all danger until the avalanche comes crashing down on him. Arrival in a concentration camp is a severe psychic trauma akin to being buried by an avalanche. The facts rush at the newcomers so fast that they are in danger of being crushed by them.
Eighty percent of the travelers were loaded onto large trucks. These were the old, the invalids, and the mothers with children. They were taken to the “Bad- und Desinfektionsraum.” There, in the hermetically sealed washroom, they were summoned by loudspeaker to breathe in deeply to disinfect the lungs of contagious diseases. What went through these people’s minds in the instant they realized that the gas was poisonous is something we can scarcely imagine. As cruel as their fate was, it would be too speculative to go into their emotions during the moment of stupefaction…
We will follow the others, the strong young people, closely.
The psychic trauma took place in several phases. After the doors of the goods wagons had been thrown open, the prisoners drove the
travelers out with sticks and cudgels. For the first time the new arrivals discovered how people are treated in a concentration camp, not just by the SS, but also by some categories of prisoners with long experience of camp life. In Auschwitz these were mostly Poles.
Then all the baggage had to be thrown onto a pile and one said goodbye to the last material possessions one had brought from home. But what followed was worst of all. Long lines were formed on the embankment: the line for the elderly, the young men’s line, and the young women’s. People now realized the inevitable, that they were going to be split up and would have to go through a long, fearful period of uncertainty before seeing each other again.
But in that instant people still believed that they would be reunited later and called out a sincere “till we meet again.”
As the rows set in motion, the multiple psychic trauma continued step by step.
After passing a barrier, the line of young men entered the grounds of the actual camp.
Storage yards for building supplies, large ramshackle sheds, and enormous stacks of bricks and timber. There were small trains, propelled by hand power, and large wagons pulled by fifteen to twenty men, all dressed in prison uniforms. Here and there along the road there were factories with the hum of machinery coming from the inside, then more timber, bricks, and sheds. There was life everywhere and everywhere buildings were being built.