by Eddy de Wind
Translator’s Note
A literary translator should be faithful, everyone knows that, but people often don’t realize that faithfulness operates on many levels and that these levels sometimes conflict with each other. Strict adherence to the meaning might, for instance, hobble the elegance of the original or block the associations that make it so evocative. Still other factors come into play in Last Stop Auschwitz, which was written explicitly as a testimony and needs to be respected not just as a personal and political account, but also as part of the historical record.
Eddy de Wind’s book is remarkable for many reasons, not just the horrors he describes and his early insights into the political and psychological processes of totalitarianism, but also the conditions under which he wrote it. His having found the energy, drive, and commitment to write a book like this in the evenings after spending long days carrying out difficult medical procedures is beyond admirable. Inevitably the circumstances led to a certain roughness and lack of structure, but this only adds to the book’s rawness and authenticity. Last Stop Auschwitz is a report from the belly of the beast. The SS had been driven away and the camp had been liberated, but De Wind was still inside the monster, fighting to save the lives of its victims.
In his afterword to the 1980 republication of the 1946 Dutch original, De Wind explains that a well-known publisher was interested in taking the book on but wanted it to be rewritten first. Instead De Wind kept looking and found a smaller, more political publisher who preferred a new edition that was “as faithful to the original as possible.” De Wind was happy to agree, even though he realized that doing so might expose him to “criticism for the style and immature political statements.” To his mind, this risk was more than compensated for by “the greater guarantee of authenticity.”
Returning to the levels of faithfulness in translation, Last Stop Auschwitz requires a certain inversion of the usual practice. If a translator generally strives to make their translation as polished as the original, here an aspect of faithfulness is trying to retain the rawness of the original rather than producing something more like an English version of the rewritten book De Wind himself rejected. There is a contradiction here, because translation is “rewriting,” rewriting in another language, but while doing so I have done my best to retain the rough edges of the original and with them its directness and urgency. I wanted it to be good English, of course, but English that was as much like the Dutch as possible.
An important exception is the spelling of names. In his notebook, De Wind often approximated the spelling of names or wrote them down phonetically, presumably because he had only heard them and never seen them written down or had seen them and forgotten the spelling. It’s no surprise that the original Dutch publisher didn’t have the resources for extensive fact checking in the immediate postwar period, but at that time, when the Nuremberg trials had only just begun and knowledge of the camps was still relatively limited, it would have also been extremely difficult to obtain information that is now just a few clicks away. As interested readers will soon discover, it is not difficult to find additional information online about many of the historical figures named in the book. It was only natural, then, to correct Glauberg to “Clauberg,” Klausen to “Claussen,” and Döring to “Dering.”
A final point to clarify is my treatment of De Wind’s use of foreign languages. The concentration camps were a confusing multilingual environment with German as the language of command and authority, but often spoken by non-German prisoners. In general, my approach was to translate De Wind’s Dutch into English and reproduce his use of other languages, but as usual with translation, it wasn’t always that simple. De Wind often mixes Dutch and German, for instance, perhaps reflecting the way the Dutch prisoners spoke in the camp, and at least once he uses a German word in a sense that seems specifically Dutch and therefore not really German at all.
The German content in the book is significant: both the short lines of dialogue spoken in German and the multitude of terms relating to the SS and the concentration camps. Again I have corrected any obvious mistakes, while trying to bear in mind Primo Levi’s description of the corruption of the German language in the camps and his account in The Drowned and the Saved of his otherwise excellent German translator’s consistent inclination to turn Levi’s remembered camp German into something he, as a German speaker, considered more plausible. Reading about Levi’s correspondence with his translator made me realize once again how much of a shame it is that this book wasn’t translated thirty or fifty or sixty years ago when the author could have been consulted and would, later, have been able to hold the English edition in his hand as further proof that there was a purpose to his survival.
David Colmer
Amsterdam, August 2019
Reading Group Guide
1. Last Stop Auschwitz is the true story of Eddy de Wind’s experiences in Auschwitz, but most of it is written in third person because it felt too traumatic to write in first person. What effect did that have on you while reading?
2. Doubt and disbelief run throughout the memoir. For example, on their way to Auschwitz, Eddy describes how his wagon-mates laughed off the SS coming for their valuables, and even when they arrive in the camps they “still didn’t believe” (here) that they would lose everything. Why do you think they held on to this doubt, despite what they had seen and heard?
3. Most people have at least some familiarity with the Holocaust and what took place in the concentration camps. Did anything surprise you about Eddy’s depiction of the camps while you were reading?
4. Eddy’s journal begins and ends with him longing for Friedel. In what ways did his love for Friedel make Auschwitz more bearable and/or more difficult for him?
5. Eddy describes how the prisoners were divided into categories based on the SS’s justification for their imprisonment. Discuss the effect this had on the prisoners. Would similar divisions have existed among them if they had not been visibly labeled?
6. The girl in No Pasaran asserts that she is staying alive so that she can “tell all of this, to tell everyone about it, to convince people that it was true” (here). Do you think this is why Eddy has written this account? Are there any other reasons that might have inspired him to write about his experiences in his initial weeks of freedom? Why do you think some survivors feel compelled to share what they went through, while others prefer not to talk about it?
7. Toward the end of the book, “Hans” asserts “The entire German nation is responsible. They’re losing the war now and will renounce their leaders, but if they’d won the war, nobody would ever have asked the Fuhrer which means he had used or what had happened to all of the Communists and Jews” (here). Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
8. In his essay “Confrontation with Death,” Eddy reflects on the concentration camps and their lasting impact from a psychological and sociological perspective. What does it add to the book to include Eddy’s writing from later in his life alongside his journals from within the camp? What are the different strengths and impact of these two reflections on concentration camps? Were there echoes of sentiments from his memoir that you recognized in Eddy’s later writing?
9. The “Note on the Author and the Text” gives greater context and detail not included in Eddy’s writings. Did any of this new information surprise you or change how you see the narrative?
1. A citizen of the German Reich. Under the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws, this status was reserved for “racially pure” Germans.
2. Hans Albin Rauter was the highest-ranking SS and police leader in the occupied Netherlands.
3. Brand name of a hand-pumped insecticide spray used widely between 1928 and the mid-1950s.
4. A concentration camp in Brandenburg, Germany. One of the first the Nazis established when they gained power in 1933.
5. The Nazis established brothels in concentration camps to encourage prisoners to cooperate, though no Jewish male prisoners were allowed to use them. Female p
risoners were forced into prostitution. In Auschwitz the brothel was located in Block 24.
6. A concentration camp/ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia that was used partly for elderly and prominent Jews and was also presented to foreign visitors as a model camp.
7. Dachau, established in 1933, was the first Nazi concentration camp and became a model for all others. Initially described as being for political prisoners, it was developed on the site of an abandoned munitions factory ten miles northwest of Munich.
8. A German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate, once the largest company in Europe, which from 1933 worked closely with the Nazis.
9. Jawischowitz was an Auschwitz sub-camp between 1942 and 1945.
10. The Geuzen was a Dutch anti-German resistance group.
11. Erwin Von Witzleben, a German officer, was a lead conspirator in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. He was tried and sentenced to death on August 7 by the Nazi “People’s Court,” known as the Volksgerichtshof, which had jurisdiction over so-called political offenses.
12. Gdansk (Danzig in German), on the Baltic coast of Poland.
13. A subcamp, which was part of a village, where vegetables, fruit, and flowers were grown by prisoners.
14. The river running south of Auschwitz.
15. Otherwise known as “the Shema,” this prayer is a centerpiece of daily morning and evening prayer and considered by some to be the most essential prayer in Judaism. It is also usual to recite it before bedtime and when death is imminent.
1. Translated by Eva Martin. Italics, Eddy de Wind.
2. Translated by Eva Martin. Italics, Eddy de Wind.
3. It is not known exactly how many people were sent to Auschwitz or how many died there. Historians tend to estimate that around 1.3 million people were sent to the camp and that 1.1 million people were murdered there.
4. Eugène Carp (1895-1983) was a prominent professor of psychology in the Netherlands.
5. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is the fictional protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment.
6. “Why shouldn’t the SS earn anything?”
7. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German concentration camps and the system behind them by Eugen Kogon (New York: Berkley Books, 1950).
8. It is generally estimated by historians that between 5 and 6 million people died in the Holocaust, in camps, and also by execution and as a result of disease.