Eliazar de Wind - Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from Within the Camp

Copyright 1946 by Eddy de Wind, revised text copyright 2020 estate of Eddy de Wind

English translation copyright 2020 by David Colmer

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Originally published in Dutch as Eindstation Auschwitz in 1946

First U.S. Edition: January 2020

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This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

LCCN: 2019951956

ISBNs: 978-1-5387-0143-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-0141-6 (ebook)

E3-20191123-JV-NF-ORI

In 1943, Jewish doctor Eddy de Wind volunteered to work in Westerbork, a transit camp for the deportation of Jews in the east of the Netherlands. From Westerbork, inmates were sent on to concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Eddy had been told that his mother would be exempted from deportation in exchange for his workin fact, she had already been sent to Auschwitz. At Westerbork, Eddy met a young Jewish nurse named Friedel. They fell in love and married at the camp. Then, in 1943, they were transported to Auschwitz on a freight train.

Unlike so many people arriving at Auschwitz, they were not killed immediately. But they were separated: Eddy ended up in Block 9, as part of the medical staff; Friedel in Block 10, where sterilization and other medical experiments were conducted by doctors, including the notorious Josef Mengele and the gynecologist Carl Clauberg.

Somehow, both Eddy and Friedel survived.

When the Russians approached Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. They fled, taking with them many prisoners, including Friedel, who were ordered to walk toward Germany. These walks, which later became known as the Death Marches, were intended to eradicate all evidence of the concentration camps atrocities.

Eddy hid and remained in the camp; it would take months before the war ended. He joined the Russian liberators. By day, he treated the often very ill survivors the Nazis had left behind and the Russian soldiers. In the evenings, having found a pencil and a notebook, he began to write with furious energy about his experiences at Auschwitz.

In his traumatized state, he created the character of Hans to be the narrator of his own story. Other than in a few instances, the horror of his experience was still so raw he couldnt find the words to describe it in the first person.

This is Eddys story.

H ow far is it to those hazy blue mountains? How wide is the plain that stretches out in the radiant spring sunshine? Its a days march for feet that are free. A single hour on horseback at full trot. For us it is farther, much farther, infinitely far. Those mountains are not of this world, not of our world. Because between us and those mountains is the wire.

Our yearning, the wild pounding of our hearts, the blood that rushes to our headsthey are all powerless. Because of that wire between us and the plain. Two parallel fences of high-voltage barbed wire with dim red lights that glow above them as a sign that death is lurking there, lying in wait for all of us imprisoned here in this rectangle enclosed by a tall white wall.

Always the same image, the same feeling. We stand at the windows of our blocks and look into the enticing distance while our chests heave with tension and impotence. We are eleven yards away from each other. I lean out of the window while longing for that faraway freedom. Friedel cant even do that; her imprisonment is more complete. I can still move freely through the Lager. Friedel cant even do that.

I live in Block 9, an ordinary hospital block. Friedel lives in Block 10. There are sick people there too, but not like in my block. Where I am, there are people who have fallen ill from cruelty, starvation, and overwork. Those are natural causes that lead to natural diseases that can be diagnosed.

Block 10 is the experimental block. The women who live there have been violated by sadists who call themselves professors, violated in a way that a woman has never been violated before, violated in the most beautiful thing they possess: their womanhood, their ability to become mothers.

A girl who is forced to submit to an uncontrolled brutes savage lust suffers too, but the deed she endures springs from life itself, from lifes urges. In Block 10 the motive is not an eruption of desireit is a political delusion, a financial interest.

All this we know as we look out over this plain in the south of Poland and long to run through the fields and marshes that separate us from the hazy blue Beskid Mountains on the horizon. But that is not all we know. We also know that for us there is only one end, only one way to be free from this barbed-wire hell: death.

We know that death can come to us here in different forms.

He can come as an honorable foe that a doctor can fight. Even if this death has base allieshunger, cold, fleas, and liceit remains a natural death that can be classified according to an official cause. But he wont come to us like that. He will come to us just as he came to those millions who have preceded us here. When he comes, he will almost certainly be stealthy and invisible, almost odorless even.

We know that only subterfuge hides death from our view. We know that this death is uniformed because the gas tap is operated by a man in uniform: SS.

That is why we yearn so, looking out at those hazy blue mountains, which are just twenty-two miles away, but for us eternally unattainable.

That is why I lean so far out of the window toward Block 10, where she is standing.

That is why her hands grip the wire mesh on her window so tightly.

That is why she rests her head on the wood, because her longing for me must remain unquenched, along with our yearning for those tall, hazy blue mountains.

T he young grass, the swollen brown chestnut buds, and the radiant sun that was growing more glorious with every passing day seemed to promise new life. But the Earth was covered with the chill of death. It was spring 1943.

The Germans were deep in Russia and the fortunes of war had yet to turn.

In the West, the Allies still hadnt set foot on the Continent.

The terror raging over Europe was taking fiercer and fiercer forms.

The Jews were the conquerors playthings. It was a game of cat and mouse. Night after night, motorbikes roared through the streets of Amsterdam, jackboots stamped and orders snarled along the once so-peaceful canals.