Afterword

by John Boyne, New York Times bestselling author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

With each newly published memoir, history book, or novel that details the crimes that took place across Europe during the Holocaust, our understanding of that period increases in direct correlation with our dismay at the brutality of our species. Some of the most important writers of the last seventy-five years have shared their experiences of the camps in print, but, to the best of our knowledge, Eddy de Wind’s Last Stop Auschwitz is the only book written from within a concentration camp itself. Because of this, it offers a unique insight into a tragedy that, more than any other event, defines the twentieth century and drapes it in infamy.

I’ve read many autobiographies centered around life and death within Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and the dozens of other death camps, and each time I’ve found myself astonished by how deeply the daily events of camp life emblazoned themselves on the minds of the survivors, scorched into their collective memories with as much indiscriminate savagery as the tattoos carved into their arms. From the naive perspective of historical distance, one imagines that those who left the camps with their lives would do all they could to forget what they had been through—but no, it seems that memory can prove the most unwelcome consequence of trauma and that testimony is its necessary antidote.

Eddy de Wind’s memoir represents a singular addition to the wealth of material that readers, historians, and scholars can access as they try to comprehend the incomprehensible. While images of Jews “standing stark-naked in the burning sun,” as barbers “with their blunt razors… tore out the hair more than shaving it off,” are familiar to students of the subject, there’s something visceral about reading the words from a man who both suffered these indignities and determined to write about them. One wonders how he felt transferring those recollections from mind to page, whether they served to relieve or relive those dark days.

De Wind’s descriptions of the people and experiences that populated Auschwitz—the prisoners, the guards, the fences, the food, the tattoos, the showers, and the slaughter—offer a rich insight into a man who was watchful while being watched and who, perhaps without even intending to, stored his memories away for the moment when the world would defeat the Nazis; their crimes would need to be exposed if they were to be prevented from happening again. The service he and so many other writers of this period have done for us is not quantifiable.

As with all memoirs of life in the camps, one turns the pages with a growing sense of disillusionment in mankind. It’s impossible for the reader not to question what he or she might have done if subjected to such tortures, or, indeed, if asked to take part in them. Descriptions of the corpse carriers jumping out of the way to keep their clothes clean as they threw the bodies of the dead into the back of a truck are among the many subtle and horrific insights that the author draws upon, along with “enormous stacks of tins: the urns of the Poles whose bodies had been burnt there,” and the sound of executions at seven o’clock at night: “First the order to fire, then a volley, then the bodies being dragged away. And it kept on going like that. And then the cries of the victims. A girl begging for mercy because she was still so young and so desperate to live.”

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