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 being 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, that 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.

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