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