By Dorian de Wind
The Moderate Voice
AUSTIN, Texas — Not all members of today’s de Wind family, although all descendants of the Patriarch Issachar, are Jewish.
After a “mini-diaspora” from “Holland” in the late 1800s and early 1900s to places as close as Belgium and Spain and as far as Asia and the Americas, the Levys-de Winds married into other nationalities, ethnicities and religions.
But most have never forgotten their Jewish roots.
How can they, when in the 1940s their Dutch relatives – their uncles, aunts, cousins – were forced from their homes, ripped from their loved ones and sent to suffer and die in Nazi extermination camps just because they were Jews.
In Parenteel van Issachar, a comprehensive genealogy of the Levy-de Wind family — Jan van Wisse de Wind’s lifetime work — van Wisse de Wind meticulously collected and recorded a wealth of vital statistics and information on each family member.
But the datum that stands out most macabrely is the place of death of so many de Winds, as indicated by sinister names such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, Dorohusk… sometimes just a vague and sad “Midden-Europa” or “place of death unknown.”
Equally tragic are entries such as: “Hans Eduard…is overeleden….te Auschwitz. Hans werd 5 jaar, 8 maanden en 6 dagen.” (Hans Eduard died in Auschwitz. Hans was 5 years, 8 months and 6 days old.)
By this author’s count, those grim “plaatsen van overleden” (places of death) appear a heartbreaking 124 times in the parenteel.
In other words, a significant portion of two entire de Wind generations was murdered by the Nazis in their monstrous quest to achieve their “Final Solution.”
One de Wind, on his way from the Dutch “transit camp” of Westerbork to “an unknown destination,” was able to write a letter to his 6-year-old daughter while in a sealed, dark and overcrowded freight wagon of a “Holocaust train” and to throw it out of the wagon just before reaching the German border. Miraculously, the letter eventually reached Louis de Wind’s family.
The “unknown destination” Louis mentions in his letter turns out to be the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
Louis’ letter is a rare written record of the angst, horror and love of a man, a father, who deep down inside knows he may never see his daughter again.
It is even more rare to find an account of the hell that was Auschwitz, a record of the incessant atrocities, of the unending suffering and of the occasional moment of joy and fleeting glimmer of hope felt by an Auschwitz prisoner and written down while at Auschwitz.
A cousin, Eliazar “Eddy” de Wind, did exactly that.
In early 1942, Eddy de Wind, then a young Jewish doctor, reports to Westerbork relying on false promises by the Nazi occupiers. There, he provides medical care to fellow Jews awaiting transport to “final destinations.” While at the camp, Eddy meets, falls in love with and marries a young nurse, Friedel Komornik.
In September 1943, the Nazis break their promise and deport both Eddy and Friedel to Auschwitz, “the largest camp established by the Germans. A complex of camps [that] included a concentration camp, killing center, and forced-labor camps”
Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, Eddy and Friedel are separated. Eddy goes to work as a camp’s doctor while Friedel becomes a candidate for Nazi medical experiments. They are housed in separate but adjacent “blocks” (barracks). The occasional sight of each other from a distance, the passing of notes through the fence and the brief, furtive encounters with each other — occasionally the rare steal of a quick embrace — are what keep Eddy and Friedel sane, alive and with a modicum of hope against hope.
While a prisoner at Auschwitz, Eddy wrote the manuscript for what probably is “the only complete book written inside [Auschwitz] itself.” A moving, frank and detailed record of the unspeakable brutalities he and other prisoners experienced, written where and when they occurred. Atrocities and brutalities that included (near-)starvation, savage beatings, sexual crimes, forced sterilization, the most cruel and repulsive medical experiments and, finally, gassing and other forms of murder of the sick and the healthy, of the very young and the very old and of those in-between.
Eddy wrote his manuscript at night, sitting on the side of his bunk bed, sacrificing part of an already minimal, precious amount of sleep, after long, arduous working days as a camp doctor performing difficult, exhaustive, sometimes heartbreaking medical procedures.
An experience about which Eddy writes, “We know that there is only one ending to this, only one liberation from this barbed wire hell: death.” For an estimated 1.1 million human beings who were deported to Auschwitz, death was indeed their “liberation.”
In mid-January 1945, as the Soviet troops were approaching Auschwitz, the Nazis began evacuating the camp. They forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to join murderous death marches during the harsh Polish winter. More than 15,000 prisoners perished.
Friedel was one of those forced to march. She miraculously survived. Eddy elected to stay behind, in hiding, and after the liberation continued for three months to take care of those left behind by the Nazis, those who had been too weak or too sick to march — and the dying.
While awaiting the Soviet troops, Eddy and other prisoners come across a young Dutch woman who had escaped the death march, wandering dazed and wounded in the frozen hellscape. Her name is Roosje.
Roosje tells Eddy about her immeasurable and endless suffering at other death camps. How she had to bury her own mother who had died of starvation: “We got 300 grams of bread and a liter of soup per day.” Then she says something that must have moved Eddy to the core: “They will never believe us in Holland when we come back and tell all this.”
Eddy replies, promises, “We will make ourselves believable, there will be official reports that will prove the truth of our stories. And if someone still doesn’t believe it, I will ask them where then is my mother, my father, my brothers and the other tens of thousands…”
Eddy kept his promise.
After his return to the Netherlands, where he was reunited with Friedel, Eddy published Eindstation Auschwitz in his native tongue.
Eddy went on to become one of the most respected psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the Netherlands and the author of several widely acclaimed papers on what was then called “concentratiekampsyndroom” (concentration camp syndrome), including his internationally lauded paper “Confrontation with Death. Psychological Consequences of Persecution.”
Eddy de Wind died in September 1987. He was 71.
Three years before his death he was awarded the prestigious Royal Orde van Oranje-Nassau for his chivalry and service to society.
I was privileged to read Eddy’s original book in Dutch. It left a haunting and indelible impression upon me.
At this moment, award-winning translators are translating Eddy’s book into several languages. In the U.S. the English version will come out in January 2020 – the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — published by Grand Central Publishing under the title Last Stop Auschwitz – My Story of Survival from within the Camp.
Eddy’s original publication and a later edition — in Dutch and only in limited numbers — did not receive the publicity and attention his unprecedented work so rightly deserves.
This new edition is made richer by unique insights into the life of Eddy de Wind before and after Auschwitz as told by his son Melcher de Wind who sees Eindstation Auschwitz as the ultimate fulfillment of his father’s wish and the source of his father’s will to survive during captivity: “I must stay alive to tell this; to tell everyone about it; to convince people that this was true…”
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Dorian de Wind is a columnist for The Moderate Voice with which San Diego Jewish World trades news and features under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.