Holocaust Book Review: Eddy de Wind

 

Eddy de Wind. Last Stop Auschwitz: . My Story of Survival from within the Camp, trans. David Colmer. London:Transworld Publishers/Penguin/Random House, 2020. Original Dutch edition Eindstation Auschwitz, 1946. vii + 261 pp. +
6 b+w photographs.

Another book about the Holocaust and about the horrors of Auschwitz. Every record of this period in Jewish history is valuable, every voice recorded, every memory preserved, every testimony is a proof of what is denied, trivialized and forgotten at our peril. Each is defiance of the effort to wipe us off the face of the earth and out history. But each is not a trustworthy, persuasive, vivid and aesthetically crafted piece of writing.  Last Stop Auschwitz, however, is one of the few books, if not the only one, written from inside “the belly of the beast”, that is, composed while in a concentration camp and then published without editorial guidance or hindsight reflections. As a Dutch physician working inside the camp hospital, Eddy de Wind distanced himself slightly from the unspeakable conditions around him by giving his personal narrator a fictional name.

The reviewer is humbled by the presentation of the whole book. The accompanying comments and additional information say virtually all that needs to be said about the importance of the book, the relevance to understanding how people—Jewish and other victims, German and other perpetrators of horrendous crimes against humanity—did what they did.  What the Nazis did was inconceivable to normal human beings. More inconceivable is how some of the victims of these criminal acts endured. What happened to them, as attested by the long silences and the sometimes never-spoken words, cannot be expressed in any normal language. Thus the relevance and the paradox of an English translation of the Dutch original right now.

All around the world, not just in Trump’s America, even as a period of healing seems to be opening, there are once again unspeakable crimes committed by fanatical groups of terrorists and tyrannical states running roughshod over the standards of common decency, human rights and international law. Therefore there must be some way of revealing the chaos and anarchy, of speaking of a truth that allows justice to return, and expressing the cries of those whose voices are drowned in the blood of violent oppression.

Written from within the belly of the beast, as the translator of Eddy de Wind’s book puts it, this narrative is at once a cri du cœur by a fictional character and a virtual transcription of one man’s experience of the Shoah while it is happening. Putting some distance between the reality and his own literary prose, Eddy de Wind records how he sees, hears and feels the horrible actions occurring around him. He does not describe the unimaginable cruelty and cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands. He hears gunshots, rifle butts crashing into people’s skulls, corpses being dragged across the floor. He sees flashes of light, he tastes the muddy slop the prisoners are given to eat, he gags on the stench of men and women’s bodies rotting in their own excrement.

The “Afterword” by John Boyne says about all that a good book review should. It gives the publishing history of the text and its reception by early readers in post-War Holland. It describes the shape of the narrative and why it is rushed along by incomprehensible commands and counter-demands by the Nazi officials. It points to moments of poignant insight by the narrator into an understanding of what the war was really all about: a race war, an attempt at racial hygiene and the elimination of the Jews and other Untermenschen, such as Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and all opponents of the regime.

The concentration camps, sometimes more slave-labour and sometimes more extermination, were established in the early 1930s already, first, to inculcate an attitude of total ruthlessness in the SS, teaching  them to kill brutally and sadistically; second, to exploit millions of innocent people on the way to death for their few months left of forced labour to help fund the war effort, already incapable by 1942 of sustaining large scale battles on many fronts; third, to murder as many Jews as possible, even at the cost of strategic failures elsewhere, and thus to bring on the Gotterdammerung, the downfall of the gods and of civilization.

 There is also “A Note on the Author and the Text” which consists, we are told consisting of statements made by various members of Eddy de Wind’s family and by information abstracted from different written and oral interviews by Eddy himself in the years following the War. From this learn about what happened to him and his wife after the liberation of the concentration camps and the processing of displaced persons. Though he was reunited with Friedel, his wife, returned to his medical career, training further as a psychoanalyst, his life was difficult. Neither Eddy nor Friedel could escape the post traumatic stresses of their ordeal, and they eventually were divorced, Eddy eventually having two further wives. He published extensively on what became his speciality, the effects of the Holocaust on its surviving victims and their children, one important essay, “Confrontation with Death,” being published in a fresh English translation in this volume. The psychological strains on the lives of those who managed, often more by sheer luck than any heroic acts on their behalf, outweigh any physical disabilities from malnutrition, disease or injury. Anxiety, nervousness, nightmares and moodiness often hamper the re-establishment of old relationships and formation of lasting new ones.

In the autobiographical novel, which is the text of Einstation (Last Stop Auschwitz), the narrator and the character named Hans, both of whom constitute the representative experiences of Eddy de Wind, reveal a highly educated and cultured young man wrenched out of normality and thrust into the mad house that was Auschwitz and the whole of the Holocaust. As a physician, he was pressed into service in the concentration camp hospital and experienced the utter illogical, stupid and insane world that it was. Around him, the horrors of the SS-run death machine carry on, tortures, executions and sadistic behaviour in general are mostly seen on the margins, heard from a distance, and felt in the disease, weakness, loss of will-to-live in those patients who pass into his care. But some actions and events that we are able to see and have some understanding of by virtue of hindsight, Eddy/Hans could not place into a larger picture and measure the weight of historical importance. For instance, he never identifies the Lagerartzt, the camp doctor in charge of medical experiments as Dr. Josef Mengele, nor does he realize the full extent of the inexpressible suffering undergone by twins, women and deformed victims. What he does feel is the myriad details of bodies disintegrating, men and women reduced to Musselmänner, other prisoners, including at times Jews thrust into positions where they not only have to degrade and torture others to try to survive themselves, but have their personalities twisted into the same sadistic madness as the Nazi guards.

There is a glossary of foreign words and titles of functionaries in the camp (German, Dutch, Polish) and expressions and an expansion of abbreviations. This is a bit awkward and might have been more conveniently placed as footnotes or marginal notes. David Colmer in his Translator’s Note justifies the retention of these words and expressions in their original form: words that run together terms from the commands of the Nazis, the curses of the foreign guards, the horrible mangled tones of the kapos, the pleas of the dying. Such a mangling of discourses does not obey the laws of grammar, the niceties of colloquial syntax, and the nuances of each individual’s personality. The translator attempts to convey the roughness of Eddy de Wind’s original Dutch text. The new version in English also, one might say, shocks the reader into sharing some of the confusion and meaninglessness of the experience the original writer was still feeling at the time he completed the book. Six black and white photographs are entered into the last section of the book to show the early life of Eddy, his mother and friends, the author as an old man in 1986, a year before his death, and a few pages of the handwritten original script. The inside front and back cover pages also reproduce in full colour some of the pages of that manuscript.