The REAL storyteller of Auschwitz
Seventy-five years after its liberation, the only book ever to be written inside the notorious Nazi death camp is published in English for the first time
SHORTLY after entering Auschwitz, Melcher de Wind walked over to touch the barbed wire fence that still rings the notorious concentration camp. As he tentatively clutched the dull wire between its barbed knots of steel, a strange, sickening fear tightened his stomach.
It was the self-same wire that so terrified his father Eddy, a Jewish doctor, when he arrived at the death camp with his young wife Friedel in September 1943. On that terrible night, Eddy’s eyes had been drawn to the small red lights dotting the top of the fence, warning that a deadly 3,000-volt charge ran through it.
Seventy-seven years on, tears welling in his eyes, Melcher, 58, explained: “My father couldn’t touch the wire because it would have killed him. So when I put my hands on the same barbed wire it was a very emotional moment for me.
“Even now, touching it made me scared, as if the 3,000 volts were still live, but I felt I had to do this for my father. His survival was a victory over Auschwitz and so for me touching the wire was the right thing to do.
“My father’s incredible book, too, is a victory over Auschwitz and over the SS.”
The book, Last Stop Auschwitz, which is being republished this week, is a remarkable document. Widely thought to be the only complete book written within the camp itself, it is a truly extraordinary account; poignant, terrifying and unforgettable.
DR EDDY de Wind was a Dutch psychiatrist who, having been shipped to Auschwitz, made it through the brutal selection process to be put to work.
The book was written almost 75 years ago on Eddy’s bunk bed in the days following the camp’s liberation by Russian forces on January 27, 1945. He was a physical and mental wreck, having barely survived, but felt compelled to document its horrors as a warning to future generations.
More than one million people, mostly Jewish men, women and children were transported from across Europe to be murdered here or in the larger nearby death camp of Birkenau. It was killing on an industrial scale, the likes of which the world had never seen.
On his first visit to the camp, standing yards from the infamous entrance, with its notorious slogan Arbeit Macht Frei – “Work Sets You Free” – Melcher movingly imagined how his father felt when he arrived at the same spot on a crowded freight train from the Westerbork labour camp in The Netherlands.
Eddy was 26 and his new bride was just 18. A Jewish refugee fleeing persecution in Germany, Friedel had sought sanctuary in The Netherlands, before being swept up by the Nazis. The pair married after Friedel, working as a nurse, had fallen for the older doctor guiding her through the darkness.
Both had been treated fairly well at Westerbork, but all that changed when their packed train made its last stop in the Polish countryside.
Melcher, his eyes scanning the imposing former Polish army barracks, whispered: “It must have been so traumatising, so awful when they got off that train.
“The dehumanisation process would have started immediately. Their possessions were stolen, people were being hit, and then there was the selection.
“Only the strong were taken away, the women for experiments and the men to become slaves…. the others were led to the gas chamber.”
Eddy escaped death because he was a trained doctor whose skills were needed, Friedel because she was a fit young woman.
The terrified couple separately endured the indignity of having their heads shaved and prisoner numbers imprinted on their arms.Then she was taken to Block 10, run by Nazi medic Josef Mengele, where countless women were used for sadistic experiments.
Eddy was assigned to Block 9, the bleak home for Polish political prisoners who were treated marginally better than other inmates.
A strip of grass 20-feet wide separated the blocks. But it was as if they were living on different continents.
Melcher says: “Every day my father hoped to catch sight of Friedel but they had to be careful because the SS stopped any communication.
“My father told me at one point he asked somebody where all the people he’d travelled with had gone, and where his mother had gone because she had been
‘Every day my father hoped to catch sight of his wife, but the SS made it difficult’
‘We once watched a film about zombies but the awful memories made him cry’
sent to Auschwitz before him. “The other prisoner pointed to the sky above the gas chamber and told him, ‘You see the smoke, that is where they all are’.”
The gas chamber, just a few hundred yards away, was an ammunition store which had been converted into a sealed death vault. After its victims had succumbed to the hydrogen cyanide Zyklon B gas, other prisoners would feed their naked bodies into the furnaces next door.
“My father realised it was a murder machine with the purpose of killing all the Jews, gipsies and others and that would continue until the war stopped,” says Melcher, a father-of-three and museum curator in Amsterdam.
The camp broke nearly everyone. But perhaps his training as a psychiatrist helped Eddy to devise a strategy for survival. Melcher says: “He was lucky to be in Block 9 because the Polish prisoners got packages from their homes, which included food but he was very worried about Friedel.
“The women in Mengele’s experimentation block were not allowed out. My father would get the kettle of soup for Block 9 from the canteen and take it there in the hope of seeing Friedel.
“Sometimes he saw her face behind a barred upstairs window, which lifted his spirits. They also passed notes to each other through other prisoners and sometimes they met briefly and were able to talk.
“It’s a very moving love story which runs through the book. One of my father’s notes to her was a love poem, just beautiful.”
By chance, Friedel was spared the surgical knives of Mengele’s butchers, but her health declined and she suffered tuberculosis.
At one point, she was chosen to work at night in a nearby clothing factory making the blue and white striped pyjamas for prisoners.
Friedel feared the dust would prove fatal but Eddy appealed directly to Mengele for her to come back to the experimentation block, where her nursing skills might help others survive.
Melcher says: “It was very brave because if he had said one wrong word he would have been taken to the gas chamber. But it also shows the schizophrenic Nazi mentality. Mengele could be human, which meant he knew what he was doing. He knew the difference between good and evil.” As the Russian army fought its way across Poland towards the camp, Eddy avoided being rounded up for slaughter by SS guards by hiding under clothing. But Friedel was forced to march towards Germany.
After liberation, Eddy agreed to stay in the camp, treating injured Russian soldiers and survivors for many months while constantly wondering if his wife was alive. It was only when he eventually arrived back in Amsterdam that he found her in hospital, being treated for a severe lung condition.
Although they went on to live together for 12 years, the couple struggled with their memories and separated in 1957.
Friedel, left infertile by TB, remarried and adopted an Indonesian boy while Eddy married Sonya, a younger non-Jewish woman, with whom he had three children, including Melcher.
The book he’d furiously written in the evenings in a discarded SS notebook, desperate to recall every detail, after helping injured Russians all day, was published in Dutch in 1946 titled End Station. In 1980 it was republished in Dutch. Now, to mark the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the family has agreed it should be shared throughout the world in translation. Publishers in 23 countries have snapped it up.
THE Daily Express travelled to Auschwitz to talk about the book’s extraordinary genesis with Melcher, during his first visit there.
“It is an honest, direct book which has a universal appeal and a moral compass,” says Melcher. “It’s even more incredible that he wrote it so soon after Auschwitz was liberated. Throughout his life my father struggled with his memories.
“I remember once watching a film about zombies and he suddenly started crying because the film brought back the terrible times. My mother says Auschwitz was always on the kitchen table in our family. As children growing up we felt our father’s pain and we wanted to help, but it was not always easy.
“Being in Auschwitz now has helped me understand where his pain came from.”
Eddy later worked in Amsterdam to help people dealing with war trauma.
“He always wanted to help people, an incredible man and an unbelievable father,” Melcher added. Eddy died of heart failure aged 71 in September 1987.
Shortly after his father’s death, Melcher visited Friedel to break the news.
Her tears added to the flood already cried over Auschwitz. Now Eddy’s book is published in English for the first time, many more will doubtless be shed.