Eliazar de Wind

E. de Wind: Einstation Auschwitz

Eliazar (Eddy) de Wind ( The Hague , February 6, 1916 - Amsterdam , September 27, 1987 ) was a Dutch Jewish doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst . He was a survivor of the Holocaust in the Auschwitz concentration camp .

Life

Family, youth and studies

Eliazar, nickname Eddy, grew up as the only child of an assimilated Jewish merchant family in The Hague. He was badly scalded at the age of three and his father died of a brain tumor. Eddy studied medicine in Leiden and was able to finish his studies despite the German occupation and the expulsion of Jewish students from the universities. In Amsterdam he began training as a psychoanalyst.

Persecution of Jews, Arrest and Westerbork Camp

In the course of the mass arrest of 427 Jewish men in retaliation for the death of Hendrik Koot he was on 22./23. Arrested in February 1941 and taken to Schoorl . He feigned tuberculosis and was released with a few others, while the remaining men were transported to Mauthausen concentration camp . Subsequently, from February 24 to 27, with the support of the Communist Party, the February strike broke out, which was bloodily suppressed and made the situation of the Jews much worse: the Jews were ousted from working and economic life and by the so-called Liro regulations on their property deprived.

Eddy tried to flee to Switzerland, but did not want to abandon his mother either. When she was arrested and transported to the Westerbork transit camp , he volunteered on the advice of the Judenrat , which was looking for doctors for the camp, to protect his mother from deportation. When he arrived in Westerbork, however, his mother had already been transported to Auschwitz with her husband and stepson. Eddy had to "inspect" the prisoners in the hospital and decide who was not fit for transport and who was then put back from the deportation. He worked with a German nurse, Friedel Komornik, whom he married in the camp. On September 14, 1943, they were also deported to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz

The time in the camp is described in his book I stayed in Auschwitz , a text that was still written in the camp and in which he calls himself "Hans". He survived through his work in the prisoners' hospital and, through intervention with the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, also managed to get his wife to survive. Before the death marches during the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, he hid under a barrack and was thus able to experience the liberation by the Red Army . At the request of Russian doctors, he stayed five months to help with the care of the Dutch sick in particular, and in the meantime he wrote his notes, probably the only ones that were still written in the camp and therefore not falsified by memory. After the liberation of the Netherlands, Eddy tried to return home and, after an odyssey through Eastern Europe and across the Mediterranean, reached Enschede on July 24, 1945 . There he met his wife again, who he believed had perished on the death march.

post war period

After their return, Eddy and Friedel found it difficult to return to a society characterized by a spirit of reconstruction and remained mentally and physically battered: Friedel was sterile, relatives and friends had been murdered. They moved to a house in Amsterdam, but separated in 1957. Eddy remarried and the marriage had three children. Other survivors considered this marriage to a gentile woman to be “treason”.

Act

Eddy resumed his training as a psychoanalyst and dealt with the war trauma, which he described for the first time as survival guilt syndrome or concentration camp syndrome in an article entitled Confrontatie met de dood (German: "Confrontation with death") and the made him known in professional circles. In 1946 he published the Einstation Auschwitz , the report of his imprisonment. In addition to his work on the concentration camp syndrome, de Wind was one of the first to deal with trauma between the generations. He remained traumatized and in need of therapy himself, but hardworking and successful and became a sought-after expert and speaker, also in his second specialty, sex research . He campaigned for education and contraception in schools and founded the independent MR70 Foundation for Abortion in 1970, now the Rutgers Stichting . Traumas do not end with the death of those affected, but are passed on across generations. On the basis of this knowledge, Eddy founded a foundation for researching the psychological consequences of war (Stichting Onderzoek Psychische Oorlogsgevolgen, SOPO). While working on this project, he suffered a heart attack. The impending death brought him mentally back to Auschwitz and he suffered from severe fears. He died at the age of 71.

Works

• I stayed in Auschwitz - recording by a survivor 1943-45 Pieper, Munich 2020
• Einstation Auschwitz 1946; Reprinted in 1980 with a postscript, and in 2020 with a postscript from the De Wind family "Het leven van Eddy de Wind", pp. 209-223
• Psychoanalytic treatment van Ernst getraumatiseerden in: Tijdschrift voor Psychotherapie 8 (1982) pp. 143-155.
• Psychological and social factors of traumatization through war and persecution , in: Psychosozial 9 (1986).
• Confrontatie met de dood. Psychological followed van vervolging (Utrecht 1993).
• Terminus Auschwitz: journal d'un survivant (Paris 2020)
• Perversion or love: what else is normal in sexuality? Hamburg: Konkret Buchverlag, 1971
• Encounter with death . In: Psyche vol. XXII (1968), pp. 423-441.
• Dead in het derde en vierde geslacht In: 1940-1945: Onverwerkt verleden? Lezingen van het symposium georganiseerd door het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie. Utrecht: Hes (1985), pp. 51-65.

literature

• Joost Visser, Ben Crul, Ingrid Lutke Schipholt, Eva Nyst (eds.), Witte jassen en bruinhemden. Nederlandse artsen in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (2010).

Web links

• Eddy de Wind in de Database Joods Biographical Woordenboek (Dutch)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ denhaag.digitalestlösungen.nl
2. ↑ Herman Musaph, In Memoriam Eddy de Wind , in: herdenkingsnummer Nederlands Auschwitz Comité, January 1988, pp. 15-17, on issuu.com
3. ↑ E. de Wind (2020): I stayed in Auschwitz , p. 227.
4. ^ Mathias Middelberg: Jewish law, Jewish policy and the lawyer Hans Calmeyer in the occupied Netherlands 1940-1945. Osnabrück 2005, ISBN 978-3-89971-123-3 , pp. 163-168.
5. ↑ E. de Wind (2020): I stayed in Auschwitz , p. 236.