Eddy de Wind (1916–1987)

Eddy de Wind (né Eliazar) was born to a Jewish family in The Hague, Netherlands. He was a young medical student at the University of Leiden when Nazi Germany invaded his country in May 1940, at the start of World War II. The Germans forced Dutch universities to exclude Jewish staff and students. However, with the help of his professors,

Eddy was able to accelerate his studies and graduate. He was picked up in a German raid and sent to the concentration camp at Vught, but was released. Remarkably, shortly after this, when his mother Henriette was sent to the notorious Westerbork transit camp, he promised the authorities that in exchange for her release, he would voluntarily serve there as a doctor. However, when he arrived at Westerbork, he found that his mother had already been deported to the death camp at Auschwitz. Nevertheless, Eddy stayed at Westerbork, where he met and married his first wife, Friedel Komornik, a nurse at the camp. In 1943, Eddy and Friedel were both deported to Auschwitz.
There he served as a prisoner-doctor. He survived due to a combination of language skills -- he spoke German and French as well as Dutch -- medical training, coincidence, and luck. In January 1945, when those still alive were forced by the Nazis on a death march away from the camp, he successfully hid, and was thus one of the few Jewish prisoners to be liberated by the Red Army. He stayed on for three months at the request of the Russians to help care for the sick.

After returning to
The Netherlands, he specialized as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and devoted a great deal of his time to treating and researching survivor trauma. In 1949, he introduced the term concentration camp syndrome (KZ syndrome in German) in an article entitled "Confrontatie met de dood" (Confrontation with Death). Today KZ

syndrome would be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and survivor’s guilt. In 1946, Eddy published a memoir, Eindstation Auschwitz. Mijn verhaal vanuit het kamp, 1943–1945, written while he was still on-site, one of the first Holocaust memoirs to appear. It was translated into English as Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from Within the Camp and published posthumously in 2020. After the war, Eddy and Friedel divorced and he remarried and had three children.