Eddy Wynschenk - Early Life

Early Life

Wynschenk was the youngest of four children whose father was a wholesale dealer in fruits and vegetables. When the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940, Wynschenk’s father lost his business. Wynschenk was separated from the rest of his family after they were arrested in 1943. His two sisters were in hiding, but they turned themselves in after learning their younger brother was without his parents. His sisters did not survive. He arrived in the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, alone, and then was deported to Auschwitz. Wynschenk never again saw any of his immediate family.

Wynschenk was put to work in Birkenau, the killing facility of Auschwitz. In a speech to the Holocaust Center of Northern California, Wynschenk later described how he was selected to work on the train platform where the Jews first arrived. After large transports of Hungarian Jews were forced off the trains, Wynschenk had to go aboard the cattle cars and empty them of whatever possessions the Jews had left behind, then load what was left behind onto trucks. Afterwards, he was selected to work in a coal mine in Furstengrubbe, an Auschwitz sub-camp.

As World War II drew to a close and Allied liberators closed in upon Auschwitz, Wynschenk was among thousands of prisoners forced from the camp and into a death march by the Nazis. The prisoners wended their way westward. After three days of trudging through freezing mud on their forced death march, and ten more days cramped among many other prisoners in an open convoy, the teenage Wynschenk's toes turned black from gangrene. He was not yet eighteen years old –and weighed a mere 75 pounds– at the end of World War II in 1945, when two nurses cut off his toes. No anesthetic was used, but Wynschenk was so numb that he did not feel anything. His toes were thrown into a fire. Afterwards, his unique gait became easily recognizable.

After liberation from the death camp, Wynschenk returned to Holland, by which time his entire immediate family had been killed. He never graduated from high school. He married four years later, in 1949.