Survivor remembers

To survive when millions do not is a tale most people hope never to tell.

But for Margot DeWilde, a survivor of the Holocaust, her story of endurance is something she hopes will educate, inform and prevent the horrors that occurred during World War II from happening again.

Thursday marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Although she was not at the camp during the liberation, DeWilde survived the conditions in Auschwitz for a lengthy period of time. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Web site, the Nazis established the camp in Poland in 1940.

The camp was gradually enlarged with three main parts and over 40 sub-camps. Throughout the years, prisoners included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, the Roma (known as Gypsies then) and beginning in 1942, European Jews.

Most of the Jewish people deported to Auschwitz were immediately sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau. The Nazis evacuated most of the camp toward the end of the war in an attempt to erase all evidence of what occurred at the site. Prisoners unable to leave were liberated on January 27, 1945.

Born in 1921 in Germany, DeWilde moved from Berlin to Amsterdam at age 11. In 1940, Holland (also known as the Netherlands), surrendered after only one day. Although DeWilde and her family had experienced persecution in Germany, the oppression began in Holland as well. DeWilde described the oppression of European Jews as Hitler having heard the story of Robin Hood, but confusing the Jews with the rich people in the story.

"(The) limitations became bigger and bigger," DeWilde said. "You couldn't go shopping anymore, (it was) special times and stores."

The restrictions also affected schools and professions, but the restraints didn't affect DeWilde's spirit.

"I was always very obstinate," she said. "I went shopping, didn't wear a star and was working a little in the underground falsifying papers."

In 1942, the first raids began, and DeWilde's family decided to go into hiding. They hoped to immigrate to Switzerland.

"We were put in a compartment in a train in Amsterdam with another family," DeWilde said.

Unexpectedly, a German officer told them they'd have to get out at Cologne, Germany for a stamp in their passports. Once there, they were arrested and accused of smuggling valuables. The family was transferred to a train with several hundred other Germans, which was en route to a collection camp in Berlin.

At this point, although DeWilde and her family didn't know what would happen to them, they decided not to try to escape.

"We thought, 'we're young, if we're placed in some area where we'll have to make a future we'll make it,'" she said.

She and her husband left on the next-to-last transport to leave Berlin.

"When everyone stumbled, fell and jumped out, there was an officer standing in front which gave directions. Women to that side, men to that side," DeWilde said.

The officers at Auschwitz then asked that young married women step forward, one of which was DeWilde.

"It is a strange feeling, you can't image, not knowing minute-to-minute what was going to happen to you," DeWilde said. "All you could do was make the best of every minute."

The women in her group had their hair shaved and their clothes taken from them. Brought to a barrack in a big complex, they arrived at No. 10, although they had no idea what that meant.

"Later, we found out that it was an experimental block," DeWilde said.

As one of the many test subjects on whom medical experiments were performed, DeWilde underwent treatments that left her sterilized.

Even as she endured the treatments and the perpetual hunger that pervaded the camp, DeWilde spoke often of a "guardian angel" that watched over her. When she contracted scarlet fever, a barrack doctor saved her life with a shot of the forerunner of penicillin. Another time, when she was in an attic of one of the buildings repairing clothing, she asked her friend to move down a little because she was uncomfortable. Within moments, a rock came through the roof, landing on the spot she'd just vacated.

In the depths of the winter of 1945, DeWilde was forced, among others, to walk until they reached a train station 60 to 70 miles away from the camp. After arriving at their location, DeWilde and two friends agreed to go to what turned out to be an overcrowded labor camp.

Throughout the war, DeWilde and the other prisoners heard rumblings of what was going on in the front lines. Never knowing what was going on with the war, it was a surprise to be liberated that final morning. She, along with thousands of other people, began to walk westward, but the Russian army caught up with them. They were eventually sent back to their home countries.

Although DeWilde's husband died in the camp, she was able to reconnect after the war with her parents and brother. She eventually moved to Minnesota, where her brother was living. Addressing anti-Semitism in the United States, she said that as late as 1959, her brother asked her to put a Band-Aid on the number tattooed on her arm from Auschwitz as a precaution.

"I never felt bad about (the number)," DeWilde said. "But when stupid people asked what it was, I said it was my telephone number."

When asked about the importance of having someone like Margot DeWilde speak to students on campus, Susan Motin, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education, said that DeWilde summed it up best herself.

"When you have the opportunity to see a person like DeWilde, you are the last generation that will be able to see (someone like her) in person," Motin said. "She really wants people to know what happened and that it did happen."

Kelsey Zwiebel, a third-year international relations, Spanish major and a member of the history 411 class that focuses on the Holocaust, said she appreciated the experience.

"I was thoroughly impressed," Zwiebel said. "You learn a lot more hearing real stories from a real person than reading textbooks. It makes it a lot more personal and a lot more real."

Motin said that the Center tries to bring in at least two survivors each year.

In recounting her experience, DeWilde was candid about the things she had endured and why she is still willing to discuss them.

"(Recent amendments limiting certain groups) is the reason why some of us speak out," she said. "You have powers in yourself which you do not know."