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Eddy Wynschenk (July 18, 1927, Amsterdam, the Netherlands – December 16, 2003) was a Holocaust survivor who became renowned throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond for sharing his story, frequently, at schools throughout Northern California. Before the Russian Army liberated Holocaust survivors from the Auschwitz death camp in January, 1945, he was forced to go on a death march. During the march he suffered frostbite. Using scissors, nurses cut off his numb, frostbitten toes to save his life at the Dora-Nordhausen camp. Speaking to students, he got angry often, and often cried as well. But sharing his Holocaust story with students became his mission in life. ==Early life== Wynschenk was the youngest of four children whose father was a wholesale dealer in fruits and vegetables. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands 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 the Netherlands, 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 the Netherlands, by which time his entire immediate family had been killed. He never graduated from high school. He married four years later, in 1949. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Eddy Wynschenk」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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