Margot DeWild
"I'm not bitter - I don't hate," says woman who survived Auschwitz
Left. Margot DeWild held a pendant depicting a canal scene in Amsterdam: "For me this is home." (Star Tribune photo by Richard Sennott)
By Margot DeWild's reckoning, "I've had a guardian angel all my life."
She survived two years in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, losing her first husband and undergoing forced sterilization by Josef Mengele. "But I'm not bitter - I don't hate," she said. "That's probably what keeps me alive."
In 1932, when DeWild was 11, her father left his native Germany and moved his family to Holland, sensing that Adolf Hitler's rise to power would be disastrous for Jews. In late 1941, DeWild's mother and brother went into hiding in the Dutch city of Arnhem; her father hid in Amsterdam. Newly married to a student named Ludwig Meyer, DeWild hoped to accompany her in-laws to Switzerland.
The family had to wait until March 1943 to win permission to travel. They made it only as far as Cologne, where they were eventually taken to Berlin. After several weeks in a transfer camp, she was sent to Auschwitz. "'they told the married women to step forward," DeWild said. "I was one of about 25 who were picked. They took us to a brick barracks, where Mengele was doing medical experiments."
Working in the camp's sick bay, she nursed her husband, who had tuberculosis. "It spared him from going to the gas chamber," she said. "Three times he was on the list, but he died finally of natural causes, in his bunk, in April of 1944. I was raised Orthodox, but when he died, I started to ask why. I couldn't believe anymore."
Transferred to another camp in early 1945 as the Soviet army approached, she still remembers the day she saw a prisoner carrying a U.S. flag. "I thought I was hallucinating," she said, recalling her personal liberation day: May 4, 1945.
Of all of DeWild's relatives, only her mother, father and brother survived. She resettled in Holland, where she married again. She divorced after 17 years.
She came to Minnesota in 1959 to visit her brother, who worked at Pillsbury. She met Rudy DeWild in Minneapolis. They married in 1960. "We've had 40 years," she said. They now live in Plymouth.
DeWild despairs that another Holocaust could come. "The Holocaust wasn't the first one and it may not be the last time a group of people is persecuted because they are different," she said.
- Bob von Sternberg