Dora Zaidenweber

Ruth Margo De Wilde
Courtesy of Star News, Elk River, MN.

Remembering the Holocaust:
Tuesday, 08 January 2008

None of it made sense. The family was told they couldn’t get out of Holland because of a newborn baby. The mother wouldn’t be able to travel with a small child, too tiresome. Instead, they were ordered to board separate trains and told to get off at the first stop to get visas.

But instead Ruth Margot De Wilde and her in-laws were interrogated by the Gestapo and sent with a transport of previously arrested to the central collection point in Berlin.

This was during the Holocaust when millions where killed under the Nazi regime. De Wilde is one of the survivors who spent June 1943 to January 1945 in the Auschwitz concentration camp before walking three days and two nights during a death march and then being liberated at Ravensbruck.

There’s just so much to tell, the 86-year-old woman said while sitting in her Plymouth, Minn. home.

One of the earlier memories of the horrible ordeal is being on the transport trains sent to Auschwitz. They were cramped and only had one bucket for a facility, De Wilde said.

When they arrived at Auschwitz and the doors opened there was a lot of screaming, as the “capos,” which were other prisoners, let them out.

The selection process started immediately and since men and women were separated, De Wilde was put in a different line than her husband, who later died at Auschwitz of tuberculosis.

“I didn’t say goodbye to anyone,” she said. “They said women to that side, so you went.”

De Wilde was housed at the only women’s barrack at the camp. But before this she went through the experience of having her head shaved and a number tattooed on her arm.

It was in this barrack that many of the women were selected to be part of Dr. Josef Mengele’s, now known as the angel of death’s, infamous Nazi medical experiments.

DeWilde remembers women coming back crying to the barrack after being picked for an experiment.

While at Auschwitz she had some jobs, including making the beds, which were just straw mats and pillows, she said. Life at the camp was a lot of uncertainty and waiting. In the mornings all the prisoners would line up, at times in the snow, for hours while the officers went through the daily camp, she said. Once all the numbers were called, some sort of hot liquid was given out as people went back to their barrack to see what would happen.

“Nothing was going on in the beginning,” De Wilde said. “You didn’t know what would happen.”

During this time the women would talk and create recipes verbally, she said.

“In the beginning it was about food because there wasn’t enough,” De Wilde said.

In January1945, after walking through the snow to Ravensbruck, De Wilde arrived with a group of women from Auschwitz, including two other friends who she stayed with until liberation.

“We were the three musketeers,” she said.

Speaking about her life experiences is nothing new for De Wilde, who has been an active speaker since the 1960s.

She said before that, people just didn’t talk about the Holocaust, but she decided to in order to preserve the history and remind others what people are capable of doing to each other under certain pressures.

And after all De Wilde was put through, she still doesn’t hold any hate in her heart, she said. Instead she has pity for those that could sink to the level of hurting others and blindly taking orders.

Ruth Margo De Wilde’s video interview from the Survivors of the Shoah project is available at the University of Minnesota Library.

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Phone: 612-624-0256
Fax: 612-626-9169
Email: chgs@umn.edu

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Last modified on October 22, 2009