Louis de Wijze

A footballer in Westerbork and Auschwitz

"Football was everything to me" - this is how Louis de Wijze described his relationship with football as a young man. Born in Boxmeer near the German border in 1922, de Wijze was already playing for the youth team of "Quick 1888", a football club from Nijmegen, at the age of 14. Barely three years later, he was already playing for Quick's first team. He owed this success to more than just his talent.

After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Dutch army called up numerous older Quick players. Because he came from a Jewish family, he was no longer allowed to play for his club after 1941. He and his family were arrested in November 1942 and taken to the so-called transit camp in Westerbork, from where deportations to other camps began. In order to maintain a semblance of normality, the SS camp management allowed sports and cultural activities. Louis de Wijze played football in one of the camp team.

In March 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz. There, too, the SS allowed football matches in which only a few privileged prisoners could take part. Louis de Wijze was lucky and was one of them. He arrived in Buchenwald in January 1945 on an evacuation transport. The SS sent him to forced labour in the Langenstein-Zwieberge subcamp. He managed to escape from a death march in April 1945. After his return to the Netherlands, de Wijze successfully ran a meat business - like his father before him. As a pensioner, he was involved in remembrance work until his death in 2009.

"Football was everything to me, it defined my whole life. That's why I was overjoyed that I was able to continue playing my favourite sport in the Westerbork transit camp. It gave me courage and strength. Football gave me self-confidence and self-esteem. And now, perhaps a thousand kilometres away from home, where death has become the all-dominant factor around us, I can still immerse myself completely in the intoxication of the game. For an hour and a half, there are no more orders, no more truncheons or gallows. I sink blissfully into the gurgling applause and let myself drift on the waves of cheers. After every game I win, I'm firmly convinced that the hell we have to live in here will soon be behind me like a bad dream."

"It was a wonderful feeling to swap the boring, smelly camp clothes with the hated number on them for the crisp, colourful football shirts. For the first time in a long time, I no longer felt like a number, a colourless herd animal."

_{Louis de Wijze on playing football in Auschwitz (Ontsnapping uit de dodenmars, Amsterdam 2015)}