At a certain point, Verduin became very ill as a result of infections caused by flea bites, and he was afraid of being sent to the gas chamber for the next selection. By deliberately injuring his thumb, he ended up in the infirmary. He later became seriously ill again and fell into a coma. His end seemed inevitable, but the head of the infirmary, a Polish-Jewish fellow prisoner, pronounced him dead and in this way Verduin survived the last weeks of Auschwitz as a ‘deceased’ person.
After the camp was dismantled, he endured an exhausting 60-kilometer “death march” that ended in Gleiwitz. From there the prisoners were taken to Buchenwald to be murdered. Thanks to his claim that he was not a Jew, he was not killed but sent to a Dutch barracks. Three days later, Buchenwald was liberated. He finally returned to the Netherlands in May 1945, where he was reunited with his mother after a few months. His father and sister did not survive the war.
Until an advanced age, Verduin still told his story about the war in secondary schools. In 2015 he represented the Dutch who survived the camp at the commemoration in Auschwitz. At the commemoration in 2020, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Verduin, together with volunteers, Dutch celebrities and another survivor on the former camp site of Camp Westerbork, read names at the spoken monument De 102.000 Namen Lezen.
–
