The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor

Antisemitism, an ancient prejudice that has lingered into the 21st century, has roots in an age when religion was felt to be central to one’s identity, morality, and place in society. During this time, the very existence of a rival religious group was seen almost as a provocation, and in Christian Europe the most visible example of this was Jewish people.

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE and again in 135 CE, Jewish refugees immigrated widely throughout the Roman world, and by the Christian era were by far the largest non-Christian group in Europe. In the Middle Ages, their religious and cultural differences drew the suspicion and hostility of many Christians, who forced them to live apart in their own societies, which made them all the more mysterious to their Christian neighbors, some of whom spread fantastical rumors about their supposed practices. The most notorious of these was the macabre “blood libel”: the false claim that Jews ritualistically murdered Christian boys in order to use their blood in religious rites. As a result of these lies and other facile claims and grievances, Jews were a frequent target of pogroms—organized massacres, often by common citizens—and sometimes were expelled en masse from European countries. In 1492, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella banished the Jews from Spain, while England expelled them for over 350 years, from 1290 to 1657.   

With the Age of Enlightenment, religious hatreds in Europe partly subsided, and by the 19th and 20th centuries, Jewish communities had established themselves at the core of many European countries and economies. In 1874, the United Kingdom elected a Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. In his book, Eddie Jaku notes that Jews had for centuries been an integral part of the societal “fabric” of Leipzig, his family’s home city, so much so that its big market day was held on Friday, rather than Saturday (the Jewish holy day), to allow them to participate.

This began to change after Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I (WWI), which came as a great shock to many Germans, who had been led to believe by state propaganda that they were winning the war. Conspiracy theories abounded that Germany had somehow been undermined and betrayed by domestic enemies. The fledgling Nazi party was quick to capitalize on these conspiracies, giving an age-old face to this shadowy menace: a Jewish one. As Eddie relates, German society, eviscerated by WWI and by the sanctions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, was descending into widespread poverty, hunger, fear, and (ultimately) a directionless, simmering rage that was just looking for a target.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis crested to power on a wave of antisemitic and anticommunist rhetoric, and immediately Jewish people were reduced to second-class citizens. Many anti-Jewish laws were passed as a way of forcing Jews to emigrate. In his book, Eddie tells how he was expelled from high school that year for being Jewish and was forced to transfer to a school in a distant city under an assumed name. Over the next five years, the relentless drumbeat of anti-Jewish propaganda, legislation, and ghettoization became more and more extreme: Jews were no longer demonized merely for “betraying” Germany in the war, but for every imaginable vice, including the murder of children. In 20th-century Germany—educated, sophisticated, and secular—the “blood libel” of medieval religious bigotry had returned, tenfold.  

The spark to this powder-keg fell on November 7, 1938, with the assassination of a German embassy official named Ernst vom Rath, purportedly by a 17-year-old Polish Jew. Two days later, on November 9, the Nazi “Brownshirts” and other paramilitaries incited an unprecedented nationwide pogrom, in which thousands of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were destroyed. Nearly 100 Jews were murdered, including women and children, and many thousands of Jewish men were arrested and thrown into concentration camps. Known as Kristallnacht (“the Night of Broken Glass”), this night was the watershed moment when the coolly orchestrated antisemitism of 1930s Germany tipped over into the rabid violence, mass internment, slave labor, and outright genocide that would come to define the Holocaust.      

Unfortunately, as recounted in his memoir, Eddie chooses this night of all nights to visit his parents’ house in Leipzig for their anniversary. Eddie, who had not been following the national news while studying in Tuttlingen, is profoundly disturbed to see ordinary Germans—formerly the most polite and law-abiding citizens, and once very respectful of the Jews—beating and murdering their Jewish neighbors in the streets, and throwing helpless women and children into Leipzig’s freezing river. A few days later, at the Buchenwald concentration camp, he witnesses the first stages of Hitler’s “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem,” as laughing guards herd hundreds of innocent Jews through the gates and shoot them in the back to cull the prison population. To him, it feels as if the world has gone mad. In the years to come, as Hitler’s obsession with the Jews is sanctified by the Nazis into a sort of national religion, six million Jews will die in the camps and through other innovative forms of state-sponsored murder throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe from 1938-1945.

All the same, Eddie suspects that many, if not most, non-Jewish Germans are secretly horrified by what is happening. Some of the guards at Buchenwald and Auschwitz take significant risks to smuggle him food or to take him out of harm’s way; one even helps him escape Auschwitz by hiding him in a barrel. If all of the Germans who disagreed with the Nazis had stood up to them on Kristallnacht, he thinks, there would have been no Holocaust. However, like citizens of any nation, most were passive, and did as they were told. Eddie’s memoir stands as a testament to the insidiousness of discrimination and hatred, urging readers to reject both, to prevent such atrocities from ever occurring again.