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

The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor is a 2020 nonfiction book by Eddie Jaku, who was 100 years old when the book was published. The memoir recounts Eddie’s life from his idyllic childhood in Germany to his experiences in Auschwitz and his survival of the horrors of the Holocaust. Through a combination of resilience, shrewdness, and sheer luck, Eddie lives to see the Nazis defeated and the camps liberated in 1945, but only after losing most of his family and friends to Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Though Eddie does not spare the details of the horrors that he has seen and endured, his final message is one of hope: Happiness, he believes, is the “best revenge,” and so he refuses to harbor any feelings of hatred or vengeance—which, he argues, are a kind of prison for the soul. The memoir became an international bestseller and has been translated into 37 languages.

This guide uses the 2020 Pan Macmillan edition of The Happiest Man on Earth.

Content Warning: The source material contains vivid, real-life accounts of atrocities committed against Jewish people and other minorities during the Holocaust, including genocide, torture, murder, forced starvation, forced labor, mass extermination, etc. Some readers may find the events profoundly disturbing. There is also some discussion of suicidal ideation. 

Plot Summary

Eddie Jaku is born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Leipzig, a German city with a centuries-long tolerance for Jews, who have long been an integral part of its economy and society. Eddie and his family are proud Germans whose national identity is far more important to them than their religion.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, and his antisemitic ideology soon directs national policy: Eddie’s family is forbidden to celebrate his bar mitzvah in Leipzig’s grand synagogue, and his high school soon expels him for being Jewish. His resourceful father sends him to the distant city of Tuttlingen to attend an engineering school under a false identity, and for the next five years he studies and works diligently, in great loneliness. In 1938, he decides to travel back to Leipzig to surprise his parents on their 20th anniversary, but this happens on the night of the nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, and Eddie is brutally beaten and arrested. He is sent to Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp, where the prisoners—mostly middle-class Jews—are routinely tortured, humiliated, and murdered. It is here that he first meets his longtime friend Kurt Hirschfeld.    

One of the soldiers at Buchenwald recognizes Eddie from his engineering school and helps to get him a manufacturing job. Eddie’s father is enlisted by the Nazis to drive him to the factory, but instead drives him to the Belgian border, and the two of them, despite being separated during the crossing, manage to meet up in Brussels. Before Eddie’s mother and sister can join them, Eddie is arrested by the Belgian gendarmerie for being an illegal alien and is placed in a refugee camp, where he lives for a year. In 1940, Germany invades Belgium and France, and Eddie makes plans to escape to England. He and some other refugees make their way to the west coast of France and attempt to cross over to England from Dunkirk, but the chaotic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force is underway, and no boat will take them. Eddie travels south on foot, looking for another portal of escape, but is mistakenly arrested as a German spy, and spends the next seven months at Gurs, a French concentration camp.

When Phillipe Petain, the collaborationist head of Vichy France, agrees to trade Jewish prisoners to the Nazis in exchange for French prisoners, Eddie is put on a train to Auschwitz, but uses a stolen screwdriver to pry up the floor tiles of his compartment and escape. Over the next week, he hops trains back to Brussels, where he meets up with his father, mother, and sister, who are hiding in the attic of a boarding house. Eddie arranges to work secretly at a nearby factory to support himself and his family, but in 1943 they are all discovered and arrested by the Belgian police, who hand them over to the Gestapo. They are put on a train to Auschwitz, a journey that lasts nine days. At the camp, Dr. Josef Mengele selects Eddie for slave labor, but Eddie’s father and mother do not make the cut. They are murdered in the camp’s gas chambers shortly after arrival.

At Auschwitz, even for those spared immediate death, life is typically very short: Death by starvation, freezing, beatings, overwork, and suicide is commonplace, and many prisoners are casually murdered by guards for trivial offenses. Luckily for Eddie, his friendship with Kurt Hirschfeld, whom he first knew at Buchenwald, gives him crucial moral support. His mechanical skills eventually earn him the status of “Economically Indispensable Jew,” which offers a little protection from the arbitrary cruelty and bloodlust of the guards. Some guards, however, are “good people” caught in an impossible situation, and these men sometimes smuggle food to Eddie and others, once even helping him in an (abortive) escape attempt.

In January 1945, the Nazis, seeing that the war is lost and that the Red Army is closing in, herd the camp’s prisoners out onto the road on a forced “death march” to Germany. Up to 15,000 prisoners die on the march, during which Eddie saves the ailing Kurt by hiding him in the crawlspace of an abandoned building. Eddie and the other survivors are put on a train to Buchenwald, and hundreds more die of exposure during the five-day journey. The Russians, however, continue to close in, and after four months at Buchenwald, during which Eddie becomes so weak that he can barely eat, the prisoners are forced out onto another march—an aimless one through the German countryside. Eddie suspects that the Nazis will soon kill them all to eliminate the evidence of their atrocities, and so he slips away one night and hides in a culvert. After subsisting for several days on slugs and snails in a nearby cave, he uses the last of his strength to crawl to a highway, where he is rescued by American troops. The Germans have finally been routed, but for many days Eddie hovers between life and death in an army hospital.       

Eventually, Eddie makes a satisfactory recovery, and is reunited with both his sister and Kurt in Brussels, where he and Kurt take an apartment together. In 1946, he marries Flore Molho, a Jewish woman who spent most of the war hiding in Brussels and Paris. A year later, holding his first child in his arms, he feels his long-lost happiness return “in abundance.” However, the Belgian government continues to treat Eddie as a refugee, forcing him to reapply for citizenship every six months. He does not feel at home there, so in 1950 he and Flore decide to move to Australia.

In Sydney, after a rocky few months, they settle into their new lives, and Eddie makes a comfortable living as a manufacturer of medical instruments. After six years, Eddie decides to focus on auto mechanics, and soon opens his own service station. In 1966, he learns yet another trade (real estate) and founds his own agency, which he continues to run well into his nineties. Starting in the 1970s, he begins to speak out about his experiences in the Holocaust: first in small groups as a form of therapy, and eventually in front of ever-larger audiences, to bear witness to the monstrosity of these almost-inconceivable events. His message, however, is never one of anger or bitterness, but of love and happiness—partly in sheer defiance of the Nazis’ exploitation of grievance and hatred.