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

Several months have passed. It is November 1938—and Eddie is about to make the “biggest mistake” of his life. To surprise his parents on their 20th wedding anniversary, he makes the nine-hour train trip to Leipzig and, for the first time in over five years, uses his key to enter the family house. Surprised, and a bit worried, to find no one there but the family dog, he nevertheless goes to his room, collapses onto his childhood bed, and falls asleep. Had he followed the national news while working at his job in Tuttlingen, he would have known that antisemitism in Germany has been steadily building for months and is about to explode in the orgy of violence, murder, and destruction later known as “Kristallnacht.” His family, knowing this, went into hiding, thinking him safe in Tuttlingen with his forged papers.

Eddie’s impromptu homecoming just happens to coincide with this terrible night, when the homes and businesses of thousands of Jewish families are vandalized by mobs, many of them burned to the ground, and Jews are dragged into the streets of every German city to be beaten, arrested, or even murdered.

Eddie has barely fallen asleep when 10 Nazi thugs break into his house. In a frenzy, they kill his dog, carve a swastika into his arm with a bayonet, and beat him “half to death.” Dragging him into the street, the Nazis force him to witness the utter destruction by fire of his family’s 200-year-old house with all its family history. “In that moment,” says Eddie, “I lost my dignity, my freedom and my faith in humanity. I lost everything I lived for” (25).

Most horrifying, for him, is that most of the night’s mayhem is perpetrated not by Nazi thugs but by “ordinary” Germans—friends and neighbors, people he has known all his life. Mobs of these people, caught up in the mass hysteria, throw dozens of Jewish people, including many children, into Leipzig’s river, drowning them. Those who commit these atrocities seem to enjoy it; and worse, the many who take no part—who know it is wrong—do nothing to stop it. Cowardice and weakness, Eddie suggests, can be just as destructive as hatred or outright evil. After that night, Eddie is no longer proud to be a German.

Under arrest for being Jewish, Eddie is locked up in the zoo he used to visit as a child, then put on a truck to Buchenwald, a German concentration camp. On the way, he hears stories from the other prisoners about the widespread carnage of the previous night, and begins to worry even more about his parents and sister. At Buchenwald, due to his extensive injuries, he is sent straight to the hospital, where a nurse warns him that if he tries to escape, his parents will be instantly murdered. Not knowing that his parents are in hiding, he abandons any thought of escaping.

Once his wounds have healed and he joins the general population, he is “relieved” by the civilized manners of his fellow prisoners, most of whom are middle-class professionals like himself. He even makes a close friend, a Jew from Berlin named Kurt Hirschfeld. None of the prisoners are criminals, and so have no idea why they are being held, or what will happen to them. At this early stage of the Holocaust (1938), the full horrors of the ”Final Solution” still lie ahead, and are to them, as to the rest of the world, still inconceivable.

Nevertheless, Buchenwald, even in this early incarnation, comes as a great shock to Eddie. The only toilet is a huge pit of human waste, over which prisoners must balance on a thin plank of wood to relieve themselves. Beatings by guards are frequent, brutal, and mostly unprovoked, and every morning several hundred prisoners are randomly slaughtered—shot in the back—to keep the numbers down.

To Eddie, whose beloved country had always been among the most genteel and law-abiding of societies, Buchenwald’s wanton cruelty and lawlessness seem absolutely surreal. In retrospect, however, he does discern a certain logic: If, as Otto von Bismarck believed, Germans value obedience, conformity, and esprit de corps (the “common spirit” of a group) above most other things, the character of their leader is all-important. An evil one (like Hitler) might easily corrupt them, and turn them into a nation of outright monsters.

However, Eddie notes that some soldiers at Buchenwald still conceal a (small) core of decency behind their jackbooted facades. Coincidentally, one of them, Herman Hoer, had lived with Eddie at his boarding house at Tuttlingen and had always liked him. Shocked to see him at Buchenwald, Herman is visibly “panicked,” and resolves to do whatever he can to help his old acquaintance, whom he knows to be a brilliant mechanic and toolmaker. He does not dare help Eddie escape, but he does speak to the camp commander about his abilities. In a nation mobilizing itself feverishly for a war of global conquest, skilled mechanics (even Jewish ones) are at a premium, and Eddie is offered a contract to work at a factory “for the rest of [his] life” (36).

Before reporting to the factory, however, he is permitted to spend a few hours with his parents. His father is notified, and picks him up on May 2, 1939, six months after Eddie first entered Buchenwald. His father has been making his own plans to escape the country, but does not want to leave without Eddie. Embracing his father for the first time in over five years, and then leaving in his car, out of the clutches of Buchenwald and the Nazis—hopefully forever—transports Eddie to a “paradise” of joy, tenderness, and freedom. In the harrowing years to come, he tells us, he will often look back to this golden memory, and find the strength to survive another day.