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

Knowing he cannot return to a Nazi concentration camp, Eddie steals a screwdriver and wrench from a toolkit on the train and sets to work prying up the floor tiles of his car. With little time to spare, he and eight other prisoners manage to squeeze through the small aperture and make a dangerous escape onto the tracks.

Eddie spends a week traveling back to Brussels by jumping trains, hopping from one to another in the dead of night to avoid searches. Once there, he manages to locate his father, mother, and sister, who are hiding in the attic of a boarding house outside of Brussels. His father is in poor health, having never recovered from the beating he received from the Belgian police over a year before. For a while, they are joined by Eddie’s two aunts, who unfortunately take the fatal risk, two months later, of visiting the family’s old apartment in Brussels to check the mail. The Gestapo are waiting, and the two of them are arrested, then gassed to death on the train to Auschwitz along with all the other passengers.

To keep his family from starving, Eddie takes a job as a mechanic in a factory, but can only work in absolute secrecy in the dead of night. He is paid only in cigarettes, which a friendly restauranteur takes in exchange for food. One day, the police raid the building next door and arrest a Jewish couple. Their three children have nowhere to go, so Eddie’s family takes them in; his mother treats them “as though they were her own children” (62). Eddie’s old friend Kurt Hirschfeld, also hiding out in Brussels, visits the family regularly for dinner, and Eddie’s mother treats him just like a son. Today, Eddie reflects that those months in Brussels may have been the “best time” of his life, because his family was all together. Though they were all crammed into a small attic, it is the sort of life he had always dreamed of during his lonely years at Tuttlingen and then at Buchenwald.

One night in 1943, while Eddie is at work, the police raid the house and arrest his family. Only the three children escape, and only because Eddie’s parents have hidden them behind a false wall. To arrest Eddie, the police lie in wait for hours until his return from work. At a transit camp in Malines, where the family has been corralled with many other Jews to await the next mass transit to Auschwitz, they meet Kurt, who has also been arrested (for vagrancy).

Once the camp has amassed enough prisoners to fill the train to maximum capacity, they are herded aboard, 150 to a car. It is a nine-day journey in unbearable heat, so Eddie’s father comes up with a plan to ration the meager amount of water they are given: Cutting a sheet of paper into 150 squares, he makes ration tickets for the passengers to trade for water (two cups per day). Thanks to him, only two passengers in their car die during the trip—as opposed to a death rate of up to 40% in the other cars.

In February of 1944, the train arrives at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau railway station, and the passengers are herded out “like cattle” by guards wielding batons, guns, and vicious dogs. Eddie’s mother and sister disappear into the surging crowd. At the camp’s entrance, Eddie and his father are assigned to separate lines by Dr. Josef Mengele, the white-coated “Angel of Death” who decides who is strong enough to work and who is to be killed immediately in the camp’s gas chambers. Not knowing this, and unwilling to be separated from his father, Eddie slips into the same line as his father, but a guard notices and pulls him out. His father is put on a truck, and Eddie never sees him again.

Eddie is one of 148 men chosen by Mengele that day to join Auschwitz’s work force, but first the group is thinned out by a brutal form of unnatural selection: The men are made to undress and are crammed into a very small, dark room, where they are confined for days, while Nazi guards sporadically terrorize them with shouts, threats, and beatings. Three days later, 18 men are dead, from trampling or other violence. The survivors are given striped prison uniforms and prisoner numbers by way of an excruciating tattoo.

Shortly afterward, Eddie asks a guard about the whereabouts of his father, and the guard points to the black smoke pouring endlessly from the crematoriums. Eddie’s father, the “strongest, kindest” man he had ever known, is dead, without a trace, along with his gentle, big-hearted mother. Eddie now asks his reader to please tell their mother “how much you love her. And do this for Eddie, your new friend, who cannot tell it to his mother” (71).

Eddie notes that Auschwitz has made an obscene reality out of Adolf Hitler’s fondest dream, outlined in his book Mein Kampf, of reducing the Jewish people to an abject, animal-like state of humiliation and lowly death. Entering the camp, Eddie is stripped of almost all of his belongings—even his name—and is put into a freezing barracks with 400 other Jews of all classes and nationalities, few of whom have anything in common besides their religion. This is a terrible shock to Eddie, who was never very religious but was always a proud German. To this day, Eddie cannot understand the madness of such reductive hatred and sheer waste.

Auschwitz is a “death camp,” where men and women die continually, day and night, of every possible cause. Eddie not only sees people murdered in the yard every day but wakes up beside death every morning: Throughout the freezing nights, the men in his barracks always try to shift their positions to keep warm, but regardless, 10 or 20 of them (usually the ones left too long on the outside of the pack) freeze to death every night. Weakness is a capital offense: Any prisoner who trips and falls on their way to work at the camp’s factories is shot instantly through the head.

Over time, Eddie learns to keep himself alive in “little ways,” such as by collecting enough bits of rag to make his wooden shoes less agonizing to his feet, or by crafting small tools, such as knives, to sell to other prisoners. Above all, what keeps him alive is his friendship with Kurt, whom he is able to meet every morning before work. Kurt is his “last link” to better times: Without him, Eddie would surely have succumbed to despair after the murder of his parents.     

Nevertheless, there are “many times” when Eddie finds it almost impossible to go on, and begs Kurt to come with him “to the wire”—i.e., to die by suicide by throwing themselves onto the camp’s electrified fence. Kurt, however, always keeps his friend from doing this. Love and friendship, Eddie tells us, is the greatest miracle you will ever know. In a hellscape like Auschwitz, a good friend often made the difference between life and death. This is certainly true for Eddie, who diligently keeps himself alive, day by day, just to see Kurt again. “A friend,” Eddie says, “can be your entire world” (84).