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

“Nothing could shake my father’s patriotism and pride in Germany. We considered ourselves German first, German second, and then Jewish.”

One of the many ironies of the Holocaust is that most of the Germans who were scapegoated and murdered as Jewish “traitors” were just as patriotic (if not more so) as their non-Jewish fellow citizens. Many Jews served in WWI on the German side and were decorated for their valor, but this did not save them from persecution or extermination under the Nazis. Eddie’s father, a skilled mechanic, helped the Germans manufacture weapons for WWI, and (like Eddie himself) was devoted to his country. His family was not devoutly religious: Judaism played a very small part in their lives. However, in the eyes of the Nazis, their religion alone marked them for destruction. Eddie’s assertion that “nothing could shake” his father’s pride in Germany strikes an ominous note for the reader, who knows that this pride will soon be sorely tested.

“As a boy, I truly believed that I was part of the most enlightened, most cultured, most sophisticated—certainly the most educated—society in the whole world. How wrong I was.”

After its unification in 1871, Germany became one of the industrial, cultural, and technological centers of Europe. It had a centuries-old intellectual pedigree that included such writers and philosophers as Hegel, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche, Rilke, Heidegger, and Kant. This is why the rise of Nazism—one of the most brutish, intolerant, and intellectually backward political systems of all time—was such a shock to so many. Here, Eddie foreshadows what is to come, and his own shock and sense of deep betrayal: “How wrong I was.”  

“It was hard for even fortunate people to live, and the Germans were humiliated and angry. People became desperate and receptive to any solution. The Nazi party and Hitler promised the German people a solution. And they provided an enemy.”

In the wake of WWI, Germany was reduced to a shell of its former self, having lost much of its territory, natural resources, and wealth, partly as compensation to other nations for its leading role in WWI. For many years, decent food was scarce, and inflation was out of control. Adolf Hitler, in his rise to power, focused the German people’s rage and frustration against an “enemy” in their midst: Jewish people, whom he falsely blamed for Germany’s betrayal and defeat in WWI. Many ordinary Germans found themselves swept up in the mania of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish scapegoating and (eventual) mass murder. In this passage, Eddie warns against how desperation and bitterness can lead to hatred and violence.

“This was the epicenter of engineering technology in the world at the time, supplying the world with precision machines [...] I remember seeing a machine where a chicken would go into one end of a conveyor belt and emerge at the other end plucked, washed, and wrapped. It was incredible!”

Early 20th-century industrial technology, such as the assembly line factory, was greeted by most with great optimism. The Holocaust, however, revealed the unsuspected horrors of this new, well-oiled efficiency, when directed toward the liquidation of a people. Eddie’s delight in a German chicken-processing plant is, in retrospect, darkly ironic, in light of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, where human beings were processed and killed with similar machine-like efficiency. 

“And he was right. Without what I learned in school, I would never have survived what was to come.”

In his teens, Eddie spent five lonely years at a prestigious college in Tuttlingen, Germany, studying mechanical engineering under a false name. The mechanical skills he learned there—very valuable in wartime Germany—saved his life several times throughout the long years of his persecution as a Jew in Germany and Belgium. His time in Tuttlingen also accustomed him to loneliness, privation, hard work, and the habits of secretiveness, all of which later helped him to survive the Holocaust. Though his father could have had no idea of what was to come, he did know that Eddie’s chances of success in (antisemitic) Germany would be much better with a first-rate education. Here, Eddie shows his gratitude for his father’s wisdom and love in this, as in all things.  

“It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbors since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting.”

For many, the most troubling aspect of the Holocaust was the avidity with which ordinary Germans turned against their own friends and neighbors once the Nazi campaign of religious/racial hatred reached a fever pitch, notably with Kristallnacht in 1938. Thousands became complicit in the antisemitic violence, betraying and harming their Jewish neighbors and “join[ing] in the violence and the looting.” For Eddie, such experiences will stand in marked contrast with The Importance of Unity, kindness, and compassion that will make survival possible.

“Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of unified Germany, once warned the world to watch out for the German people. With a good leader, they were the greatest nation on Earth. With a bad leader, they were monsters. For the guards who persecuted us, discipline was more important than common sense.”

As Eddie relates, Bismarck suggested that Germans valued conformity and a “groupthink” submission to authority. This unthinking, clocklike conformity had murderous consequences during the Holocaust. At Buchenwald, Eddie regards the Nazi guards’ policy of shooting prisoners in the back to be a particularly obscene travesty of “discipline.”  

“The Jews had become the scapegoat, as they had been time and again over the centuries, but the hunger for money and productivity in the Third Reich still overpowered the insanity of pure hatred.”

Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis were well aware that many of their country’s most skilled mechanics, engineers, and scientists were Jewish. Whenever possible, they retained these individuals for forced labor—to serve the war effort and economy—rather than murder them. This expediency saved Eddie on a number of occasions, and here he reflects wryly on how one negative force (greed) helped him by slightly overpowering another (hatred).

“I just couldn’t bring myself to take this poor boy’s clothes. It was one thing to improvise and be resourceful, but another to steal this poor dead soldier’s dignity, the only thing that the war had not taken.”

In the increasingly antisemitic Germany of the 1930s, Eddie and his family learned to use deception to protect themselves. An example is when Eddie was issued fake papers in the name of a Christian child who had disappeared so he could attend college in Tuttlingen. However, Eddie’s compassion will not allow him to steal the “dignity” (clothes), as well as the name, of a dead soldier on the beach of Dunkirk, even though it represents his only chance of escaping to England.  

“I did not want to be separated from my father so I slipped from one line to the other and followed behind him. I was nearly on the truck when one of the stooges standing guard with Mengele noticed me.”

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Eddie almost doomed himself by following his father into a truck that was conveying prisoners to the camp’s gas chambers. The notion that older, weaker prisoners were being methodically winnowed out and murdered en masse was (as yet) inconceivable to him. Only the alertness of one of Dr. Mengele’s “stooges” saved him—since Mengele had allocated him for labor. This was the last time Eddie saw his father.

“Many people chose to take their own lives rather than go on. It was so common there was even a phrase to describe it: go to the wire.”

Many Auschwitz prisoners lost all hope and chose a quick death over a prolonged, excruciating one, often by throwing themselves onto the electrified fence (”the wire”) around Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Eddie himself was tempted several times to end his life this way, but his friend Kurt always kept him from doing it, urging him to maintain Resilience in the Face of Unimaginable Horrors.

“Auschwitz was a living nightmare, a place of unimaginable horrors. But I survived because I owed it to my friend Kurt to survive, to live another day so that I might see him again.”

For almost a year, Eddie’s friend Kurt kept him alive—not only by forcibly restraining him from suicide, but by giving him something for which to live. As Eddie suggests, those who survived Auschwitz were generally those who had strong emotional bonds with other prisoners, reinforcing The Importance of Unity in survival. A friend, he says, “is someone who reminds you to feel alive” (83). The miracle of love and friendship is the “most important” lesson Eddie has taken from life, and here he reminds us that even in the worst “nightmares,” good things can thrive.

“I never lost sight of what it was to be civilized. I knew that there would be no point surviving if I had to become an evil man to do it. I never hurt another prisoner, I never stole another man’s bread, and I did all I could to help my fellow man.”

Though other prisoners occasionally stole Eddie’s food at Auschwitz, he was determined not to survive at the expense of someone else. Instead, he embraced The Importance of Unity. Perhaps guided by his father’s example, he often put others’ welfare or survival ahead of his own. As he saw it, to forsake his own moral code and humanity would truly be a fate worse than death.

“If they were caught helping a Jew, it would mean death for them too. The oppressors were just as afraid of the oppressed. This is fascism—a system that makes victims of everybody.”

By no means were all of the guards at Auschwitz evil; some of them even risked their own lives to smuggle food to Eddie and other prisoners. In a sense, these compassionate guards and functionaries were prisoners as well, since they too were trapped in an inhuman system that allowed them to express their humanity only in the most secretive way and at great personal risk. Eddie’s understanding of this terrible quandary shows his empathy and compassion, even for his guards.  

“This was the only way to survive at Auschwitz, one day at a time, focused on keeping your body going. The people who could not shut off everything but the will to live, to do what it took to live another day, they would not make it.”

Eddie’s sense of morality and altruism was the only remnant of his former life he allowed himself to keep. All else—thoughts of his family, memories of better times, feelings of grief and loss—had to be shut out, lest they weaken his will to live, day to day. Survival at Auschwitz allowed absolutely no distractions. The needs of the body were paramount.

“After the war, the cruel and insane medical experiments that Mengele and his doctors conducted on men, woman, and children behind closed doors would become known to the world [...] If a prisoner fell ill and was taken to hospital, chances were good that you would never see them again.”

Nothing illustrates the topsy-turvy dystopia that was Auschwitz and the Holocaust more graphically than the diabolical uses “medical science” was put to in the camps and throughout Nazi Germany, where onetime doctors like Josef Mengele took medical “research” to unimagined heights (or lows) of sadism and coldblooded murder. Under such doctors, hospitals and medical labs became places not of succor and healing but of horror and excruciating death. Prisoners at Auschwitz would take great pains to conceal their sickness and injuries because a trip to the hospital was, by and large, a death sentence. 

“And once more, it proved to me that there were still good people in the world. This knowledge was hope, and hope is the fuel that powers the body.”

After the “death march” from Auschwitz, Eddie and the other survivors were put on a train to Buchenwald, crammed into compartments that were left open on top to the snow and freezing winds. Though many of them froze to death on the trip, the open-topped wagons allowed people outside to throw loaves of bread to them as they passed. These people’s compassion and selflessness helped restore Eddie’s faith in humanity and The Importance of Unity, which to him was as life-giving as bread itself.

“With a simple act of kindness, you can save another person from despair, and that might just save their life. And this is the greatest miracle of all.”

After the war, Eddie and Kurt sheltered in their home three young Jewish women who had tried to die by suicide—a relatively common occurrence among Holocaust survivors due to Survivor Syndrome and the Holocaust. This act of kindness almost certainly saved the women’s lives. Having been saved himself, several times, by the kindness of strangers, Eddie knows the “miracle” of such acts for the person being helped—for their state of mind as well as for their body. 

“When I held my eldest son, Michael, in my arms for the first time, it was a miracle. In that one moment, my heart was healed and my happiness returned in abundance.”

Having lost almost all his friends and relatives to the Holocaust and witnessing unimaginable horrors, Eddie, like the three young women he sheltered, frequently grappled with despair. Often he felt adrift in a strange world that he could never again fully trust, and which he felt could never understand what he had been through. This changed once he married and had his first child. He had never, for many years, expected to feel such joy. He vowed, in that moment, to be happy every day, defiantly nurturing Resilience in the Face of Unimaginable Horrors. 

“In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I am interested in—to be the happiest man on Earth.”

George Herbert, the 17th-century poet, wrote that “Living well is the best revenge.” Eddie’s happiness, besides being beneficial to himself and those around him, is the perfect revenge on the Nazis, who sought to deny the humanity of an entire people and reduce them to the status of animals in an abattoir. Despite all that was done to him and to his loved ones, Eddie has not succumbed to the bestial impulses of hatred or violence, and has kept himself far more human (and happy) than his persecutors. 

“It makes me very sad to think of what all those educated, professional men and women might have achieved if they had been able to live. I believe we would have cured cancer by now.”

Despite his happiness, it is impossible for Eddie to forget the great loss to humanity, and its extraordinary potential, wrought by the Nazis’ extermination of many of Europe’s greatest minds. The intellectual community of early 20th-century Europe was extremely fecund, especially in the field of medicine, and the Holocaust virtually destroyed it—by murdering or scattering Jewish doctors, scientists, and other professionals, and by focusing the resources of the state on the science of death rather than of healing. It is partly from this consciousness of waste and loss that Eddie became a tireless public speaker, bravely sharing what he had witnessed in the Holocaust in the hopes that it would never happen again. 

“There are survivors who will tell you that this world is bad, that all people have evil inside them, who take no joy from life. These people have not been liberated.”

Eddie acknowledges the toll that Survivor Syndrome and the Holocaust have taken on many people who survived the camps. However, he argues that survivors who have become bitter and misanthropic, who have turned away from life and from other people, are still in a kind of prison. They have handed a (partial) victory to the Nazis, who sought to break their spirit in addition to killing them. This is why Eddie asserts that living well and happily instead is the best possible revenge.

“This lesson, that kindness and generosity and faith in your fellow man are more important than money, is the first and greatest lesson my father ever taught me. And in this way he will always be with us, and always live forever.”

Eddie suggests that the surest way of keeping a lost loved one alive in your heart is to stay true to their most cherished values—in this case, the generosity, friendship, love, and The Importance of Unity that Eddie’s father instilled in him. The Nazis may have murdered Eddie’s father, but they have not beaten him, because his ideals—the opposite of their own—still live on in Eddie, and in all those he touches with his father’s generosity of spirit.