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

Isidore Jakubowicz, like his son Eddie, was for many years a proud German. Originally a Polish immigrant, he settled in Germany in his youth and established himself as a mechanic. In WWI, he helped the German cause through manufacturing. “Nothing,” Eddie says, “could shake [his] patriotism and pride” (8).

Isidore’s eventual fate highlights the arbitrary bigotry and fanaticism of German society after the rise of Hitler in 1933, when even the most loyal Germans were deemed “traitors” if they happened to be Jewish. In that year, Isidore is forced to send Eddie far away to a school in Tuttlingen, where no one will know that he is Jewish. Isidore hates to part with his son, and cries after their (brief) phone calls, but feels he must be firm if Eddie is to have the education he needs to survive in this new, antisemitic Germany. Later events prove the wisdom of his decision.

Isidore, who shares his food and hospitality with others whenever he can, believes that the well-off have a duty to share what they have with the less fortunate. He regards family, friends, and altruism to be far more precious than material wealth, and Eddie (eventually) comes to agree. Even in extreme danger, he continues to assist others at his own expense, as when he sacrifices his chance to escape across the Belgian border by pausing to help a woman who has fallen. Like his son, he also reveals an ingenious practicality, as when he creates ration tickets on the train to Auschwitz to conserve the meager water supply, saving dozens of lives. When, shortly afterward, he dies in the death camp’s gas chamber, Eddie calls him “the strongest, kindest man I had ever known” (70). He lives on in Eddie’s heart as a model of kindness, generosity, and the power of love.

Kurt is a young Jewish man about Eddie’s age whom he befriends at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht. Remarkably, after escaping from Buchenwald, Kurt is reunited with Eddie at the Exarde prison camp in Belgium, and then again in Brussels, where Eddie is hiding out with his family. Most crucially, Kurt helps Eddie to survive Auschwitz, largely through sheer force of his friendship. Kurt exemplifies Eddie’s core belief that a good friend is one of the most precious things on earth, and can make life worth living when all else seems lost.

Kurt, like Eddie, is strong-willed and resourceful, which he shows by escaping from Buchenwald and then from French custody after being arrested in Brussels. He also shares Eddie’s warmth and compassion: Several times, he talks Eddie out of dying by suicide after the loss of his parents. At Auschwitz, he and Eddie slip each other food and other life necessities, and on one occasion, when Eddie is sick, Kurt cuts his own scarf in half to share it with him. Above all else, he keeps Eddie alive simply by giving him something to look forward to, day after day—such as meeting with him every morning before their factory work. As Eddie notes, “I survived because I owed it to my friend Kurt to survive, to live another day so that I might see him again” (84).

In a place like Auschwitz, where the average lifespan is seven months, and everything is designed to rob you of your will to live, friendship alone can be the greatest “balm”: more substantial and life-sustaining than medicine, warm clothes, or food itself. Nothing you do in life, Eddie believes, can be as great or momentous as loving—and being loved by—another person. That, he says, is the most important thing he has learned from life, and he owes it mostly to Kurt, who helped him to do the “impossible”—survive.