The Happiest Man on Earth summary

The only way that Eddie could get a good education was to pretend to be someone else.

His father forged some identity papers for him that said he was a German orphan named Walter Schleif. Under this assumed identity, Eddie was able to get one of the best educations in precision mechanics in the world. But it meant leaving home and living in an orphanage in a city nine hours away from Leipzig.

After Kristallnacht, Eddie was taken to a big hangar inside the zoo near his house, a place he’d loved visiting as a child. But, this time, there was nothing fun about it. Eddie was terrified as more and more Jewish men were brought to the hangar throughout the night. In the morning, they were taken to Camp Buchenwald – one of the many concentration camps that the Nazis were just in the process of setting up in 1938.

Conditions in the camp were awful. Thousands of men slept stacked like sardines on narrow bunks. Instead of a toilet, there was a big pit latrine. And men were forced to use their hands to wipe themselves, as there was no toilet paper. Disease and starvation were constant dangers.

Eddie had made it across the border and into Belgium, but his father hadn’t been so lucky. Having stopped to help another refugee, he fell behind and ended up caught in the searchlight. He was handed to the Gestapo and severely beaten. Father and son were separated.

Back in Leipzig, Eddie’s mother and sister were also arrested. It took months for his mother to negotiate their release. Eventually, father, mother, and sister all made it to Belgium. But, by the time they got there, Eddie was gone.

The train to Auschwitz was packed so tightly that there was no space to sit or lie down. There wasn’t even enough room for the people to take off their winter coats. That was a problem because the carriage was stiflingly hot with 150 men, women, and children all breathing the same air.

They traveled for nine days, but the passengers were given no food at all and only a barrel of water to last the journey.

On January 18, 1945, the commanders at Auschwitz decided to evacuate the camp. The Russian Army was closing in, and the Nazis wanted to cover their tracks and hide just how brutal the regime had been. Auschwitz was emptied and the crematoriums destroyed.

Eddie and the other prisoners were marched through the snowy countryside, their thin prison uniforms and flimsy shoes doing nothing to keep out the freezing cold. There was no food or water, and if they fell they were shot. It was impossible, but Eddie kept putting one foot in front of the other, hoping to make it alive.

Eddie had survived multiple internments, death marches, slave labor, and beatings by Nazis. But in spite of his resilience, he nearly died right at the end of the war. When he crawled out of the drainpipe to freedom, he was completely emaciated. He found shelter in a cave and survived on a diet of snails and slugs. But the water he drank made him sick, and he got even weaker.

Eventually, he decided that he didn’t care if he was caught or shot. After all, if he stayed in the cave, he’d die anyway. So Eddie started to crawl to the road on his hands and knees.

Flore Molho was a Greek Jewish girl, who’d lived nearly her whole life in Belgium. During the war, she’d avoided deportation because for many years the Nazis didn’t realize she was Jewish. When eventually she was found out, she escaped to Paris using a fake identity, where she survived the war relatively unscathed. When she met Eddie at the municipal office where she worked, Flore felt more sorry for him than anything else.

But for Eddie, it was love at first sight. When he told Flore how he felt she stared at him in disbelief. He’d only been out of Auschwitz for a few months and looked terrible. He was emaciated and sickly but full of bold talk. He said he wanted to take her away to start a new life. Flore could only laugh.

Eddie never really felt like he belonged in Belgium. As a refugee, he could only get a permit to live there for six months at a time, and that was no basis for building a life. He and Flore decided to emigrate and in March 1950 they boarded a ship for the long journey to Sydney, Australia.

For Eddie and Flore, life in Australia was heaven compared to what they’d been through in Europe. Eddie got a job building medical instruments, and the family bought a house and settled down. They’d found a place where they felt truly free.