The Happiest Man on Earth Book Summary - The Happiest Man on Earth Book explained in key points

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The Happiest Man on Earth summary

Name: The Happiest Man on Earth
Rating: 4.7 (408 reviews)
Author: Eddie Jaku

Eddie Jaku

The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor

4.7 (408 ratings)

25 mins

Topics

European History Inspiration Trauma & Healing Memoirs Wars

Table of Contents

The Happiest Man on Earth
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Become inspired by a story of resilience and love in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

The atrocities of the Holocaust can seem very far away. Most of the people who lived through that time have since died and what happened is almost impossible to imagine. That’s why firsthand accounts are so important.

In these blinks, you’ll get a personal insight into what it was like and how one man survived the Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Eddie Jaku shares the horrors and cruelty he saw, and how the kindness of friends, family, and strangers led him to survive against all odds.

The Holocaust may be over, but fascism and anti-Semitism are alive and well. Eddie tells his story so that by remembering the horrors of the past we may never repeat them.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Eddie had to change his identity to get an education;
how friendship saved Eddie’s life in Auschwitz; and
why life in newly liberated Europe was so hard for Jewish people.

Eddie Jaku’s life changed as soon as Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

Eddie Jaku was desperate to go to high school. He was clever and capable and wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. In 1933, Eddie had just graduated from elementary school in the beautiful city of Leipzig in Germany. He hoped to go to a good high school near his house. But then Hitler came to power, and suddenly everything changed for Eddie and other Jewish children like him.

Eddie hadn’t given much thought to being Jewish up until then. If he identified as anything, it was as a proud German. His father had helped to manufacture weapons in World War I and was fiercely patriotic. He always told Eddie that they were “German first and second, Jewish third.” But when Adolf Hitler came to power, being Jewish became the defining aspect of their lives.

The key message here is: Eddie Jaku’s life changed as soon as Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

When Hitler was elected, he made his anti-Semitic views known from the very start. Germany had lost the First World War in 1918 and was paying enormous sums of money in reparations to the winning Allied powers. But the country couldn’t afford it, and the reparations had led to widespread poverty and hunger.

The German people felt humiliated and angry. They were receptive to the messages of a man telling them he could return Germany to its former glory. They were also eager to find an object for their rage: the Jewish people.

The Jewish community had been at the heart of Leipzig’s culture and economy for hundreds of years. Even in medieval times, the weekly market was held on Friday instead of Saturday – the Jewish Sabbath day – so that Jewish merchants could attend.

But when Hitler came to power, he brought with him a tide of anti-Semitism. Eddie felt the consequences almost immediately. He wasn’t allowed to have his coming of age ceremony, or bar mitzvah, in Leipzig’s main synagogue. And, of course, he wasn’t allowed to go to high school.

For Eddie’s family, who saw themselves as proud citizens of a city that prized education and knowledge, this was a shocking betrayal.

Eddie’s father knew he had to find a way for his son to continue in school. So he found a solution, but it was drastic: Eddie would have to leave his family, and assume a completely new identity.

Returning to Leipzig shattered Eddie’s life.

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.

Camp Buchenwald was terrible but Eddie had a lucky escape.

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 was desperate to reunite with his family in Belgium, but every step seemed to take him further away.

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.

Auschwitz took away Eddie’s family – and his will to live.

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.

Auschwitz was emptied toward the end of the war. But life for the prisoners got even harder.

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.

By the end of the war, Eddie’s mental and physical health had been completely destroyed.

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.

Eddie fell in love with Flore, but she couldn't fully understand his experiences during the war.

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.

Australia provided a haven for Eddie and his family as he tried to forget the trauma of his past.

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.

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What is The Happiest Man on Earth about?

The Happiest Man on Earth (2020) is the true story of one man, who survived inconceivable horrors during the Holocaust, and afterward made it his mission to change the world for the better. Eddie Jaku saw first-hand how a Fascist regime could spark anti-Semitic hatred, and turn former friends and neighbors into killers. In talking about what happened, he shares how love and kindness helped him to survive one of the worst atrocities in human history.

Who should read The Happiest Man on Earth?

History buffs interested in the Holocaust and fascism
Memoir-lovers excited to hear the story of an extraordinary man
People who want to learn more about surviving complex trauma

About the Author

Eddie Jaku is a German-born engineer who spent World War II imprisoned in the Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps. In 1950, he and his family moved to Australia. Eddie was a founding member of the Sydney Jewish Museum, and in 2013 was awarded an Order of Australia medal for services to the Jewish Community. Eddie speaks regularly about his experiences during the Holocaust. His TEDx talk has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

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