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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary

It is January 1945, and the war is going badly for the Germans. The Russian army is now only 20 kilometers away from Auschwitz, and the Nazis are frantic to evacuate the camp and blow up the crematoriums to erase the evidence of their genocide. Eddie and the other prisoners are herded out on a “death march” to other camps, a terrifying ordeal he calls “the hardest time of my life” (120). The temperature falls to 20 degrees below zero centigrade, they are given no food or water, and stragglers are shot in the head. Over the next few days, up to 15,000 prisoners die on the march.

They reach a city called Gleiwitz, where Kurt tells Eddie that he cannot take another step. In despair, Eddie searches the building where they are being lodged and finds a hiding place for him in a crawlspace. Unfortunately, Eddie cannot join him in the crawlspace, since someone must close up the opening from the outside. Eddie rejoins the march, and is eventually put on a train to Buchenwald with thousands of other prisoners. The train carriages are left open to the wind and snow, and Eddie’s group only survives by sewing their jackets together into a single blanket and huddling beneath it. Shortly after the train pulls into Buchenwald, a dying prisoner pleads with Eddie to give the photo in his pocket to his (non-Jewish) wife, whom he married only three weeks before.

The Nazis are becoming “crueler and crazier” (123) in defeat, and Buchenwald seems much deadlier than it was in 1938. To protect himself, Eddie volunteers his skills as a toolmaker, and is transferred to a small camp called Sonnenburg, where he works as a mechanic, chained to a machine. The nature of his work demands absolute accuracy, and requires him to wear a sign saying that if he makes seven mistakes, he is to be hanged. The man in charge of the factory, he learns, is an old friend of his father, who was a prisoner of war (POW) with him in WWI. The man cries when he sees Eddie, but says that he cannot release him. However, he is able to sneak him extra food.

As the Allied armies close in, the Nazis become increasingly desperate, and Eddie worries that they will slaughter all the prisoners. Instead, they evacuate the camp and force the prisoners out on a long, meandering march around the countryside. One night, Eddie hatches another escape plan: Slipping away, he hides in a culvert, blocking both sides with a couple of big barrel lids. The Nazis shoot into the culvert, as a matter of course, but the wooden lids stop the bullets. Free at last, but extremely weak, Eddie staggers up to an isolated house, much like the one near Auschwitz where he was shot, but the people here are much more hospitable, and give him clothes, food, and shelter for the night. For several days, Eddie hides in a nearby cave, living off snails and slugs, until he is so weak from hunger that he can no longer walk. Knowing that he must find help very soon or die, he manages to crawl to a highway, where an American tank finds him.

Sick with cholera and typhoid and weighing only 28 kilos (less than 62 pounds), Eddie is given only a 35% chance of survival by doctors. He makes a promise to God that if he lives, he will be a different person: He will dedicate his life to putting right, however he can, the monstrous wrongs of the Nazis, and will “live every day to the fullest” (132). Eventually, Eddie makes a satisfactory recovery. Hope, he says, can make your body do “miraculous” things.

Chapter 11 Summary

Once he is strong again, Eddie travels, mostly on foot, to Belgium, where he hopes to find his family. The border guards tell him that he cannot enter because he is German, and he replies that he is not German but a Jew, whom the Belgians handed over to the Nazis to die. Hearing this, the guards not only let him in but give him “double rations.” Visiting the (now empty) apartment his parents rented in Brussels seven years before, the enormity of his loss hits him all at once: Of his hundreds of relatives, he thinks he may be the only survivor. His loneliness and sadness are such that he ponders death by suicide—but then he remembers his promise to God, and decides to live.

At a charity canteen for Jewish refugees, he is reunited with Kurt, who, it turns out, was rescued from his hiding place in Gleiwitz by Russian soldiers. The two of them find jobs and take an apartment together in Brussels. Soon, through a notice in the paper, Eddie finds his sister Henni living in a boarding house. These “two miracles” restore some of Eddie’s faith in the world, and help ameliorate the cruelty and antisemitism he frequently witnesses in his new life in Belgium.

Soon, he and Kurt are sharing their apartment with three young Jewish women who, having lost all their loved ones in the Holocaust, attempted suicide shortly after liberation. This act of charity, Eddie thinks, would have made his altruistic father very proud. When “there are no miracles,” he says, “you can make them happen” (142).

Chapter 12 Summary

After all the horrors he has witnessed, Eddie does not feel at home in Europe anymore. He cannot forget that more than 25,000 Jews (including himself and Kurt) were handed over to the Nazis by the Belgians, and that any one of his neighbors, the people he sees day-to-day, may have been a collaborator or informer.

One day, in the market square, he sees a man wearing his father’s tailored suit, which had disappeared from his parents’ apartment in Brussels. The man, who turns out to be a common thief, “sheepishly” returns the suit. Later, however, he sees the notorious kapo who murdered so many Jews in Auschwitz walking about free. He tries to have him arrested, but the police refuse to touch him, since he has made an advantageous match with the daughter of a powerful official. Meanwhile, Eddie himself is still treated as a refugee by the Belgian government, which forces him to reapply for residency every six months, despite his vital job as manager of a factory.

Eddie manages to locate the wife of the dying man who gave him the photo at Buchenwald, but when he visits her, with flowers and cakes, to honor his promise, her family is hostile to him as a “Jew.” This deepens his feelings of alienation from Belgian society, and from all those who have not suffered as he and Kurt have. His loneliness increases when Kurt marries and moves away.

However, just when he has resigned himself to a life of solitude, Eddie meets Flore Molho, a beautiful Sephardic Jewish woman who works at the town hall where Eddie goes for food stamps. For Eddie, it is love at first sight. Flore, however, mostly feels pity for him; it is a while before she falls for him and they marry in April of 1946.

Eddie credits Flore with making him more social, and for introducing him to many new things, such as theater and dancing. Having lived in fear for so long and having lost so much, he has become wary and “closed-off,” almost reclusive, and she helps to change this. His biggest life change, however, comes with the birth of his first son, Michael. Holding his child in his arms for the first time, Eddie says, “my heart was healed and my happiness returned in abundance.” Blessed with a beautiful wife and son, so quickly and unexpectedly after all of his trauma and loss, Eddie sees himself as “the luckiest man on Earth” (153).

Happiness, he says, is a wealth greater than riches, and the best thing about it is that it comes from within you and from the ones you love. It is also the “best revenge.” By a strange happenstance, Eddie and Flore’s wedding anniversary falls on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. “We are still here,” Eddie says. “He is down there” (155).

Chapters 10-12 Analysis

Having survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and two “death marches,” Eddie’s faith in both human nature and the human body has been (to some degree) reinforced. For years he has been a prisoner of the Third Reich’s machinery of death—the largest, most scientific slaughterhouse ever devised—yet somehow he is still alive. He owes his survival to the kindness of friends and strangers as well as to his own resiliency and iron will. However, now that the daily struggle to survive, which allows no thoughts of the past, is over, Eddie finds himself at another critical juncture, one that many Holocaust victims do not survive: that of grief, guilt, and what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Eddie must now confront in full the dilemmas of Survivor Syndrome and the Holocaust.

Crossing into Belgium and visiting his parents’ empty apartment, he fears that, of his large, loving, extended family, he may be the sole survivor. The emptiness of the life before him makes him wonder what he has survived for, and why he was chosen (by God or chance) when so many others, perhaps better than he, perished. For a while, he contemplates death by suicide—the fate of many survivors of the camps, once the enormity of their trauma and loss begins to reverberate in the silence and solitude of peace.

However, while hovering between life and death in the army hospital, Eddie makes a promise to God that if he is spared, he will live life “to the fullest.” He also vows to counter the Nazis’ hatred however he can. Never religious, this promise may be mostly to himself (he later credits his survival to the power of “hope,” rather than to an almighty being), but once he regains his health, he is true to his word. He soon discovers that he is not as alone as he feared: His sister Henni and his friend Kurt have survived the retreat from the camps and are both living in Brussels. To help assuage, in his small way, some of the unimaginable suffering wrought by the Nazis, he offers shelter and support to three Jewish women who have attempted suicide—which was almost his own fate. By this, he passes on the life-saving kindness he himself experienced from both friends and strangers, what he calls “the greatest miracle of all” (142)—upholding The Importance of Unity.

There is another problem: Eddie has vowed never to return to Germany, but Belgium, which allows war criminals to walk about freely and yet forces Eddie to reapply for citizenship every six months, is hardly more hospitable. When he tries to honor his promise to the dying man at Buchenwald by visiting the man’s wife, he finds that antisemitism has found a nest here as well: The Nazi state may have been destroyed, but tribal hatreds and superstitions have no nationality or knowledge of history. The only way Eddie can find a home again is through love—otherwise he knows he will always be lost. Luckily, he meets Flore Molho, and (for him) it is love at first sight. Part of his attraction to Flore—who was betrayed by a colleague for being Jewish and had to go into hiding—may be that she shares some of his experiences of persecution but not his darkest ones: She understands, to some degree, what he has been through, but unlike him, has not become “wary” or closed-off. Her optimism, wide interests, and sociability provide a crucial counterweight to his gloominess and introversion.

All the same, it is not until the birth of his first child that his heart is finally “healed.” His new family, he says, is the “best medicine”: The army hospital managed to repair most of the damage to his body, but his psychic wounds remained. Eddie’s memoir, at heart, is a testament to the power of emotion, and its monumental effects on the world and on the human body and soul. The Nazis used negative emotion (hatred, fear, rage) to warp men’s souls and pervert whole nations, turning friend against friend and destroying millions of innocents. Eddie’s revelation, taken from both his darkest and most joyous moments, is of the defiant power of love and happiness. Happiness is a choice, he tells us: Do not dwell on thoughts of anger, envy, hatred, or revenge, for it will destroy you, as it did the Nazis and many of their victims. After Auschwitz, and the incredible toll it took on his mind and body, Eddie’s 100 years of life seem the ultimate proof of the salutary “miracle” of his choice to be happy and kind every day, forming the essence of his Resilience in the Face of Unimaginable Horrors.