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

Though his new life in Australia feels like “heaven” after all his troubles and losses, Eddie remains haunted by the incomprehensible deaths of his parents and millions of others, who were murdered for no sane reason, and acutely feels the irrevocable waste of their vast potential, which has left the world much poorer.

For decades, he has not been able to talk about his experiences, partly because of the pain it would cause himself and his children, and partly because those who did not personally experience the Holocaust would never understand it. As he enters middle age, he begins to wonder why he, of all people, was spared, and what he owes to the memory of those who did not survive. Perhaps, he thinks, he was meant to help “educate the world about the dangers of hate” (170).

Though he has never felt much of an affinity for words, he begins the painful process of sharing, through public speaking, what happened to himself and his people, beginning with a small gathering at his friends’ Catholic church in Brighton-le-Sands. Eventually, he and 19 other survivors and their families found the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, which leads to the creation of the Sydney Jewish Museum. In 2011, Eddie and other concentration camp survivors form Focus, a group that allows them to share with each other their darkest memories of day-to-day survival in the camps. This bond of understanding and commiseration, which they can have only with each other, is “liberating” for many of them, helping to heal much of their anger and hatred. This sort of therapy, Eddie thinks, is all-important, since Holocaust survivors who hold onto their rage, letting it turn them misanthropic, are (in a sense) still prisoners. Anger, he says, “leads to fear, which leads to hate, which leads to death” (173). It also takes away from your children’s freedom, he argues, who deserve to enjoy their lives without the burden of their parents’ rage and negativity.

It is our duty and our joy, Eddie thinks, to cherish our children and pass on to them the best of what we have inside us, so that they will someday do the same, making for a better, kinder society. It is what Eddie’s father did for him, impressing on him with every word and deed the importance of kindness in all things. By following his example, despite all that was done to him, Eddie keeps his beloved father alive.

Eddie is proud that he has never burdened his children with destructive feelings (anger, fear, hatred) connected to the Holocaust, but eventually he regrets not having told them about his experiences in the camps. He feels that he and other survivors, through their reticence, have “missed out on a generation” who might have used this knowledge to make the world “a better place” (180). Young people, he thinks, deserve to be told—preferably first-hand—and, as one of the very few living survivors of the camps, he sees it as his “duty” to keep sharing the message—especially in recent years, with hatred and fascism again on the rise throughout the world.

Now, over the years, he has shared his experiences, and his thoughts about them, with thousands of people throughout Australia, young and old. His message is for “everyone,” and is not anchored in anger or hate but in love: For instance, each time he speaks at a school, he tells the children in his audience to go home and tell their mothers “I love you.” Eddie has been honored with many prestigious awards for his public speaking, including the Order of Australia Medal, and in 2020 (the centennial of his birth) he made the final four for NSW Senior Australian Citizen of the Year. On May 24, 2019, for the altruistic TEDx organization, he spoke to a live audience of 5,000, plus an online audience of hundreds of thousands. It is sometimes “very painful” to tell his story, but he believes he owes it to the future as well as to the past. “If I get through to even one person,” he writes, “it is worth it” (184).

In the Epilogue to his book, Eddie reiterates that hate is a “cancer” that must be resisted at all costs: It led to the Holocaust and other mass tragedies, and is perhaps the most destructive force in the world, for both nations and individuals. He says that he cannot forgive Hitler and the Nazis, but (more crucially) he does not hate them, for that would be handing them a partial victory. Resist the temptation to blame others for your misfortunes, he advises, for that is how hate begins, as it did for Germany in the 1930s. Rather, he says, “be happy, and make others happy too…Do this for your new friend, Eddie” (189).