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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

Eventually Eddie is taken out of his factory job and assigned to the mines, where he works 12-hour shifts in narrow tunnels where there is not enough room to stand up. One day, he is pistol-whipped by a guard for stepping out of line and complaining about another work crew, a group of Polish Christians, who have been stealing his crew’s wagons of coal. As a result of his repeated protests, the other crew is eventually transferred away, but Eddie suffers longtime effects (headaches, blurred vision) from the guard’s blow. Shortly afterward, the Nazis learn of his special abilities as a mechanic, and he is designated an “Economically Indispensable Jew,” a special status that, over the next year, saves him from the gas chambers three times. Eddie inwardly thanks his father, once again, for making sure that he learned a valuable trade in his teens.

Eddie becomes a mechanical engineer for IG Farben, the company that produces, among other things, Zyklon B, the deadly chemical used in the Nazis’ gas chambers. If a single pressure gauge on his watch malfunctions, he is told, he will die. To monitor the hundreds of gauges, he has an inspiration: He equips the 200 operators with whistles, fashioned by himself, with which they can alert him at the first sign of a breakdown. One of these operators, he discovers, is his sister Henni. The two are overjoyed to see each other again, but must conceal from the Nazis the fact that they are related.

The working conditions of Eddie’s job are fraught with danger, not least from the sadistic guards, one of whom strikes him in the head one day with a rock, leaving a gash that requires 16 stitches. At the hospital, a high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer is impressed by his knowledge of medical machinery, and offers him a job designing and manufacturing tables to be used in neurosurgery. Again, Eddie’s education has helped to keep him alive.

Chapter 8 Summary

Eddie ponders the mysteries of human evil, weakness, and sadism, wondering how the guards at Auschwitz could so casually maim and kill other human beings, often for no other reason than to amuse themselves, and then go home to their families and loved ones just like ordinary people. Eddie sees them as weak men whose morals have been corrupted and destroyed by their work. More troubling than the regular guards are the kapos, Jewish guards who profit from persecuting their own people. One particularly “monstrous” kapo regularly sends other Jews to the gas chambers out of greed, for small rewards of food or schnapps from the Nazis. On one occasion, Eddie tries to save a group of elderly Hungarians from the kapo by offering to be whipped in their stead, but he refuses, and has the old men whipped and murdered, just to enrich himself.

Some prisoners, Eddie notes, are corrupt as well, choosing to steal others’ food and property whenever they can. Eddie has never done this; far from hurting others or stealing from them, he tries only to help, often at his own expense. Survival, he says, is hardly worth the name if it makes you an evil man: “If your morals are gone, you go.” (101)

However, rays of hope still abound, even in this hellish place: Some of the guards are still “good people” who secretly give extra food to the prisoners, at great risk to themselves. One guard actually goes so far as to help Eddie escape, by hiding him in a food barrel on a truck heading out of Auschwitz. The plan succeeds, and Eddie is at first ecstatic to be free—until he realizes that he is still wearing his prisoner stripes. Needing a change of clothes, as well as food, he finds an isolated house in the woods and knocks, hoping the residents will help him, but the Polish man who answers the door fetches a rifle and shoots at him six times, hitting him once in the leg. Cold, hungry, and badly injured, Eddie has no choice but to sneak back into Auschwitz. All the same, he cannot find it in his heart to blame the Polish man, who was merely “weak” and scared. For every weak or evil man, Eddie says, there is a brave, kind one who will help you.

Chapter 9 Summary

The bullet lodged in Eddie’s calf must come out immediately, and it must be done without the guards finding out. Fortunately for him, many of the prisoners in Auschwitz were doctors in their previous lives, and one of them, Dr. Kinderman, is a good friend. Kinderman performs the (excruciating) operation with a letter opener, without anesthesia or disinfectant; cleverly, they time the procedure so that the bells of a nearby convent will drown out Eddie’s groans of agony.

The most significant, and universal, threat to life and limb at Auschwitz (aside from violence from the guards) is lack of food. Even though he is an Economically Indispensable Jew, Eddie is fed so little that he must conserve his energy as much as possible. Staying alive at Auschwitz is an intricate problem that must be solved day by day, and the ones who survive are those who “shut off everything but the will to live,” which means not mourning what they have lost or grieving too much for the dead: “In Auschwitz, there was no past, no future, only survival” (111).

The Nazi doctors, by and large, see their duty as not to heal but rather to examine prisoners for signs of weakness, which is usually a death warrant. Those who go into hospital are rarely seen again. Once a month, doctors measure the fat reserves on the prisoners’ buttocks and lower backs, and those who have lost too much are sent to the gas chambers. If a louse is found on a prisoner, he and all others in his barracks are murdered. (To prevent this, the prisoners choose the healthiest among them, pick him free of lice, and present him to be inspected.)

Through a multiplicity of stratagems, most of the prisoners keep themselves strong enough to survive another day, another week, another month. Eddie, who today is over 100 years old, shares his awe of the human body, which he sees as endlessly versatile and nearly indestructible. All his life, he says, he has specialized in machines, but it is the “best machine ever made” (114).

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

In Auschwitz, Eddie’s mechanical skills, not his German heritage, give him an elite status. In a cynical about-face, Hitler, after striving to exterminate Germany’s Jews or drive them from the country, has ordered his subject countries to send them back, before they can escape abroad: Concerned about his country’s “brain drain,” he has formulated an entity known as a “Economically Indispensable Jew” (See: Index of Terms) a label that saves Eddie from the gas chamber several times.

In all other respects, however, the new status turns out to be very weak medicine at Auschwitz, since it means little to the SS, who control the living conditions at the camp and see their job as one of extermination. Many thousands of Jewish workers, “indispensable” or not, continue to starve or freeze to death in full sight of a bureaucratic malevolence that refuses to lend them a blanket or throw an extra potato their way. Eddie’s status as a German, far from helping him, marks him as an enemy and possible spy to many of the foreign prisoners, with whom he shares very little besides (at most) religion. It continues to astound him that one of the least significant parts of his life—his Judaism—has, in the eyes of the state, canceled out all of the others.

The Nazis who run the camp have raised cruelty and murder to an inverted science: Their meticulous records and state-of-the-art medical labs are designed not to help or heal but to torture and destroy. Eddie and the other prisoners must draw upon Resilience in the Face of Unimaginable Horrors to survive, resorting to various stratagems to keep themselves alive. Eddie discovers his sister Henni laboring at his factory in perilous working conditions, but he is forced to limit his contact with her and to conceal their familial relations, lest the Nazis use this knowledge against them. His friend Kurt, on the other hand, has learned to wriggle through the gaps in the Nazis’ records, bluffing his way into a (relatively) safe job in the manufacturing sector. This allows him and Eddie to spend a little time together each morning before work, and to share food, gifts, and (most importantly) conversation. No one in Auschwitz survives on their own, and—day to day, in 1000 small ways—the two friends keep each other alive. With their usual peerless efficiency, the Nazis at Auschwitz have made themselves into scientists of death; to survive, Eddie and Kurt must become scientists of survival.

Throughout everything, Eddie keeps a sense of perspective, and does not let himself become misanthropic: Humans, he knows, are both good and bad, weak and strong. His experiences reinforce for him The Importance of Unity in human life. He still discovers some good souls among the guards, one of whom even helps him escape the camp in an elaborate maneuver. During his escape, while he is seeking shelter, a Polish farmer shoots him in the leg—but once back in Auschwitz, he is lucky enough to find a selfless doctor who will take the risk of saving his life. Worst of all, in Eddie’s view, are the kapos, Jews who have zealously assumed the roles of guard and torturer in exchange for gifts and privileges. Eddie tries to appeal to the humanity of one of these men, even offering himself as a sacrifice, but to no avail. After the war, he discovers that this murderer has, like so many others, escaped justice. Nevertheless, Eddie continues to love humanity, partly (from his mechanic’s perspective) out of sheer awe at the human body’s resilience and strength. Nothing so perfectly made, he suggests, can be altogether bad.