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

Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps who possessed valuable skills that could be exploited onsite at the camps’ factories, labs, or offices were granted a special status. Classed above ordinary camp workers, these Economically Indispensable Jews benefited from a modicum of protection; Eddie notes that the designation saved him from the gas chamber at least three times. However, extra food was apparently not one of the privileges, and he was still in constant danger of starving. 

The Nazis’ “secret police,” the Gestapo (full name Geheime Staatspolizei), played a key role in the Holocaust throughout Nazi-occupied Europe by spying on the populace and committing a wide range of atrocities. The Nazi party granted them widespread powers to arrest “enemies” of the state (e.g., Jews, communists, homosexuals, Roma, etc.), most of whom were held without judicial review and many of whom were tortured, murdered, and/or placed in concentration camps. Eddie’s father is handed over to the Gestapo by the Belgian police after trying to escape across the border; miraculously, he escapes their custody. The Gestapo was not a large organization, but the willingness of ordinary citizens to inform against their neighbors made them a pervasive threat to Jews and many others.

From the Greek for “burnt offering,” Holocaust is a term coined in the aftermath of World War II to refer to the Nazis’ genocidal acts against minority groups, particularly European Jews, from 1941-1945. About two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was murdered during this brief time, including almost all of Eddie’s relatives. 

A kapo was a prisoner (often Jewish) in a Nazi concentration camp who was given some degree of authority over other prisoners, whether as a guard or administrator. Most of a kapo’s duties were those normally performed by the SS, including the violent punishment or even murder of prisoners. Eddie describes a particularly “monstrous” kapo at Auschwitz who was responsible for the deaths of many of his fellow Jews. After the war, this kapo went unpunished, and was even protected by the Belgian police due to his political connections.  

Literally “Crystal Night,” Kristallnacht is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” a reference to the widespread destruction of Jewish people’s property throughout Germany on this night (November 9-10, 1938), specifically the breaking of thousands of windows and storefronts by Nazi paramilitaries and mobs of German citizens. Hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Eddie was one of these men, since he had the misfortune to return to his parents’ house in Leipzig on this very night to surprise them on their anniversary. 

While imprisoned for nine months in 1924 for a failed coup attempt, Adolf Hitler wrote a combination of memoir and political/racist diatribe that he titled Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). In it, he outlined his violently antisemitic theories of history and genetics, including his belief in racial purity and in a global Jewish “conspiracy.” The book became a bestseller in Germany after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. Eddie notes that some ideas, however pernicious and false, can have a killing power, and that in Auschwitz and other camps, Mein Kampf’s genocidal fantasies became literal fact.  

Also known as Shabbat or Sabbath, Shabbos is the seventh day of the week (i.e., Saturday), the day of rest in Judaism. Though Eddie’s family was not particularly religious, they always kept the Shabbos, a day of celebration that Eddie looked forward to, largely for the special foods prepared by his mother and grandmother, such as “delicious” challah bread. 

The Schutzstaffel (SS) was a powerful Nazi paramilitary organization with a wide range of functions, including surveillance, terrorism, military combat, racial policing, and the running of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and death camps, such as Auschwitz. In that camp, Eddie impresses an SS officer with his knowledge of a complicated medical device, leading to a manufacturing job that possibly saves him from extermination.