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Holocaust survivor who published his bestselling memoir at age 100

Eddie Jaku

Eddie Jaku, who has died aged 101, called his bestselling memoir, published last year, The Happiest Man on Earth. Yet his happiness was much more than a natural state of mind. It was an act of defiance for someone who had seen ‘‘the very worst of mankind’’ as a victim of Nazi efforts to ‘‘exterminate my life’’.

He had survived a 1930s pogrom, desperate spells in wartime hiding, several concentration camps and a death march at the end of the war, before building a new life in Australia. After decades of silence about his extraordinary past, he concluded that he had to bear witness as one of the very few left alive who had experienced the horrors of

Nazism’s rise and rule.

That rise had been all the more shocking to him as he had once considered himself a proud young German. He was born Abraham Jakubowicz in Leipzig in 1920 where his father, an engineer, ran a factory. Two of his uncles and a grandfather had been killed fighting for the German army in World War I. ‘‘As a boy,’’ he recalled, ‘‘I truly believed I was part of the most enlightened, the most cultured, most sophisticated society in the whole world.’’

After the Nazis took power in 1933 he was expelled from his grammar school as a Jew. His father created a false identity for him and sent him to an engineering college far from Leipzig where he lived more or less cut off from his family. Venturing a return journey to celebrate his parents’ wedding anniversary in 1938, he arrived to discover his home deserted. It was the night of the antisemitic pogrom Kristallnacht and Jaku was taken from his bed and beaten up by stormtroopers, who carved a swastika on to his arm. He saw Jewish children being thrown by his neighbours into a freezing river. ‘‘It was madness, in the truest sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong.’’

Jaku was taken to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he survived regular beatings. When an SS guard who had once been a classmate recognised him and recommended him to the camp’s leadership as a skilled toolmaker, he was released to go and work in a factory, but his father managed to intercept him and they became refugees in Belgium.

After fleeing invading German armies in 1940 he was captured in Vichy France and, after months in another camp, he was put on a train for Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Again his practical skills saved him as he managed to remove floorboards from the train and jump out. But after a further spell hiding in Belgium, he and his parents were captured in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. On arrival, his parents were swiftly murdered in the gas chambers.

Jaku was selected by the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele for work, and his ability as an engineer led one of the German companies using local slave labour, IG Farben, to categorise him as an ‘‘economically indispensable Jew’’.

He came close to death on many occasions but developed a network of friends who helped each other to defy disease, starvation and brutality. ‘‘A friend,’’ he once wrote, ‘‘is someone who reminds you to feel alive’’.

At one point he escaped but was shot at when he appealed to a Polish family for help, so smuggled himself back into Auschwitz, where fortunately he had not been missed.

As the Soviet army approached in January 1945, Jaku and thousands of fellow prisoners were forced by the Germans into one of the socalled death marches westwards. After a spell back in Buchenwald and in another camp, Jaku managed to escape and hide, surviving on slugs and snails until eventually he spotted an American tank and gave himself up.

He weighed 28 kilograms and suffered from typhoid and cholera. Given a less than even chance of survival, he somehow recovered, promising himself that he would now ‘‘walk from German soil and never come back to the land that had given me everything and taken everything away from me. I would dedicate the rest of my life to putting right the hurt that had been done to the world by the Nazis.’’

He returned to Belgium, yet life was initially far from happy. There was constant guilt about his survival when so many of his relatives had perished. And there was anger about those who had prospered from evil, like the man he spotted walking about Brussels in a suit stolen from his former family home.

Greater contentment came through his marriage in 1946 to Flore Molho, another Jewish survivor, and the birth of their two sons. The family emigrated to Australia in 1950 where Jaku ran a service station and also worked with his wife in property sales.

For many years, wanting to create ‘‘the most normal, happy family life that is possible’’, he said little about his experiences. Then he began to tell his story in Australia, and his memoir brought him global fame.

He said that he could not forgive those who had become guards and torturers, but he acknowledged the occasional acts of kindness from Germans that had helped him to survive. And there was his passionate desire that new generations would know this history and be warned of the power of hatred. ‘‘Hate is a disease,’’ he said, ‘‘which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you in the process.’’

‘‘A friend is someone who reminds you to feel alive.’’

Eddie Jaku on surviving in a concentration camp

Obituaries

en-nz

2021-10-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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