‘A simple act of kindness can function like a miracle.’ Photo: Book cover of The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
Author: Eddie Jaku. Review by Reg Naulty
Eddie Jaku was born Abraham Jakubowicz, in Germany in 1920. He is a holocaust survivor, recently turned 100, and a large part of his book describes his experiences in Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps. In 1950 he migrated to Sydney, where he has lived ever since with his wife, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Eddie was imprisoned for a total of seven years in the two concentration camps, where the treatment he received is profoundly shocking. He attributes his survival to a close friendship there, but it was also due to his belonging to a reserved profession, that of precision engineering. Three times, when he was being marched towards the gas chambers, a guard noticed a label classing him as a reserved worker, and called him from the queue.
Perhaps the frequency of this occurrence caused Eddie’s belief in miracles, which, he writes, are always present, even when things look dark. But they need not come from a divine source. A simple act of kindness can function like a miracle, he affirms. Eddie was not a religious man, but he was an astute moralist. When our morality goes, our humanity goes too, he remarks.
Eddie returns to the point several times that human weakness was exploited by the Nazis and manipulated into hatred, but he does not appreciate that religion can be a source of strength. One recalls the Baptist in Solzhenitsyn’s description of a gulag who was sustained by prayer. And there was the Catholic von Stauffenberg, who believed that God had spared him from near death in North Africa for a special mission, that of assassinating Hitler, though he was wrong about what the mission was.
Given the extreme brutality of the Nazi regime, acquiring sufficient inner strength to resist it would have been a challenge to anyone. For an isolated individual it would have been daunting indeed. Such a task cries out for co-operation, mutual support and an achievable action programme. Could it be that a Quaker Meeting for Business, waiting for ways to open, is well adapted to the purpose? Eddie makes a point about the preciousness of life: ‘You must remember that you are lucky to be alive – we are all lucky in this way.’ A very similar point was made by Pitirim Sorokin, later a US sociologist, when he was a prisoner in a Soviet camp about twenty years before Eddie, also in extreme conditions, and also close to execution.
‘Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world’, says Joseph A Matter in Love, Altruism and World Crisis, The Challenge of Pitirim Sorokin. Very late in life, Eddie acquired a sense of mission himself: to speak about his life, and help educate the world about the dangers of hate. This is a moving and important book.
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