Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy but will destroy you in the process. “Every day I wake up is a happy day,” he says, his eyes sparkling like the Order of Australia pin he proudly wears on his lapel. “I am 100 and two months,” he squeals, in a mixture of disbelief and delight. He still drives his own car and starts each day by singing in the shower. Even today he remains wiry and active, with a full head of white hair and a deceptively youthful elan that could have him pass for a man in his 70s. However, Jaku’s indomitable spirit could not be extinguished. When they tattooed the number on my arm, I was sentenced to a slow death, but first they wanted to kill my spirit,” he says. Like the nightmares and the yearning for his mother, it has not disappeared with time.Įddie Jaku showing his concentration camp tattoo. He is dressed smartly in tie and suit, which conceal the crude indigo ink concentration camp tattoo on his left arm. I meet the debut author at the Montefiore residential aged care facility in Randwick, where he has lived for the past year, moving in when his wife of 74 years, Flore, needed care. Through all my years I have learnt this: life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful … Happiness is something we can choose. But now I consider myself the happiest man on Earth. “I have seen the very worst in mankind, the horrors of the death camps, the Nazi efforts to exterminate my life, and the lives of all my people. “I have lived for a century and I know what it is to stare evil in the face,” it begins. The Happiest Man on Earth, published this week, retells his powerful life story from stateless refugee to celebrated centenarian. Jaku not only survived the horrors of the Holocaust, but he has lived to become a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather as well as a successful Sydneysider, running everything from a service station to a real estate agency. He vowed to rest, and if he survived he would live every day to the fullest and dedicate the rest of his life to putting right the hurt that Adolf Hitler had inflicted on the world. Then, a Jewish doctor, who helped dislodge a bullet from his leg after one escape attempt, helped the analytical young engineer see life as a mathematical equation: “One hour of rest equals two days of survival.” But his friend Kurt Hirschfeld, a fellow young German Jew, convinced him to keep on living. At times he thought of joining them to perish, like his parents, who had been murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers. He’d regularly be woken by the suicidal screams of fellow Jews who had “gone to the wire” – killing themselves by running into the electrified barbed-wire fence on the perimeter of the death camp rather than suffer further at the hands of the Nazis. “If I could survive one more day, an hour, a minute, then the pain would end and tomorrow would come,” he would tell himself. At times, in his early 20s and interned in Auschwitz, sleeping on hard wooden planks, 10 naked men to a row, with nothing but each other for warmth, he didn’t expect to make it through the frozen night.Įddie Jaku, 100-year-old author and Auschwitz survivor, in Randwick. Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku never expected to live to 100 let alone become a first-time author just months after making that milestone. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
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