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

Years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Eddie still grapples with unresolvable questions that depress him and threaten his sense of self-worth: “Why am I alive,” he asks himself, “and not all the others who died so terribly?” (170). His sense of guilt and bewilderment is fairly common for Holocaust survivors, and even has a name: “survivor syndrome,” also known as “concentration camp syndrome.” In the years after the war, Eddie wrestles with his trauma and must learn how to live and thrive again after facing years of torment and loss.

A form of post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor syndrome encompasses the oppressive feelings of guilt, anxiety, depression, and/or social withdrawal suffered by many who have survived a mass tragedy, such as the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide, or massacres such as the Rape of Nanjing in 1937-1938. Many studies, and a number of important fictional works, have referenced this syndrome in connection with the Holocaust, including Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” (1980) and William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice (1979).

Sufferers often describe chronic feelings of guilt for having survived when so many others, including loved ones, did not, as well as recurring, uncontrollable thoughts of what they might have done to save others. Many reproach themselves for things they supposedly did to others who did not survive. These symptoms often worsen with time, and have been cited as a factor in many deaths by suicide: In his memoir, Eddie describes three Jewish women who survived the camps but then attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge a few months after liberation. Eddie, by his account, has little to reproach himself for: Unlike some at Auschwitz, he did not steal food or hurt other prisoners, and in fact tried to help others whenever he could. Nevertheless, as the years pass, a desolate feeling plagues him that a mistake has been made, that God somehow spared the “wrong people” and that he should have died as well.

Eventually, Eddie counters these feelings of guilt and unworthiness with acts of altruism and activism. Thinking that he may have been spared by God so he could use his experience to do good, such as speak out on what he has witnessed, he takes on the “responsibility” of educating others—to prevent, in his small way, future Holocausts from happening. In an early act of altruism, he helps the three Jewish women who attempted suicide by rescuing them from the psychiatric hospital where they had been confined, offering them the shelter of the comfortable apartment he shares with Kurt. The women soon make a “complete” recovery and go on to live successful lives. Later, in his new home of Australia, he delivers a number of public speeches, at progressively larger venues, about his struggles to survive Auschwitz and other camps.

Many sufferers of survivor syndrome avoid any discussion of what they have endured, and Eddie himself finds his public sharing “very painful”; but, knowing that many in today’s world would like to forget the Holocaust, or even deny that it happened, he regards his firsthand testament of its horrors to be an important duty to the dead as well as to the living. Furthermore, he learns to sublimate his feelings of grief, anger, and guilt into the simple, therapeutic determination to “be happy.” This, he says, is the “best revenge”—and the only one he is interested in pursuing.