Eddie Jaku has every reason to hate, but he chooses to find every reason to be happy instead. He was sent to Auschwitz as a young man, escaped the death marches at the end of the war by hiding in a cave and eating slugs and snails to survive.
He was finally found by American troops and sent to a hospital where he was told he was 65 percent dead and 35 percent alive. But still, he refuses to hate. Hate, he says, is disease that destroys your enemy and then you.
He bears witness to the Holocaust as a volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
Eddie Jaku at the Sydney Jewish Museum Photo: Photograph by Katherine Griffiths, courtesy Sydney Jewish Museum
“When I came out of the camp and I was very, very sick and I was three months in hospital in Germany… and when I left the hospital I made a promise; from now on I will be a kind, polite, smiling person, nothing will get me down.”
This is how Jaku lives his life, he’s a happy man. “Everyday when I wake up I say it’s another day to enjoy.”
In 1972 he and other survivors created the Holocaust association as a way to tell their stories.
“For myself, I’m German, it was my country, and what happened to me, the world has to know and also the world has to know what can happen if you don’t care...educated and civilised people followed [the Nazis] and became murderers, Hitler didn’t do that by himself.
“We were German first, German second, Jewish at home. Jewish is a religion, not a race.”
Jaku was first arrested when he was 18 years old; 10 Nazis bashed him nearly to death, on what is now known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) and he was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
He was released on 2 May 1939 in order to become a tool maker in a factory where he volunteered to work. When his father picked him up from the camp to take Jaku to the factory he instead drove to the border of Belgium and Germany where the pair were smuggled into the Belgium forest.
“After two weeks I was arrested by the Belgium police, as a German I was put in an internment camp with 4000 Germans, that camp was liquidated on the 10 May 1940 when Hitler invaded Norway, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, France.”
He then made his way to Dunkirk with his father, where they split up, and Jaku walked by himself to the South of France. His journey ended there as he was arrested on a toilet in Lyon and sent to another camp, Gurs, where he was for 7 months.
“Hitler made a deal with the president of France, he asked them ‘Give me all the German Jews, they’re all highly professionals and educated and in exchange I’ll give you back thousands and thousands of French prisoners’.”
Jaku was being loaded into a wagon with 34 other people when he realised on the train platform there was a hammer, screwdriver and spanner. He grabbed the tools, put them in his pocket and asked the driver how long the journey would take.
“I had 9 hours to escape.”
During the journey he unscrewed all of the bolts from the floorboard in the train and then chiselled away at it with the screwdriver. “And eventually, just before we arrived at the border Strasburg, I open two planks… and I escaped. I went back to Belgium and I lived in an attic with my parents and my sister and on the 18 October 1943 somebody denounced us and we were sent to Auschwitz.”
Jaku is constantly reminded of his time in Auschwitz by a number tattooed on his arm. “We cannot even get this out because it’s put in such a way that it’s put through three skins and the flesh.”
He says even women who have had skin grafted in order to remove the tattoo find that after 5 years the number comes back because of how deeply it was done. “It’s a proof for us, some people put it on their grave.”
“You tattoo or you brand animals so you show to whom they belong, but not people.”
The Nazi’s killed 20 million people during the Holocaust; 6 million Jewish people and 14 million others. In Auschwitz, Jaku says 1500 people were killed every hour.
“Auschwitz was a death camp, you never know when you get up in the morning if you come back to your bunk but we have no bunks, we sleep 10 people between columns… naked, because naked you can’t escape.”
If one of the people went to the toilet in the night they would have to come back and shake the 1st and 10th person in the line because if they didn’t those people would freeze to death. “Every night, 10 to 20 people died, every night, because they were too long on the outside.” It was an unwritten law, he says.
“That’s the way we lived.”
In the morning they would have a cold shower, a coffee and 1 or 2 pieces of bread before walking 1 and a half hours to work in wooden shoes, with nothing to protect them from the snow, rain and wind.
“If you break a leg they shoot you, and then we have to take you back,” he says.
“On 18 January 1945 the bell was ringing in the middle of the night and the Russians, we could already hear the canons, and the bell rings for headcount, we were in my camp, Auschwitz, 68,023 people.”
At 5am they were taken out of the camp and made to walk three days and nights without food and water.
“They called it the death march because every time somebody is falling down, they asked them to open their mouths, they open their mouths and they shoot them.”
They arrived in a military building where his best friend told him he could not go on. Jaku hid his friend in a manhole to save him. Jaku was sent back to Buchenwald camp and two days later his friend was liberated.
“And me, idiot, I didn’t stay myself in this manhole. I had a motto, never be the first and never be the last but this I had to break because from Buchenwald there is no escape.”
On the second or third day though, he was required again as a tool maker and was sent on to smaller camp where he worked with his friend Krupp for four months.
As a foreman at Bayer, the biggest medical company in Europe, Jaku was tasked with overseeing 200 machines that worked off air pressure.”I organised everyone to have a whistle which i made myself and when the air pressure went down they would whistle, and I’d run to the machine, close the machine. If I closed the machine I could restart it, if the machine closed by itself, 200 machines will have to be stopped and I hang because I have a sign around my neck ‘If one machine stops, you hang me’.”
Jaku had access to a kitchen at the factory, where he found a big pot with holes in it that he fixed so he could boil potatoes. Doctors would be paid in potatoes, receiving four of them for a days work, but because they were raw, Jaku made a deal with them; he would boil their potatoes if they gave him one.
“So I had my trouser pockets and my jacket pockets filled with small boiled potatoes.”
He used these to trade.
There were many times he wanted to give up and electrocute himself on the wire fences, Jaku says, but his friend Krupp would stop him. “Without a friend in Auschwitz you are dead.”
When the camp was evacuated the Americans were close and they found themselves walking around in circles. One night the commander found an abandoned horse and told everyone he would make soup.
“That is the night I escaped for good.”
While walking, Jaku had found two pieces of timber which he carried with him on the journey. He knew that every 100 metres along the road there was a pipe that would take the water from one side of the field to the other. It was 95cm in diameter and while most of the time it was filled with water, Jaku says in April 1945 it was 15cm from the top.
“So when it got dark that day, when he promised us the food, I went into one pipe, in the water, right in the middle, crammed into 95cm. After a few hours I lost my shoes but I put one timber on the right side of my head and one timber on the left side and I blacked out. I can’t tell you if I was there one day, two days, three days, I don’t know.”
When he woke up, 38 bullets were stuck in the right timber and 10 in the left. He realised why there were always two guards staying behind when the prisoners started to walk again - so they could shoot down the pipes.
“That was my escape.”
He found a house nearby and the family that lived there asked him to stay - they knew he was Jewish because of the little yellow triangle on his jacket. Jaku knew if a patrol car came by he would be dead so he asked for a jumper, threw away his stripped clothes and in the morning he walked to a big forest nearby.
“I lived for about two months in a cave, eating snails and slugs. I collected some water from a creek, that water was poison. On 4 June 1945 I got so sick that I couldn’t stand up anymore, I said now if they shoot me, they do me a favour, so I was ready to give myself up and I made 80 metres to the highway, it took me a full day. I came to the highway, I put my hand on the highway and I’m in front of an American tank and I collapsed.
"Those beautiful American soldiers, I’ll never forget, they put me on a blanket, there were eight soldiers in this tank, and I woke up after one week in a coma in a German hospital. First I thought I’m cuckoo, I’m crazy, because yesterday I thought I was in this cave and now I’m in a bed with white sheets, cushions and nurses around.”
One night a nurse came by, her name was Emma. She put her head on his blanket to check if Jaku, now 28 kg, was breathing. “And I said Emma, I’m not letting your arm go before you’re telling me what [the doctor] told you and I started crying and she whispered in my ear ’65 percent you’re dead, 35 percent you live - and I live.”
