Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku never expected to live to 100 let alone become a first-time author just months after making that milestone. 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.“If I could survive one more day, an hour, a minute, then the pain would end and tomorrow would come,” he would tell himself.
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. And now he’s an author., published this week, retells his powerful life story from stateless refugee to celebrated centenarian.“I have lived for a century and I know what it is to stare evil in the face,” it begins.
“I do not hate anyone, not even Hitler. Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy but will destroy you in the process. You may not like everyone, but that doesn’t give you the right to be nasty to them. I don’t love everyone but I hate no one. There is no revenge; staying alive is the only revenge."
“Not a moment passed when I did not miss my family … I told my father how lonely I was without them, but he said: 'Eddie, I know it is very difficult, but one day you will thank me' ... And he was right. Without what I learnt at that school, I would never have survived what was to come.” In 1943, the family was arrested by Belgian police, denounced as refugees and deported to Auschwitz. After nine days on a train of fellow Jews, surviving on only two cups of water a day, they arrived in the middle of a bitter Polish winter.
“I did not want to be separated from my father so I slipped from one line to the other. I was nearly on the truck with my father when one of the stooges standing guard with Mengele said, ‘Hey, didn’t he tell you this way? Your father goes by truck and you walk into the camp’. I never saw my father again. He sent him and my mother to the gas chamber.”Jaku survived thanks to the fine mechanical skills his father had insisted he learn.
They both escaped but were separated, and Jaku was recaptured by Nazis and put to work on an assembly line, repairing gearboxes for war machinery back in Buchenwald. He again escaped, hiding in a cave in the Black Forest, where he was discovered delirious with hunger and close to death by US soldiers in April 1945, having spent the last few months of the war eating little more than slugs and snails.
pitthen Much Respect! I will definetly try to meet you when i get the opportunity to come to Sydney.
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