The "Happiest 100-Year-Old in the World" Who Survived the Death Camp

He was born in 1920 in Leipzig, eastern Germany. His name was Abraham Salomon Yakubovich. His friends called him Adi. In English, Eddie. He spent his childhood in a wealthy and loving Jewish-German family. However, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he faced the harsh realities of life. He entered the Leibniz Gymnasium but was expelled simply because he was Jewish. He forged his identity to enroll in a mechanical engineering university, and after five years of study, he worked at a medical device manufacturer, but this did not last long either.

On November 9, 1938, intending to surprise his parents, he secretly visited his hometown but was caught by the Nazi Sturmabteilung and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was dragged around, repeatedly imprisoned and escaping multiple times. After great hardship, he reunited with his family and hid with them for 11 months, but was discovered due to a neighbor’s betrayal and imprisoned in the notorious Auschwitz. According to the Nazi classification system that valued people based on their utility, he lost his parents in the gas chambers and survived a subhuman existence until May 1945, about 1 year and 3 months later. His story is captured in the book The Happiest 100-Year-Old in the World (Dongyang Books).

The Nazis were cruel. They thoroughly destroyed both the body and soul of people. They crammed 148 people into a very small shower room and left them there for three days. Occasionally, they created extreme fear by shouting “Fire!” or “Gas!” and made them “trample each other blindly in pitch-black darkness.” “Screams filled the air and the stench of blood was overwhelming. (...) One man was trampled so badly that one of his eyeballs popped out and hung on his face.”

The value system in Auschwitz was different from society’s. Old rags were more valuable and useful than gold. “Gold could not do much, but rags could cover wounds, keep warmth inside prison uniforms, and be used to wipe the body simply.” They were also useful when carrying corpses. Guards made prisoners carry those who collapsed during marches, and in those moments, the powerless prisoners found rags indispensable.

As useful as rags to the author was his fellow prisoner Kurt. He confesses, “If it weren’t for Kurt, I would not have been able to endure the despair and grief after my parents were murdered.” The daily conversations they shared while walking together “were enough to keep me going, and to remind me that someone who cared about me and someone I cared about still remained in this world.” The author emphasizes, “Having one good friend is like having the whole world.”

What the author learned about the Nazis, or rather about the banality of human evil, is this: “Under the Nazi regime, Germans were weak and easily manipulated; they did not instantly become evil humans, but they gradually and surely lost all morality and soon lost their humanity. These people could torture others and then return home without a second thought to face the faces of their wives and children.”

Having experienced extreme physical suffering, he offers the following advice to today’s youth: “It breaks my heart to see young people today treating their bodies carelessly?smoking, drinking excessively, doing drugs?and destroying this wonderful machine that we were gifted.”

After the war, he lived as a refugee in Belgium and, after marriage, succeeded in business. It was only in his old age that he began to share his experiences. From 1992 to 2003, he volunteered at the Sydney Jewish Museum, sharing Holocaust testimonies, and passed away last October at the age of 102.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.