Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku, who last year published his best-selling memoir, The Happiest Man on Earth, has died in Sydney, a Jewish community leader said. He was 101.
“Eddie Jaku was a beacon of light and hope for not only our community, but the world,” New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive officer Darren Bark said in a statement.
“He will always be remembered for the joy that followed him, and his constant resilience in the face of adversity,” Bark added.
Photo: AP
Jaku died on Tuesday.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison paid tribute to Jaku’s decision to “make his life a testimony of how hope and love can triumph over despair and hate.”
“He will be sadly missed, especially by our Jewish community. He was an inspiration and a joy,” Morrison said.
Treasurer of Australia Josh Frydenberg, whose Jewish-Hungarian mother also survived the Holocaust and arrived in Australia in 1950 as a stateless child, said: “Australia has lost a giant.”
“He dedicated his life to educating others about the dangers of intolerance and the importance of hope,” Frydenberg said in a statement.
Jaku said in a speech in Sydney in 2019: “I do not hate anyone. Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you.”
“Happiness does not fall from the sky. It’s in your hands. I’m doing everything I can to make this world a better place for everyone,” he said.
Jaku was born Abraham “Adi” Jakubowiez in April 1920 in the German city of Leipzig. His parents and many of his wider family did not survive the war.
He was tossed out of school in 1933 at the age of 13 because he was Jewish, but managed to finish his high-school education in another city under an alias in 1938 with a qualification in precision engineering.
Jaku said his qualification spared him the gas chambers in the years that followed because he worked as a slave laborer.
He was sent to and escaped from concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Auschwitz, where his parents were gassed on arrival.
He escaped from what he suspected was a death march as an Auschwitz prisoner as Allies approached. He spent months in hiding before US troops found him near-starved and sick with cholera and typhoid.
In 1946, he married in Belgium his Jewish wife Flore, who had spent a comparatively uneventful war in Paris pretending to be Christian, and they migrated to Australia in 1950.
He worked at a Sydney garage and his wife as a dressmaker before they went into real estate together.
Forever marked with an Auschwitz prisoner number tattooed on his left arm, he also became a volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum, sharing his experiences and philosophies of life with visitors.
“When anybody left Eddie having spoken to him, they really just felt as if their whole outlook on life had changed,” museum chief executive Norman Seligman told Nine Network television.
Jaku said with the birth of his first son, Andre, “I realized I was the luckiest man on Earth.”
He is survived by his wife of 75 years, his sons Andre and Michael, four grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS