Fake Holocaust Survivors: Eddie Jaku

Sometimes when you read ‘Holocaust Survivor’ stories you find yourself guffawing loudly at the sheer ludicrousness of the claims. One such is the fairly famous story of ‘Holocaust Survivor’ Eddie Jaku whose story has been written up for Aish.

He read how:

‘Abraham Salomon Jakubowicz was born into a Leipzig, Germany family of four on April 14, 1920. He had a happy childhood growing up with his parents, little sister Johanna, and Lulu, the family dachshund. His playmates called him Abie, which became Adie, and then Eddie. His engineering school education would serve him well during his lifetime, but it started off badly as he and other Jewish boys were kicked out of school when the Nazis rose to power.

His father orchestrated a new identity for him, so 13-year-old Abraham became “Walter Schleif” to hide his Jewish heritage and continue his study of mechanical engineering school in Tuttlingen, which was far south of Leipzig. Away from home, he stayed at an orphanage after classes. He graduated and earned an internship at a prestigious engineering union.’ (1)

Now we’ve already descended into implausibility at this early stage because we have Jaku claiming his father ‘created a new identity’ for him in 1933 just after the Third Reich had begun which is rather implausible in that it was widely believed the Third Reich ‘wouldn’t last’ at the time or that the NSDAP’s anti-jewish policies wouldn’t match their rhetoric.

So, we are supposedly to believe that Jaku’s father ‘foresaw’ the ‘persecution’ of the jews throughout the 1930s into the 1940s, but yet didn’t prepare to get his son and family out of Germany as so many others did?

It just doesn’t seem very plausible and the idea that Jaku was studying ‘mechanical engineering’ at 13 as he claims is implausible as this would require his Abitur – the German school leaving certificate – that would only be awarded at the earliest at age 15 not age 13.

So Jaku’s timeline is completely off and shows that he is either misremembering or outright lying and as we shall see this is not uncommon in Jaku’s narrative at all.

Jaku’s story continues with the claim regarding his ‘experiences’ during Kristallnacht:

‘Abraham/Walter decided to risk a visit home and took a nine-hour train ride to see his parents and celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. He called it “the biggest mistake of my young life.” He didn’t know his family had fled from the rising wave of antisemitic violence. Only their dog Lulu remained. He went to bed and at 5:00 AM on November 9, 1938, the door to his house was smashed in by ten Nazi soldiers. They beat him unmercifully, carved a swastika into his arm, and bayonetted Lulu to death. Abraham was taken outside and saw his neighborhood ablaze. He was forced to watch as his family’s 200-year-old house was burnt to the ground.’ (2)

So basically, Jaku came home from his school (university?) by train, his family had fled leaving their dog Lulu and ‘ten Nazi soldiers’ bashed his parent’s door down, ‘carved a swastika into his arm’, bayonetted the family dog to death and then burnt his house down.

This is unlikely in the extreme as it is clearly gratuitous, unlikely to have occurred and likely some kind of atrocity propaganda that Jaku either invented at the time or later.

We can also see this in how Jaku claims that he was then shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp which is possible given 10,000 jews were shipped to Buchenwald after Kristallnacht, but… most of them were released within a month. (3)

Jaku claims that:

‘He was loaded onto a truck and taken to Buchenwald and eventually put on a train to Auschwitz. Over the next seven dark years, he would serve time in four concentration camps.’ (4)

So Jaku is claiming he was part of the small minority of jews who were arrested on Kristallnacht but not released inside a month to which he inexplicably makes no reference whatsoever, which misleads the reader and noteworthy is his lack of explanation of why he was kept ‘in protective custody’ as it was called. This would only have happened if Jaku had been a political subversive or a habitual criminal neither of which he claims to have been.

Hence Jaku is lying about something: either he was a political subversive or a habitual crime or he is making stuff up.

He continues about his time in Auschwitz which he claims he transferred to from Buchenwald:

‘In Auschwitz, he the number 172338 was tattooed on his arm. He learned that his parents had been victims of the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoriums. Eddie slept naked in a narrow row of ten men when it was eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit. He marched for an hour and a half to work, sometimes clearing debris from a bombed-out ammunition depot or jackhammering coal on a 12-hour shift.

When his captors learned of his mechanical engineering background, he was made a foreman at the IG Farben chemical factory and was responsible for regulating air pressure to 200 machines. One of the company’s chief products was a poison gas used in the Nazi gas chambers.

One of the machine operators he ran into was his sister. They realized they couldn’t speak or even acknowledge each other in front of their captors. They passed each other in near silence daily.’ (5)

Now here there appears to be a kernel of truth in that Jaku claims he was used as a manual labourer at Auschwitz – it was fundamentally a constellation of numerous work camps and part of Albert Speer’s plan to put the Third Reich’s economy on a total war footing – and was transferred to being a foreman at the I. G. Farben chemical factory because of his engineering background which makes sense because I. G. Farben famously had facilities at Auschwitz.

So far so good, but the problem here is Jaku’s claim that his parents were ‘gassed’ which he clearly has no evidence behind it and is – to be charitable – likely a post-war assumption and not something that Jaku ‘knows’ let alone actually saw.

The slide into ludicrous sheer implausibility continues with Jaku’s story about how ‘he escaped Auschwitz’:

‘He escaped once by hiding in a food drum and rolling off a delivery truck. Still dressed in his prison pajamas, he was freezing cold and stopped at a cabin for help. He was met by a Polish farmer and his rifle. The first five bullets missed him, but the sixth hit his left calf. He had to sneak back into Auschwitz where an old French doctor used an ivory letter opener and his fingers to dig and squeeze out the bullet. They timed the surgery to coincide with the bells ringing at a nearby Catholic church to muffle his screams of pain.

And what did he think of the man who shot him? “Do I hate that man? No, I do not hate anyone. He was just weak and probably as scared as I was. He let his fear overtake his morals. And I know that for every cruel person in the world, there is a kind one.”

By early 1945, the Russian troops were advancing, and the Nazi war effort was weakening. Auschwitz was evacuated and the Germans destroyed their gas chambers and crematoriums and forced the Auschwitz prisoners on a march into deeper German-occupied territory. Sixty thousand prisoners started this Death March and 15,000 perished during the march.

The surviving prisoners boarded a train to Buchenwald, and Eddie was assigned to a machine shop to make gears. By now, the Allied war effort was making solid advances against the Nazis, and Russian artillery and British bombing runs were heard daily. The prisoners were marched away from the advancing Russians to the east only to get closer to the advancing Americans to the west. Nazi soldiers began deserting their posts.’ (6)

Alright so Jaku ‘hid in a fuel drum’ and ‘rolled off a delivery truck’ in his ‘prison pyjamas’ while he was ‘freezing cold’; where he promptly met a Polish farmer who shot ‘six bullets at him’ but five missed. Then a French doctor – who was in southern Poland for some inexplicable reason – performed surgery on his bullet wood using an ‘ivory letter opener’ – letter openers are dull and usually unsharpened blades so are largely useless in a surgical context – and his ‘screams were timed to coincide with bells ringing at the nearby Catholic church during his surgery’.

This is a beyond ridiculous story that no one any sense of criticality can take seriously: it is just so implausible yet weirdly precise that it sounds like a plot from a penny dreadful.

Then of course Jaku goes on a death march back to Buchenwald from Auschwitz and:

‘He escaped by crawling into a drainage ditch, then hid in caves eating snails and slugs. Near death, he was crawling down a highway and was met by an American tank. He weighed 28 kilograms, 62 pounds.’ (7)

Alright so Jaku ‘escaped into a drainage ditch’ – which is quite possible – but then apparently lived in caves ‘eating snails and slugs’ till he was found by an American tank crew sometime in early to mid-1945.

So, does anyone take Eddie Jaku’s ‘Holocaust survivor’ story seriously?

Certainly not me!

References

(1) https://aish.com/the-happiest-man-on-earth-eddi-jakus-inspirational-story-of-survival-forgiveness-and-love/

(2) Ibid.

(3) https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/april/1945-4.html

(4) https://aish.com/the-happiest-man-on-earth-eddi-jakus-inspirational-story-of-survival-forgiveness-and-love/

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.