The granddaughter of Holocaust survivor and international best-selling author Eddie Jaku says he would be the “most haunted man on earth” if he were alive to have seen the rise in antisemitism over the past three years, believing it would’ve reminded him of his life in Nazi Germany before he fled for Australia.

Eddie Jaku was born in Germany in 1920. He survived several concentration camps before his eventual rescue by US soldiers in June 1945. He had hidden in a forest after fleeing Auschwitz, and weighed only 28 kilograms. He published his hugely successful memoir The Happiest Man on Earth in 2020, at age 100, and died in October 2021.

Danielle Jaku told the antisemitism royal commission today that her grandfather would be shocked by the level of polarisation in Australia, and the lack of leadership to “swiftly address and repair it”.

“He would not be the happiest man on earth, but he would be the most haunted man on earth,” Jaku said. “I think he’d be thinking that the echoes of his life in 1930s Germany are so strong, and after surviving all of that, to come to Australia and become the happiest man on earth, I say that he would be devastated.”

Jaku has now been excused from the hearing. It is now hearing from David Solsky, one of the organisers of the Bondi Beach paddle out that occurred in the days after the terror event.