Max Eisen writes his own history in order to protect the future
Aleah Balas | February 28, 2020
Looking at Max Eisen, a smaller than average 90-year-old man, it is impossible to imagine someone so happy and healthy falling victim to such hardships. But as he begins to speak, the pain can be heard crystal clear.
Eisen was born in Moldova, Slovakia in 1929 and was later accompanied by two brothers and much later, a sister. He fondly remembers his dog Farkas (Hungarian for Wolf) being his best friend and guard for his family’s orchards and lumberyard.
As a child, his family and friends would call him Tibby, nicknamed after his given name Tibor and his greatest worry was getting through long days of public school followed by nights of Hebrew school. But as it turns out, he would later come to have much larger concerns.
Eisen and his family were taken from their home on the morning of Passover in 1944 which ended fatally for all but Max.
“I could smell the coffee beans roasting. We typically had chicory but on Passover we got real coffee. I love coffee,” Eisen says as he holds his Tim Horton’s cup, explaining the reason for this vivid memory.
He survived living and working in the labour camp of Auschwitz at the age of 15 and subsequently a death march lasting 13 days over a distance 600 kilometres. While at Auschwitz, Eisen worked closely with a doctor in the operating room, cleaning it for the procedures despite his age and lack of formal education.
Not only did Eisen survive the camps prior to liberation, after being liberated he found himself in a harsh communist climate in Czechoslovakia. As he battled his way out, he was arrested and jailed for 6 months when he tried to obtain fake paperwork to leave the country. This was a time of political turmoil and reconvention after the war, and many political prisoners were in similar situations.
Eisen finally arrived in Canada on October 25th, 1949 and though it has been 70 years, he says it has gone by too fast.
“I arrived in Canada 70 years ago…how fast the 70 years have gone by…and a second in Auschwitz was like a thousand years”
As a final wish, his father made him promise, through the barbed wire that mediated their last conversation, that if by some chance he survived, he needed to tell the world what the people in the camps had endured. With this promise always at the back of his mind, he wrote out his stories and published his memoir, By Chance Alone, in 2017.
He feels it is important to reflect on the past as it can easily permeate into the present. In 2018, a campaign poster featuring Eisen’s photo stood outside of a synagogue in Toronto promoting the importance of Holocaust education. It was vandalized one night, with the word “Auchtung” (meaning “Attention,” a phrase used commonly in concentration camps to round up for selections to be gassed).
“Who would have thought that all of this poison we left behind after the second world war was going to reappear here in North America?”
Eisen now lives in Toronto and has children, grand-children and even three great-grandchildren to whom he spends a great deal of time with.
In response to his book, he is constantly on the go, speaking to youth groups, university classes and has been around the globe working on spreading his message.
Eisen is set to be on 60 Minutes in the coming months, with no word yet on the exact date.
