Description
Tibor “Max” Eisen was born in Moldava, Czechoslovakia, into an Orthodox Jewish family. He had an extended family of sixty members and lived in a family compound with his parents, his two younger brothers, his baby sister, his paternal grandparents, and his uncle and aunt.
In the spring of 1944—five and a half years after his region had been annexed to Hungary and the morning after the family’s yearly Passover Seder—gendarmes forcibly removed Eisen and his family from their home. They were brought to a brickyard and eventually loaded onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave labourer.
One day, Eisen received a terrible blow from an SS guard. Severely injured, he was dumped at the hospital where a Polish political prisoner and physician, Tadeusz Orzeszko, operated on him. Despite his injury, Orzeszko saved Eisen from certain death in the gas chambers by giving him a job as a cleaner in the operating room.
After his liberation and new trials in Communist Czechoslovakia, Eisen immigrated to Canada in 1949, where he has dedicated the last twenty-two years of his life to educating others about the Holocaust across Canada and around the world.
The author will be donating a portion of his royalties from this book to institutions promoting tolerance and understanding.
In the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.
Endorsements
Winner of CBC Canada Reads.
Finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize.