FROZEN IN TIME
Auschwitz survivor recounts atrocities in trial of Nazi sergeant
If you manage to survive, you need to tell the world what happened here
Thomas Walther presses “record” on a video camera, shifts forward in his seat and extends an arm toward an elderly gentleman seated across from him.
“Now we are together with Max Eisen,” he says, in a soft, measured voice, in his thick-German accent.
“I want to tell you what I want to hear from you. And that is, the things that are important, and the question is — what is important — what is important to me?
“And the answer, Max, is what is important for you. For you, looking inside yourself, starting at a time, a long, long time ago, when you have been a happy child, and starting at this point.”
Mr. Eisen, an 86-year-old Toronto resident, with a gaptoothed grin and a good memory, begins to speak, describing an idyllic 1930s childhood in Moldava, a village in the present-day Czech Republic.
His family owned a large house, where he lived with his parents, grandparents and two younger brothers and, for a time, a baby sister. There were bike rides, piles of friends and endless summers spent at a relatives’ farm.
It was perfect. And then it was over. Condemned by the Second World War and a Nazi killing machine that would be responsible for the murders of Mr. Eisen’s family and most of his relatives in Auschwitz. But he survived, somehow. Mr. Walther, a 71-year-old retired German judge-turned-Nazi hunter, has come to a suite in a Toronto hotel room to listen to his story of all that was lost and how.
He’s preparing to represent Mr. Eisen and 22 other Canadian Auschwitz survivors as co-plaintiffs in the trial of Oskar Groening, the bookkeeper of Auschwitz.
The former SS sergeant sorted and counted money stolen from the murdered Jews. He also stood guard on the train platform at the notorious death camp as the cattle cars delivered their doomed cargo.
He remained in Germany after the war, a free man, managing a glass factory and, at age 93, is living on a generous company pension while facing charges of being an accessory to 300,000 murders.
His trial begins April 21, in Luneburg, Germany.
Mr. Eisen doesn’t know if he will be able to attend. So he faces the old Nazi, who has never denied being at Auschwitz — he insists in interviews he was merely a “small cog,” not an actual executioner, and therefore not guilty of any crime — through the memories he relates to Mr. Walther.
Searing images of a train ar- riving in Auschwitz, a man-made “hell” of smokestacks and horrible smells, and fire and men screaming in German.
“Is it night or day?” Mr. Walther asks.
“It is the middle of the night,” Mr. Eisen says.
“There was light?” Mr. Walther asks.
“A floodlight, you couldn’t even open your eyes.”
Mr. Eisen remembers being separated from his mother, younger siblings and aunts on the train platform. They were told to go to the left, and the family would all be together again, soon. He can picture his mother walking away from him. It is his final memory of her.
“I was in total shock,” he says. “The first guy I saw get killed was a guy from my town …
“In the shower, his glasses fell down. Can you imagine a naked person from the rear? It is a comical thing to see. And this SS person was so livid that he came and gave him a kick in his head — and he flipped over — and then he stomped him to death.
“I remember hearing his ribs cracking.”
There were more killings. Beatings. Shootings. Selections. Starvation. Barking dogs. Blinding lights. Murder on an industrial scale where every cog, no matter how small — the German prosecutors will argue in court — was essential in keeping the murderous conveyor belt moving.
Mr. Eisen’s father was eventually killed, but not before he left his son with a parting wish.
“He told me, ‘If you manage to survive, you need to tell the world what happened here.’ And that’s it, I was an orphan.”
Mr. Eisen came to Canada in 1948. He has a small Canadian flag pinned above his heart. He also has something to say to the German court.
“If I can’t make it, I would like to tell the judge to give this man a life sentence to do community work,” he says.
“Truly, I would think that this would be a very good tool for this man to go to visit schools, under some supervision, and talk about that period of time … That would be the only productive thing to do.”
Mr. Walther hits “stop” on the video camera. The two men shake hands, stand and embrace.