Survivor bore witness to a nightmare
Veteran a living bridge to horrors of the Holocaust Fled Austria after the ‘Night of Broken Glass’
“We were the witnesses. Now that I’ve told you the story, you are the witness.” — Martin Maxwell, Holocaust survivor and veteran of DDay and the Battle of Arnhem Martin Maxwell was just a boy when his parents took ill and died, leaving him, his older brother and three younger sisters orphans. But the worst was yet to come. Growing up in separate orphanages in Vienna, the siblings lost all semblance of their old lives in 1938, when Germany annexed Austria and began shipping Jewish children to concentration camps.
“ We were marched by the Nazis to the street while bystanders were cheering and celebrating our arrests. They burned the synagogues, broke the windows of Jewish homes and threw furniture out from those homes,” recalls Maxwell, now 81 and a Toronto businessman.
That was on Nov. 9, 1938, the beginning of the horror for Jews caught in Nazi Europe.
That day, exactly 67 years ago, became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, because of the shards that littered the streets. It marked the beginning of the open persecution that ushered in Hitler’s mass extermination of six million Jews.
Maxwell, born Max Meisels, and his brother Leo were rounded up by SS officers. But miraculously, they were let go, thanks to a “ letter of safe passage” issued them by a German soldier for whom Leo had once worked as a personal servant. They were two of only 10 who were freed that night; hundreds of others were sent to concentration camps or removed to the Polish border. Young Max was to defy incredible odds more than once over the next few years. With the help of Quakers, he and Leo were among 10,000 Jewish children who escaped to England through the Kindertransport program, in the period between that awful night and the outbreak of war the following September. While Leo, then 16, moved to the United States and later joined the American army, their sisters were headed to a Paris orphanage.
Tragically, two of the girls — Josefine, 11, and Erna, 14 — never made it. Both died in a Nazi concentration camp. The youngest sister, Berta, later moved to Toronto and died several years ago, at age 69. Max, then 15, was adopted by a London family shortly after he arrived in England on New Year’s Eve 1938.
Like other Kindertransport children, he was classified as an “ enemy alien” and technically not eligible to join the British forces. But he had adopted an anglicized name, and at age 17, 9 months and 1 day, Martin Maxwell persuaded a recruiting officer to allow him join the Pioneer Corps. He was later transferred to the tank corps and then selected by the Glider Pilot Regiment. The regiment, which specialized in carrying troops and equipment to precise spots without alerting the enemy, was to take particularly heavy casualties. Maxwell was in one of the six gliders that left for Normandy on June 5, 1944, at the beginning of the D-Day invasion. The group succeeded in capturing the Pegasus and other bridges, cutting off reinforcements to the German forces.
Three months later, he was assigned the dangerous task of landing his glider behind enemy lines in Holland, where he and others in his unit were captured in the battle for Arnhem. They were freed on May 1, 1945. Maxwell might have kept much of his story buried in his heart forever, were it not for an Martin Maxwell offensive remark made by a rude lad he bumped into at a wedding party 12 years ago.
“ The young man said he noticed my slight English accent and asked where I was during the war in England. When I replied I was serving in the army, he said, ‘ I’m sure you were not on the front line,’ ” recounts Maxwell, who joined his sister in Toronto in 1952.
“I’d been reluctant to talk about my experience during the Holocaust and the Second World War, but after that encounter, I said to myself, ‘ I’d better tell people about my experience, so they know what we went through.’ ”
That’s when Maxwell, the owner of a North York manufacturing company that makes bandages, cotton balls and the like for Wal-Mart, joined the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto. The organization, currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, has seen its annual education program grow from a one- day occasion to a multifaceted two- week series of events that has reached many thousands of people across Greater Toronto. Holocaust Education Week 2005 will close tonight with a Kristallnacht memorial service at Adath Israel Congregation, on Southbourne Ave., which will honour the survivors and pay tribute to the liberators.
Despite efforts to educate the public about the horrors of war and bigotry, Maxwell is still constantly reminded of the struggle against religious and ethnic hatred in places like Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur.
“ It makes you wonder whether what all we did collectively for a
better world was really
worth it,” he laments.
“Does anyone really
care anymore?”
It wasn’t until April
this year that Maxwell
found his answer, during a nine- day trip to the Netherlands, along with 1,300 Canadian veterans, to mark the 60th anniversary of Holland’s liberation.
“ I was standing by myself and this 7- year- old Dutch boy came up to me, put out his hand and said, ‘ Thank you for our freedom,’ ” says Maxwell. “ At that moment, I knew it was all worth it.”