‘If you survive you must tell the world what happened here’
WATERLOO — It was a hard lesson about hard things. Students absorbed it without fuss or fidget.
Max Eisen told them how he stayed alive while Nazis murdered his parents, his two brothers and his baby sister.
Eisen’s father had just seconds to say goodbye at the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp in Nazioccupied Poland. He said a prayer and told his son: “If you survive you must tell the world what happened here.”
And so at 88, the Toronto man is still doing what his father asked.
Finnegan Manning, 13, had never heard from a Holocaust survivor. “It’s awful because it’s a great example of how terrible humans can be,” he said.
It appals Sophia Murphy, 14, that some of Eisen’s neighbours ransacked his home as soon as Nazi Germany deported his family to the death camp in 1944. “They were mocking them,” she said.
Ava Rai, 10, was struck to hear that some of Eisen’s former neighbours were further displeased to see him return after he survived the war.
Eisen says he survived by chance alone. That’s the title he gave to the book he wrote.
But as he revealed Wednesday to 60 students at the KitchenerWaterloo Bilingual School, it also took will and determination to survive the genocidal Nazis, who sought to murder all Jews.
Eisen was 15 when police arrived to force his family from their Hungarian home in the spring of 1944.
“Why don’t you leave your baby girl with me?” a distraught neighbour asked his mother.
His parents did not yet know they were doomed. His mother could not bring herself to give up her child. And so mother and baby perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
“I think about this. I can hear this,” Eisen said, recalling the words between his mother and their neighbour. “If my mother had left behind my little sister, would she have survived?”
Eisen survived the Nazis by staying useful to them as a slave labourer. He endured starvation, a vicious beating and a forced death march across Europe before U.S. soldiers liberated him in May 1945.
Though the events of the Holocaust are decades past, Eisen knows there’s justice still to be done. He’s helped to achieve it.
He testified at the German trials of two ex-Auschwitz guards. Both were put on trial in their 90s. Both were convicted of facilitating mass murder, without evidence they personally killed anyone.
Seeing justice in Germany, Eisen wants Canada to keep prosecuting Helmut Oberlander, the retired Waterloo developer who served a Nazi death squad that murdered at least 23,000 people.
“I think they should have taken his citizenship away a long time ago,” he said.
He understands that Oberlander is 94, that there’s no evidence he personally killed anyone, that he led an upstanding life here, and that the government failed three times to revoke his citizenship in a case that has cost taxpayers $2.1 million and lasted 23 years.
As Eisen sees it, Oberlander served the Nazi murder machine. “How does a machine work if all the cogs aren’t working?” he said.