By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at AuschwitzWINNER of CBC Canada Reads In the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz comes a bestselling new memoir by Canadian survivor Finalist for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize More than 70 years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, a new Canadian Holocaust memoir details the rural Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau, back-breaking slave labour in Auschwitz I, the infamous “death march” in January 1945, the painful aftermath of liberation, a journey of physical and psychological healing. Tibor “Max” Eisen was born in Moldava, Czechoslovakia into an Orthodox Jewish family. He had an extended family of sixty members, and he 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 of1944--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 years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and he 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 significant 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. |
Contents
Summers on the Farm | |
Big Changes | |
Life under Hungarian Rule | |
A Year of Death and Birth | |
The Operating Room | |
Surgeries in Barrack 21 | |
A Pot of Stew | |
The Destruction of Crematorium 4 | |
Death March | |
Melk Ebensee and Liberation | |
Ebensee After Liberation | |
From České Budějovice to Moldava 23 Emotional and Physical Healing | |
The Final Seder | |
The Train | |
Arrival in Auschwitz IIBirkenau | |
Arbeit Macht Frei | |
Draining Swamps | |
Walking Ghosts | |
A Piece of Bacon | |
Selections July 1944 | |
Land Reclamation Outside Auschwitz | |
Marienbad | |
Prague | |
Return to Košice | |
Ebelsberg DP Camp | |
Canada | |
Epilogue | |
Appendix | |
About the Publisher | |
Other editions - View all
By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz Max Eisen Limited preview - 2020 |
By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz Max Eisen No preview available - 2016 |
By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz Max Eisen No preview available - 2016 |