BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
As a young Jewish boy growing up in small-town Czechoslovakia, Max Eisen never experienced hatred or racism.
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Max Eisen worked as a slave labourer in the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Only a few of his relatives in Czechoslovakia lived to see the Allied Forces liberate the camps at the end of the Second World War. |
"We were about 10 percent of the population, and we had a wonderful life. We were in complete harmony with our neighbours. My extended family lived together in one big house," he said.
"This was a wonderful way to grow up. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and this was my experience."
But Eisen's life changed when the German army occupied his country and forced all Jews to wear yellow stars, work as labourers and give up their most precious personal possessions during the Second World War.
In 1944, when Eisen was 15 years old, the Nazis rounded up the 400 Jews in his town, and shipped them in cramped cattle cars to the
Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
By the time the war was over, only Eisen and two of his cousins were alive out of an extended family of nearly 70 people.
The man shared his Holocaust experiences with about 500 students from two elementary schools at Algonquin Public School Monday afternoon. Eisen's speech was part of their Holocaust Education Week activities.
"In 1944, my family celebrated Passover. This was really the last time my extended family sat together as fellow human beings at one table...We thought that we were so safe and the war was going to end," he said.
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Students at Algonquin Public School listened to his stories of a time of unbelievable hate. This week is Holocaust Education Week. |
"About 6 am, the (army) came into our home and yelled that we had five minutes to pack a bundle, and that they were taking us away."
When they reached the concentration camp, able-bodied workers were separated from those deemed unfit for slave labour.
"The old people, and even young mothers with babies in their arms, were done away with. They were marched up into the gas chambers right from this platform," he said.
"My father and uncle and I were chosen as slave labour."
The family members signed up to do farm work because they figured there might be more food to eat. But instead, they ended up draining bogs and wading around in mud up to their waists.
"We did this on a diet of about 300 calories. The Nazis had it figured out scientifically that on this diet, our lifespan would be no more than three months," he said.
"You get a cup of so-called tea in the morning, and at noon you get a bowl of soup that is mostly water, and when you come back at night you get a so-called cup of coffee with a thin slice of bread and a tiny square of margarine. You are living off the fat you had on you, and once that
disappears, you'd break out in scurvy."
The teen's father and uncle eventually died under the horrible conditions. Eisen was a "walking skeleton" suffering from typhus on May 6, 1945 when someone told him the guards were no longer in the towers.
"A few seconds later the gate came crashing down, and a tank was crashing through, and it had a white star on it...They were a crack unit of the American Army," he said.
"Believe me, this was a very happy moment. It was like a great weight was lifted off my back."
Eisen took about three months to physically recover from his trauma. He ended up in a boys' home in Prague, and immigrated to Canada in 1949 where he started a family.
Algonquin Public School Grade 2 teacher Margery Collins arranged for Eisen to speak at the school.
Collins, who travelled to Israel last summer to learn more about the Holocaust, has been organizing Holocaust Education Week for the past three years.
During her trip, she met one of the last people who saw Holocaust victim and author Anne Frank alive.
"History becomes real when you have an actual survivor come in to speak to you, rather than reading it in a textbook," she said.
"Children can relate more to (Eisen) because they're able to ask him questions."
