Max Eisen - By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz

An award-winning, internationally bestselling Holocaust memoir in the tradition of Elie Wiesels Night and Primo Levis Survival in Auschwitz

In the spring of 1944, gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor Max Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer.

More than seventy years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisens story of survival: the backbreaking slave labor in Auschwitz I, the infamous death march in January 1945, the painful aftermath of liberation and Eisens journey of physical and psychological healing. Ultimately, the book offers a message of hope as the author finds his way to a new life.

PRAISE FOR BY CHANCE ALONE

Max Eisens important, timely memoir reminds us that horror does not happen overnight and that no one is immune to it. Villainizing a people, an ethnic or a religious group, can lead to bloodshed and genocide, as it did during the Holocaust. By Chance Alone is a testimony to the human experience of needless, senseless suffering. May we learn from it.

Marina Nemat , author of Prisoner of Tehran

Such were the overwhelming odds stacked against him, Max Eisen should not have survived. Chance, some good people, and not a little luck all played their part, but his dogged determination to overcome the lethal physical and mental onslaught is truly remarkable. It was a short trip to Auschwitza long road to recovery. Be sure that one day you will find me rowing a boat on Ebensee in his honor.

Stephen D. Smith , Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation

Max Eisen reveals, with clarity and honesty, his personal resilience and determination to survive against impossible odds, and to bear witness to the horrors of Auschwitz. His humanity and generosity shine through in this powerful and page-turning memoir as he recounts both the cruelty of the SS guards and the kindness and daily heroism of fellow prisoners in the midst of a system designed for degradation, dehumanization, and ultimately death.

Barbara J. Falk, PhD, MSL, Canadian Forces College/Royal Military College of Canada/University of Toronto

Of all the evils of our evil days the Holocaust is the deepest. There is nothing to place against the scale of its vast cruelty, its bestial embrace of hate and murderousness. But it is the very enormity of the Holocaust, its gargantuan horror and bottomless depredations that challenge our ability to take it in, to pierce the immense shadow of its near unspeakable degradations. We need an entrance guide to this inferno, and it is here in the memoir By Chance Alone , by Max Eisen, who endured imprisonment and passage through the Auschwitz inferno as a boy. Mr. Eisens youth began in the pit of that hell, and his later life has been largely dedicatedthrough talks, education, and now this bookto bearing witness to the Holocaust, and insisting that it is both fact and warning. Mr. Eisens is the account of one, and there were the millions who did not, who escaped to tell the tale, so that we can morally refresh our response. By Chance Alone is a story of great pathos, and told with directness and simplicity, of the sufferings and grief and fear of one boy in a terrible time and a terrible place. The story of one cannot be the story of all, but it mayI am sure this is Mr. Eisens hopebe a means of securing an intellectual and emotional purchase on the otherwise overwhelming terrors and evil of the greatest crime of this or any other age.

Rex Murphy , former host of CBC Radios Cross Country Checkup

MAX EISEN is a Hungarian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. He is a passionate speaker and educator who volunteers at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. By Chance Alone won the 2019 Canada Reads competition and was short-listed for the RBC Taylor Prize. Eisen currently resides in Toronto, Canada, with his wife, Ivy.

Birkenau at the end of the line. Photo courtesy of Ian Jones.

By Chance Alone

A Remarkable True Story of Courage
and Survival at Auschwitz

Max Eisen

To my beloved first family, who died in a fury of hate but prepared a map for me to travel by. They live on in my heart forever.

To my dedicated and loving present family. Years ago, I could not have imagined I would live to know them. They are my beloved wife, Ivy; my two sons, Edmund Irving and William Larry; my granddaughters, Amy Tzipporah and Julie Leah; and all my great-grandchildren. They surround me with love, stability, and great joy.

To the numerous students who have attended my presentations. This book is a reminder to stand on guard against radical ideologies and never be bystanders. Their respect and accolades have been a great inspiration to me.

Contents

Authors Note

I n the summer of 2012, after two previous attempts, I began to work on this memoir with the editorial assistance of Dr. Amanda Grzyb, an associate professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario and a scholar of comparative genocide. Together, we recorded hours of interviews, which were then transcribed. When we started to put the transcribed interviews together into a cohesive narrative, however, the story just didnt sound the way I had envisaged. In the spring of 2014, we decided to set the interviews aside and start again from the beginning. The process was painstaking. I handwrote the chapters in pencil on 8 x 11 sheets of paper folded in half, and then my wife, my son, or my granddaughter patiently typed them up on our computer. I gave each typed chapter to Amanda, and she edited them and returned them to me with queries and suggestions for additional revisions. Amanda and I met frequently over the next year, and by April 2015nearly seventy years after my liberation from Ebensee concentration campI had completed a draft manuscript detailing my formative childhood years and my subsequent survival during the dark days of the Holocaust. The dates and places mentioned in this book are described as I remember them, and any factual errors are inadvertent and my sole responsibility. After a seventy-year lapse, I have written my memories as accurately as possible.