ESA’s Social Studies department is privileged to have Mr. Max Eisen visit the school to speak to grade ten history students. The ESA community is lucky to have such dynamic man enrich students’ learning. Family members of ESA students are welcome to attend the assembly.
When: Thursday, March 28th, Period 2
Location: ESA Auditorium
Mr. Eisen, born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. He worked as a labourer, and subsisted on little more than 300 calories per day: “There was a roaring hunger in your belly every minute. This was another world that no one can imagine unless you lived it. Their aim was to grind us away body and soul. But I had a tremendous will to go on. I didn’t want to wind up in the gas chamber.” (Max, in the Toronto Star, May 8, 2008)
As the German armed forces faced imminent defeat in the winter of 1945, inmates were marched for five days to another concentration camp, Ebensee, in Austria. Though he had survived Auschwitz and the death march, Max suffered from typhus in the last weeks of the war in Europe. After liberation, he faced years of a difficult recovery. Max lived in an orphanage for several years and, in 1949, moved to Canada.
From his extended family of seventy, only Max and two cousins made it out of the camps.
Max is committed to teaching about the terrible history of the Holocaust, and he actively engages young people when he shares his memories with them.
For more information about Mr. Eisen, please see the following: