num_pages: 304
description: In the tradition of Elie Wiesels Night and Primo Levis Survival in Auschwitz comes a new memoir by Canadian survivorMore 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 familys 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.
language: English
title: By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz
publisher: HarperCollins Publishers