By Chance Alone: The Young Readers' Edition by Max Eisen with Kathy Kacer
CBC Books | Posted: May 30, 2024 2:41 PM | Last Updated: May 30
The moving, award-winning Canada Reads book from Holocaust survivor Max Eisen, now adapted for young readers.
Tibor "Max" Eisen was born in Czechoslovakia into an Orthodox Jewish family. He lived in a compound with his parents, his two younger brothers, his baby sister, his paternal grandparents and his uncle and aunt. Life was far from perfect, but it was relatively peaceful.
But in the spring of 1944 — the morning after the family's Passover Seder — officers forcibly removed Eisen and his family from their home. They, and thousands of other Jewish people, were brought to a brickyard and later loaded onto crowded cattle cars bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Fifteen-year-old Max lost his entire family, but he survived the selection process and went on to endure back-breaking slave labour and the infamous Death March in January 1945.
Max eventually survived his painful ordeal. And he knew he had to keep the very last promise he made to his father: to tell the world what happened at Auschwitz. By Chance Alone is the result of this promise. (From HarperCollins)
Max Eisen was a Hungarian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. He was a passionate speaker and educator who volunteered at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
His memoir By Chance Alone was a finalist for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize and for the 2017 Non-Fiction Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature.It won Canada Reads 2019, defended by Ziya Tong. Eisen died at the age of 93 on July 7, 2022.
Kacer is a Toronto-based author of fiction and nonfiction for children about The Holocaust. She is the author of over 20 books and has won the Silver Birch, Red Maple and Jewish Book Awards in Canada and the U.S.