Solo por azar. Una historia real de coraje y supervivencia en Auschwitz / By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz

UN RELATO QUE NOS RECUERDA QUE, AUNQUE LA OSCURIDAD SEA PROFUNDA , LA LUZ DE LA RESISTENCIA HUMANA SIEMPRE PUEDE PREVALECER.

En la primavera de 1944, gendarmes nazis irrumpieron violentamente en la vida de Max Eisen y su familia, arrancándolos de su hogar. Los subieron a vagones de ganado, atestados de gente, rumbo al fatídico campo de concentración de Auschwitz-Birkenau. A los quince años, Eisen, junto con su padre y su tío, logró sobrevivir al despiadado proceso de selección y fue enviado al campo de concentración como trabajador esclavo. Posteriormente, su padre y su tío fueron seleccionados para los experimentos que se llevaban a cabo ahí y nunca más los volvió a ver.

Más de setenta años después de la liberación de los campos nazis por los Aliados, Solo por azar revela la desgarradora historia de supervivencia de Eisen: el trabajo inhumano y extenuante en Auschwitz, la infame marcha de la muerte en enero de 1945, las secuelas de la liberación y su largo proceso de sanación física y psicológica. Pero este libro es también un faro de esperanza, mostrando cómo, después de la oscuridad más absoluta, Eisen logró encontrar la luz de una nueva vida.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

In the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz comes a bestselling new memoir by Canadian survivor

Finalist for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize

More 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 labor 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 family’s 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.