“Max Eisen’s 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 Auschwitz—a 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 the all 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. Eisen’s youth began in the pit of that hell, and his later life has been largely dedicated—through talks, education, and now this book—to bearing witness to the Holocaust, and insisting that it is both fact and warning. Mr. Eisen’s 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 may—I am sure this is Mr. Eisen’s hope—be 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 Radio’s Cross Country Checkup