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A Survivor Returns to Auschwitz
(Toronto Star) Rosie DiManno - Even in the final days of the Third Reich when defeat was imminent there was a purposeful and uninterrupted resolve to eradicate all of European Jewry. "There were two wars going on at the same time," says Max Eisen, a 76-year-old Jew and resident of Toronto who somehow survived all this, returned now to Poland on the 60th anniversary of liberation, in the company of Canadian students and educators for whom he is a font of living memory. "There was the war being fought against the Allies. And there was the ideological war against the biological life of every single Jew. At the end, the Nazis didn't even have enough rolling stock to get supplies to their troops. But all day long, trains full of Jews kept pulling into Auschwitz." Moved to another labor camp, Eisen recalls, "I went outside one morning and there were no guards anywhere. Suddenly, this tank with a white star on it came crashing through the gates. There were black soldiers on top of the tank. It was the Americans. We were staring at them and they were staring at us. I don't know who was in more disbelief. I saw our horror in their eyes."