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I was 17 years old when I first visited Majdanek, Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Warsaw with Holocaust survivor and Dallas resident Max Glauben.
Through the March of the Living program, Max educated my classmates and me on the history of the Holocaust. He detailed his early life and teen smuggling in the Warsaw Ghetto, his wartime labor and how he survived six concentration camps. But his testimony elicited far more questions than answers.
The history we bore witness to engulfed us.
I struggled to understand how the Holocaust unfolded and how Max — standing, at 84 years young, before me — survived. I struggled to understand where he found the strength to embrace positivity and compel tolerance after the Nazis murdered his mother, father and brother in a span of three weeks. So I reverted to a habit, a coping mechanism that would enable me to table most emotional processing until later: I penned what Max was saying, verbatim.
The salient message had been conveyed before the trip: Our own children will not have the opportunity to visit these sites with a survivor. We must learn everything we can from Max. Easier said than done.
The enormity of the Nazi genocide numbed me as I sat on the musty, wooden-planked floors of a Majdanek barrack on April 22, 2012. “I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that before,” Max said after sharing one recollection.
Immediately, my responsibility as a witness crystallized.
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The remainder of that afternoon, I walked in lockstep with Max along the barbed-wire fence of Majdanek. He reflected on the injustice that led to his family’s deportation.
“What are laws made for?” Max wondered aloud as we walked. “To protect us, to punish us for doing wrong? The Germans did everything the other way around.”
His tone wasn’t bitter. He was matter-of-fact. Max’s imperative to live life to the fullest elicited more sternness than did his reprimands of Nazi torture. I wondered: How, and why, did Max feel that way?
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I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and moved back to Dallas in June 2016. The next day, Max and I reconnected at our synagogue. Max had recently received a fresh batch of wartime records from Europe. He was particularly excited about a surviving archive from his father’s newspaper. I told Max I was interested in reviewing the records. Perhaps, I suggested before my brain caught up with my mouth, we could combine these documents and his memories into a comprehensive narrative.
That was June.
July elapsed.
Max and I bumped into each other again, this time along the indoor track of our community fitness center. We fell in lockstep, just as we’d plodded together four years earlier in Majdanek. At 88, Max’s gait and wandering mind were still forces with which to keep pace. Max said his colleague had reiterated that week that Max’s testimony merited a book.
“I thought I was writing your book,” I replied, still largely in jest.
Max didn’t miss a beat. He beamed: “That’s what I told him.”
I stopped in midstep.
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Aug. 12, 2016, we first set up base camp at Max’s dining room table. We outlined tentative goals.
Max, who had told his story many times and was named a Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year, wanted his memoir to teach readers to respect everyone around them and maintain belief in the good of humanity. He wanted to ensure retelling his history would not create further hate. Max hoped also that any written testimony would paint pictures as vivid as the imagery his oral lectures deliver. He wanted to emphasize that his history is real and recent. We set to work.
A deep dive into Max’s oral histories unfolded, beginning with a series of January 1990 interviews with University of North Texas historian Keith Rosen. Documents from Max’s camp transfers, displaced-person arrangements, immigration attempts and social workers enriched our narrative and prompted further questions to unleash Max’s memories. So, too, did a spring 2017 March of the Living trip when I joined Max again in Warsaw, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Birkenau. Crucial recollections, including emotions he has trained himself to dissociate from the memories he lectures on, flooded back.
Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum staff members recommended profound resources from Max’s archives as well as the broader Holocaust scholarship genre. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Shoah Foundation further augmented our research. Students spanning 13 years of March of the Living trips illustrated the breadth and depth of Max’s impact as an educator. We were intent on corroborating historical context across sources. We took no liberties with the truth.
Max’s wife, Frieda, and his children and grandchildren generously contributed raw emotion and insight into a Holocaust survivor’s family. Frieda’s seemingly endless refills of tuna salad and homemade cookies shepherded us through long interviews. Sharing pizza dinners and multicolor birthday cake with the Glauben family revealed further what present-day life looks like for a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor. Thanks, Frieda, for answering my late-night phone calls, even when they interrupted you and Max watching the nightly news.
And of course, Max himself has given me a gift I feel wholly unable to articulate. But let’s try.
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Max was patient when weeks passed between some of our meetings, and his optimism far exceeded my own for where this memoir would take us. Each time I stressed over the tasks that lay ahead, he reminded me gently of the ground we’d already covered.
“We’ve baked the cake,” Max would say. “Anything more will be icing on top.” He made me laugh often. He was kind, telling me that he could “hear” whether I was smiling or not from the other side of a phone call. He rarely hung up until he felt sure I was smiling.
Max trusted me first with his documents, each of which I’m relieved I never spilled on or somehow ruined. Some documents were intensely personal, including a Jewish Children’s Service social worker’s assessment of Max in December 1947, when he was depressed and anxious in the days after he immigrated to America. Max never balked as I poked and prodded for more vivid details and emotions. He rarely tired of my incessant questioning, instead calling me after I left his home to add just one more detail to the already rich narratives he’d unearthed.
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Some memories Max preferred not to discuss at first. Then he’d advance to whispering them in his raspy voice across the dining room table, as if he were nervous but curious about the consequences of saying them aloud. I’ll never forget when Max changed his mind and decided he was willing for his memoir to acknowledge the likely sexual assault he suffered in Flossenbürg. Max was resolute that day: Like countless other painful memories and admissions, perhaps his honesty can help others. Perhaps he can help you.
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The Holocaust is no more comprehensible to me today than it was in the Majdanek barrack in April 2012. But I am committed — and we hope you, our reader, are too — to the continual pursuit of reckoning with humanity’s capacity for hatred and violence.
We must continue to confront history like that of Max’s life to better understand the depth to which humanity can sink and, in concert, the immense potential each of us has to stand up for what’s right. I seek not simply to remember the Holocaust, but to inspire tolerance education and action.
Max and I want this memoir to serve as an educational resource for middle school, high school and university-level students. We hope adults will find it digestible, yet poignant. We constructed this memoir with the charm and humor Max infuses in his life’s work, aiming to create a framework for you to process and house Max’s memories and messages. Max’s reflections underscore that heroism emerges not when we hold ourselves to superhuman standards, but rather when we let our humanity prevail.
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Max’s memoir is intended to transfer to readers the power to perpetuate his lessons, to combat prejudice, and to deepen the love and shared understanding between and among diverse communities. Never has the need for this been greater.
“If you have any hatred, bigotry or anti-Semitism,” Max implores, “I hope that after you read this book, you might change your mind.”
Now, you are a witness and an upstander.
Jori Epstein is an NFL reporter for USA Today. This column is an adapted excerpt of her new book, The Upstander.
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