Max Eisen Honoured with the OACP President’s Award of Merit

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Media Release

Max Eisen Honoured with the OACP President’s Award of Merit

For Immediate Release: June 12, 2023

(Kingston, ON) – The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) is proud to announce that Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor, Educator, and writer, has post-humously been awarded the 2023 OACP President’s Award of Merit – the highest honour conferred by the OACP.

Ontario’s police leaders honoured Mr. Eisen at the OACP’s 2023 Annual Meeting held in Kingston, ON, on June 13, 2023.

Max Eisen was born in Czechoslovakia to a large Orthodox Jewish family. As a teenager, Mr. Eisen and his family were deported to Auschwitz. He survived the horrific conditions in several camps and endured a death march from Mathausen, Melk, and Ebensee. He was liberated by the 761^st Black Panther Battalion of the United States in May 1945.

As one of the few surviving members of his family, Mr. Eisen came to Canada in 1949 as a displaced person. He eventually started a successful manufacturing business.

OACP members had the honour of travelling to Europe with Mr. Eisen on the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Journey. During that trip, he led the group through the deaths camps where he was detained as a 14-year-old-boy. Mr. Eisen dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring the atrocities of the Holocaust are never forgotten and never repeated.

Max Eisen’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. The book won the 2019 edition of CBC’s Canada Reads.

Mr. Eisen returned to Poland with the March of the Living 18 times, starting in 1996. In 2015, he and other survivors testified at the trial of former SS guard Oskar Groening, who was convicted of thousands of charges of being an accessory to murder. A year later, he testified again at the trial of Reinhold Hanning, who was also convicted.

In December 2021, Mr. Eisen was appointed to the Order of Canada for his commitment to Holocaust education. He also received honorary doctorates from Trent University, Western University, the University of Saskatchewan, and the Law Society of Ontario.

Mr. Eisen was an incredibly courageous person who took it upon himself to educate and teach younger generations about the dangers of hate and intolerance by sharing his personal experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust. He was best known for his passion while speaking to students, and in his later years, to law enforcement personnel. He passed away in Toronto on July 7, 2022, at 93 years old.

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Media Contact:

José Luís (Joe) Couto

Director of Government Relations & Communications
C. (416) 919-9798

E. jcouto@oacp.ca

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