By Chance Alone Canadian Classics Edition: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz

HarperCollins Canada is proud to share with you this collection of HarperCollins Canadian Classics, featuring the masterworks of some of the finest writers in the country that reveal to us essential truths about the way we live.

The nationally bestselling, Canada Reads–winning true story of courage and survival at Auschwitz

In the spring of 1944, gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor “Max” Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard, and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave labourer.

More than seventy years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisen’s story of survival: the back-breaking slave labour in Auschwitz I, the infamous “death march” in January 1945, the painful aftermath of liberation, and Eisen’s journey of physical and psychological healing. Ultimately, the book offers a message of hope as the author finds his way to a new life in Canada.