HALIFAX — They came from all walks of life – Holocaust survivors, educators, politicians, professionals, businesspeople, Jews, non-Jews, men, women and teenagers.

Toronto’s Max Eisen in Halifax talking with Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Mayann E. Francis (who lit the first of six memorial candles).

They filled Pier 21 Auditorium in Halifax to overflowing to honour the six million who died in the Holocaust. They came to listen to Toronto’s Max Eisen tell his story of heartbreak and survival, many wiping tears as he talked of man’s inhumanity to man.

It was Yom Hashoah 2009.

In several Atlantic Canadian communities, large crowds fill halls and synagogues to light memorial candles, recite names of those who perished, and hear testimony from people such as Max Eisen. Two nights earlier, on April 19, he spoke to 200 people at Temple Sons of Israel in Sydney, N.S., and then brought his message to Halifax.

Elly Gotz, a retired engineer from Toronto and, like Eisen, a speaker with the Holocaust Centre of Toronto, addressed audiences in Saint John and Fredericton, N.B. Halifax resident and longtime Holocaust educator Philip Riteman, a survivor, addressed a large crowd in Moncton. Fredericton’s Israel Unger, also a survivor, spoke in Charlottetown, P.E.I., while survivors, led by Ernie Mauskopf, spoke to their home community of St. John’s, Nfld.

Eisen, 80, said in Halifax that he knew he was home when his ship docked in Quebec City in 1949.

“Canada afforded me a new life, a new start, a family and success in business,” said the retired Toronto manufacturer. “I came alone [after being in concentration camps and on death marches for the last year of World War II]. Only two cousins survived with me.”

He said Germans lived by three words concerning Jews – excommunication, expulsion and extermination.

“Just today, I read of a speech given by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a human rights conference in Switzerland. What I heard Hitler say on radio in 1938, when I was nine years old, that Jews should be exterminated from the world, was the same as I read today. What’s so upsetting is that, even though people today walked out from that speech, many sat and applauded after [Ahmadinejad] finished.”

He stressed that this should be a warning to everyone. “The Germans took our freedoms away. How can we live in a world today where these choices could be taken away again!”

Born in Czechoslovakia, Eisen was 15 in 1944 when he and his family were uprooted from Moldava, then in Hungary, and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Existing on about 300 calories a day, a skeletal Eisen toiled in labour gangs with his father and uncle, who were the only survivors from his immediate family. They were soon subjected to medical experiments and slain.

“This was a world no one can imagine unless you lived it. Their aim was to grind us away body and soul. But I had a tremendous will to go on. I didn’t want to wind up in the gas chamber.”

When liberated by the American 761st Black Battalion on May 6, 1945, Eisen’s extended family of 70 people was nearly decimated. He lived in an orphanage for three years and arrived in Toronto in 1949, where he married, had children (he now has great-grandchildren) and retired in 1991 to become a volunteer Holocaust educator.

“As Jews, we must continue to say, ‘You can’t do this to us, or anyone, in our cities, in our country, in our time.’”