Max Mannheimer

Max Mannheimer ( born February 6, 1920 in Neutitschein, North Moravia, Czechoslovakia) is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. He is a businessman, author and painter.

Life

Max Mannheimer grew up as the oldest of five children of Jacob and Margaret ( née Yellow) Mannheim in Neutitschein in Czechoslovakia on. From 1934 to 1936 he attended trade school in Neutitschein, in which he also noticed the first signs of Nazism. His first job was Max Mannheimer 1936 in a department store of J. Schoen & Co. in Znoimo - Stary Šaldorf / Znojmo -Alt- Schallersdorf.

After the annexation of Austria in February 1938, the family fled Mannheim Austrian Jews took place in the border each for one night in her house clean before they traveled further inland. With the Munich Agreement in September 1938 Neutitschein was annexed as part of the Reichsgau Sudetenland to the German Reich and the family experienced first exclusion in place. The company car Jakob Mannheimer was a few days later confiscated for the Nazi People's Welfare by an employee of the business. The father was arrested in the wake of the arrests during the pogroms of November 1938 and released in December 1938. The father had to leave the occupied by the German Reich part of the country within eight days, and fled to Hungarian Brod, the birthplace of the mother. The rest of the family followed on 27 January 1938. After the destruction of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Mannheim took in the summer of 1939, a work in road construction, since it was only allowed Jews to exercise physical work. The end of 1940 learned Mannheim Eva Bock and married her in early September 1942 in the hope to manage to stay together with the threat of deportation to Theresienstadt. The brother Erich was arrested in 1942 and taken to the Gestapo prison Kaunitz College to Brno, which was notorious for its torture methods.

On January 27, 1943, Mannheimer and his wife Eva, his parents Jacob and Margarethe born yellow and his siblings, Katherine, Ernst and Edgar deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and shortly thereafter passed to a transport to Auschwitz- Birkenau, where they at night from 1 arrived on 2 February 1943. Upon arrival, his parents, his wife and sister of the SS were rejected as unfit for work. Both parents were gassed on February 2, 1943 murdered his sister on 25 February 1943. His brother Ernst fell ill in the camp and was murdered on March 7, despite loads of brothers Max and Edgar the block clerk.

Max and Edgar Mannheimer were transported in October 1943 in the Warsaw concentration camp, after they had suffered heavy forced labor and disease in Auschwitz. The brothers should help in Warsaw, to eliminate the remnants of the destroyed after a revolt ghetto. In the Warsaw concentration camp Max Mannheimer Ernest Landau met, which gave him some of his soup. The two brothers Max and Edgar survived in August 1944, with transportation to the Dachau concentration camp, from which they were moved a little later in the satellite camp Karl field for forced labor. From January 1945 to their forced evacuation on April 28, 1945, the brothers were in the outer command Mühldorf. The following evacuation transport survived Max and Edgar Mannheimer emaciated and ill with typhoid fever until its liberation by the Americans on April 30, 1945 in Tutzing.

After his release from the hospital, he returned to his hometown Neutitschein. He vowed never to set foot on German soil again. Shortly thereafter, however, he fell in love with the German Elfriede Eiselt, a resistance fighter, who became his second wife and with whom he moved in 1946 with their daughter Eva to Munich. By 1964, Max Mannheimer engaged in various Jewish organizations. When his second wife died of cancer in 1964, Mannheimer wrote on his life story. Originally the text should only see his daughter. With his third wife, the American born Franzen Grace Cheney, whom he married in 1965, he got his son Ernst. Mannheimer worked in Munich as a businessman, last until his retirement as manager of a leather goods trade.

Mannheim began in the 1950s to paint and signed with the name ben jakov ( son of Jacob ), to honor his father. 1975, 1995 and 2001 his works were exhibited in Munich in 1977 in Zurich, in 1992 in his native town of Nový Jičín, as well as 2000 and 2010 in Dachau. The catalog of the exhibition of 2010 says of Mannheim: he paint for themselves to the act of creation of the images. The works "are also pictures of a path of pain and depression. "

Memory of the Holocaust

In January 1956 Mannheim helps run a project of the Wiener Library in London and reports on his experiences in Nazi Germany. Transcripts of the interviews are stored in the library in London, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in the archives of the Dachau concentration camp memorial. 1976 reached the record of 1964 in the archive in Dachau, where they were found in the spring of 1985, when the first edition of the Dachau booklets was prepared. The director of the Memorial Barbara Distel and the historian Wolfgang Benz, then at the Institute of Contemporary History, looking at Mannheim and ask him to release the text for the first edition of the scientific journal. With the publication in 1985 of Mannheim is important as a witness. He stood up for democracy and against right. Since 1988 he has been chairman of the camp community Dachau. In December 1993, his brother Edgar Mannheimer died in Zurich, where he lived as a gallery. Today Max Mannheimer lives near Munich.

Became famous Mannheim through lectures about his experiences in the concentration camp, with whom he (eg, in schools and in the army ) wants to tell of the horrors of the Third Reich and the concentration camps adolescents and adults. His memoirs were published for the first time in 1985 in the Dachau stapling. and published in 2000 under the title completely Late diary

Mannheimer on his lectures: "I come as a witness at that time in the schools, not as a judge or prosecutor. "

Mannheim is a member of the Advisory Board of the Association Against Forgetting - For Democracy.

On August 20, 2013 was followed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel an invitation Max Mannheimer, to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp, which had done none of their predecessors.

Honors and Awards

In 1993, Mannheim the award Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur of the French Republic.

Mannheim was the Waldemar von Knoeringen Prize awarded by the Georg von Vollmar Academy, the Academy every two years gives to outstanding personalities who stand in the tradition of the labor movement and the goals of democratic socialism. In 2005 he received the Upper Bavarian Culture Prize.

In addition, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Bavarian Constitution Medal in silver.

In 2000 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich.

In 2009 he became an honorary citizen in his hometown Neutitschein.

In 2010 he became an honorary member of the Jewish community of Munich and received the Bavarian Constitution Medal in gold. The education of the youth hostel Dachau was renamed in his honor in Max Mannheimer study center. The official naming took place on July 29, 2010.

On May 26, 2012, he was awarded the European Charlemagne Prize of the Sudeten Germans, and on 12 September 2012, the Great Cross of Merit presented with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer.