text: Max Glauben’s face bears the deep lines of frequent laughter, signs of a long, happy life. But his arm is branded with a reminder of the nightmare he survived.
  The letters “KL” mark the pale skin just beneath the 85-year-old’s shirt cuff. They stand for the German word for concentration camp, “konzentrationslager,” where being jabbed with an ink-dipped needle was only the beginning.
  Glauben, a short, compact man with an easy smile, spent five years in the miserable masses of the Holocaust. Yet, in the aftermath, he’s managed to enjoy a pleasant life for the past 70 years.
  Last year, he received German records from his time in the camps. For Glauben, these papers are proof that the history he’s dedicated his life to sharing is valid. They’re proof that his mind isn’t failing him; he is a living testament to one of history’s worst mass murders. And they’re proof that, if any minor circumstance worked out differently, his life would have ended before adulthood. The two generations of Glaubens that followed would not exist.
  This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day runs from Sunday evening through Monday evening, in memory of the estimated 11 million who died, including 6 million Jewish people. For Glauben, sharing his history is a heavy responsibility — a mission he takes to heart on behalf of the millions who died.
  “What the survivors can convey, above all, is the depth of the assault on the soul,” said Dr. David Patterson, chair of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. “They murdered Jewish souls before they sent their bodies up in smoke.”
  Glauben’s mission to share his story energizes him, and it’s as if his youth, taken from him by Nazi soldiers, has been tacked to his post-retirement years.
  The newly discovered records add texture to his story. "For the whole duration, I thought I was a nobody. But evidently, some of us were somebody — because look at the records they kept," Glauben said. The documents detail his prisoner number and barracks assignment and mark him as a "tischler," or carpenter.
  Documentation of his darkest years was recorded in perfect cursive, made more beautiful by a blatant inaccuracy that spared his life.
  The Nazi papers incorrectly list his birthday as two years earlier. “They made me older so I wouldn’t be killed as a youngster,” Glauben said.
  “They” could mean Germans who either purposefully or accidentally added two years to his age. Or it could mean his father, who may have lied to spare his life. Ultimately, “they” refers to whatever force moved someone, by either compassion or indifference, to mark down a birthday that sent him to the labor force instead of the gas chamber.
  “It’s God, it’s luck, it’s kismet. It’s something beyond the human ability to comprehend,” said Dr. Sara Abosch, director of education for the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
  And it’s the latest wrinkle in the narrative Glauben shares with as many classes, organizations and religious groups as his jam-packed schedule allows.
  He lives to keep history alive.
  ‘Day to night’
  His story begins in Warsaw, Poland, where he attended a private Hebrew school and lived with his family in a fourth-floor apartment. He recalls running up the stairs two-by-two and playing pingpong. His father was a newspaper businessman, and his mother stayed home to raise him and his younger brother.
  Recently, during an adult religion class at Shearith Israel synagogue in Dallas, Glauben began his story in the heat of the action, when the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Each telling takes a different course, but Glauben is always careful to include specific dates. He remembers them all.
  In the years after the Nazi invasion, Glauben’s family lived in what became the Warsaw Ghetto, a square-mile neighborhood confining a half-million Jewish people. Strangers moved in with families. Disease spread, and food was scarce. Glauben rode to town hidden under a horse-drawn wagon to smuggle food back to his family and neighbors.
  “Life had changed from day to night,” Glauben said.
  His voice rose in crescendos and his hands waved as he conducted his narrative.
  His family survived the brunt of the ghetto’s decimation, but they couldn’t hide forever. He estimates that 80 to 90 people were seeking solace in the same basement when German soldiers threw in a hand grenade.
  Taken from shelter, Glauben and his family stepped into a boxcar that smelled of human excrement. The journey lasted five days.
  Outside, the world was the same as ever, Glauben said. Birds chirped, bugs buzzed. Inside, the humidity of breath clung, then dripped from the ceiling like the lid of a boiling pot.
  “You were hoping for a drop to fall on your lips so you can wet them, because it’s much harder to die of dehydration than it is from starvation,” Glauben said. He tells this detail time and time again with emotionless crispness.
  After so many years, Glauben said, to weep or share sorrow would feel insincere. He’s lived a good life; he doesn’t want sympathy. “I always tried to be the best I can with what I got,” he said. This outlook kept him alive then and keeps him telling his story now.
  The boxcar carrying Glauben’s family stopped at Majdanek, the first of his five concentration camps. As the people disembarked, Germans separated women and children from men. Glauben’s father grabbed his hand. His mother and brother folded into the other line.
  He never saw them again.
  At a second camp, Glauben’s father was taken from him and never returned.
  Glauben, who describes himself as “mechanically inclined,” learned to build the molds to shape the metal parts of airplanes. He made sure to produce quality work and was transferred to several camps.
  Lessons weave through his narrative: Always deliver your best work; never give up; and act as an “upstander,” not a “bystander,” if you witness evil in the world.
  On April 16, 1945, Nazis directed him and others on a death march from Flossenburg to Dachau. “If you live under these conditions, you don’t think about the future, you don’t think about the past, but you think about survival,” Glauben said. “I was the only one left with my name.”
  In Judaism, saving one life is as important as saving the whole world. Glauben was compelled to save his own life in order to save those who would come after him.
  On April 23, 1945, he was liberated by the U.S. Army.
  Two years later, Glauben moved to an orphanage in the Bronx, N.Y. Depression set in during field trips to places like Radio City Music Hall. The excitement made him feel alone.
  Weeks after arriving in New York, he moved to Atlanta, where he lived with a woman who housed five boarders, and he registered for the draft. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and served at Fort Hood.
  On one of his frequent trips to Dallas, he met his wife, Frida. When Glauben’s active duty ended in 1953, he moved here and married. He served three more years in the reserves, then spent his career in various jobs including selling shoes, working as a toy buyer for Neiman Marcus and eventually becoming an owner of Imperial Garment Supply. He and his wife have three children and seven grandchildren.
  Glauben has always been a storyteller, light and quick-witted, his son Phillip said. But he never shared his personal history when his children were young. “We lived life in the present,” Phillip said.
  It was after Holocaust, the 1978 TV miniseries, that the conversation began. Glauben started sharing stories. Phillip became more interested. "I often marvel at how forgiving he seems to be," Phillip said. "He believes the mantra, 'Never shall this happen again.'"
  In the late 1990s, Glauben suffered a stomach ulcer and had half of his stomach removed. Then he had the other half removed because of cancer. Now, he has no health problems.
  “If you don’t know how to be sick, you never get sick,” he said.
  Age works the same. “In my head, I’m not 85, either,” he said. “See that? I don’t know what age is.”
  Now and then, he even cracks himself up.
  At the recent Shearith Israel religion class, after sharing his story, Glauben showed Plagues of the Soul, the DVD he created to share his experience to a wider audience.
  On the video, he narrated as photographs of crowded boxcars and miserable souls flash on the screen. He included the parallels of genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur to warn against history’s cyclical nature.
  “Sadly, hatred didn’t end with the Holocaust,” said Melissa Gendason, director of the southwest region for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “There’s still a lot of learning and healing and moving on that the world needs to be doing.”
  The evil of genocide is like a disease, Glauben said. “And for a disease, you have to find a remedy. And I feel that telling people how cruel we can be and how we can kill each other — it may be the same as a cure for an illness.”
  When he flipped on the lights after his film at the synagogue, the class remained silent.
  Glauben lightened the mood. “There are many good things that happen in life, and there are many bad things, so you have to take it all in stride,” he said. “The moral of the story is: Be nice to everyone.”
  Glauben speaks at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and elsewhere several times a week, sometimes twice or more in a day. Lately, he includes news of his recently discovered documents.
  He received them after striking up a conversation with a German researcher at a Dallas-area event where Glauben was a speaker. At his request, the researcher checked for his name and emailed him five documents from his time at the labor camps. After 70 years, his story continues to deepen.
  In 1985, he discovered that two of his aunts, who he thought perished in the gas chambers, had survived and were living in Philadelphia. They found him through a registry of survivors.
  On this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Glauben is on his eighth March of the Living trip, an annual educational tour through Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust.
  He is traveling with about 30 local high school students, sharing his story in the places he lived it. Last year, his son Phillip and his granddaughter Sarah joined him. “They have these moments where it’s almost unbearably sad,” Phillip said of the students.
  At one point, Phillip realized he was in the former gas chamber at Majdanek where his grandmother and uncle were likely to have died. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Phillip said.
  His father remained a stoic storyteller.
  Leslie Minora is a Dallas freelance writer. She can be reached at email@example.com.