A Holocaust survivor who has spent his life honoring the memory of those lost in the Holocaust will speak at 7 p.m. March 9 [WEDNESDAY] in the Ataloa Theater in East Central University’s Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center.
The Louise Young Diversity lecture will be presented by Max Glauben, who will describe the horrors he experienced and escaped as a teenager until he was liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945.
Glauben was born in 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. He attended a Tarbut school until he and his entire family were placed in the Warsaw ghetto at the end of 1939. After the Nazis torched and destroyed the ghetto following an uprising in 1943, he and his family were transported via box cars to the Majdanek gas chambers and crematoriums where his mother, brother and most of his family perished.
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| Photo courtesy of Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance. |
The 15-year-old and his father, however, were selected for slave labor for Budzyn concentration camp. After only three weeks, his father was killed and Glauben was sent to three other concentration camps.
On April 23, 1945, on a death march to Dachau from Flossenburg, Glauben was liberated by the U.S. Army. In December 1947, at the age of 19, he came to New York and later went to Atlanta, Ga. He was drafted into the Army in 1951 and received his basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, where he served his two-year tour of duty during the Korean War.
After receiving an honorable discharge in 1953, he settled in Dallas and married Frieda Gappelberg. He worked for Neiman-Marcus and Southwest Toys until he became a partner in Imperial Garment Supply and National Embroidery Inc. He retired at age 75.
Glauben is one of the founders of congregation Beth Israel in Mesquite, Texas, and served on its board of trustees. He is an active member of congregation Shearith Israel and is a life member of its brotherhood. He is a member of the Jewish War Veterans and is an associate of the Dallas chapter of Hadassah. He is a life member of the board of directors of the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
He has been involved with the Dallas Holocaust Center since its inception and continuously lectures on the Holocaust at schools, churches, colleges and other organizations. In November 1989 he was honored by the Dallas chapter of Hadassah with the Myrtle Wreath Award for his humanitarian work on behalf of the Holocaust and is an honoree of congregation Shearith Israel’s Sisterhoods Torah Fund.
Glauben has completed a documentary of his story, “Plagues of the Soul,” and hopes to distribute it to middle and junior high schools to be used as a teaching aid. The non-profit project will direct any proceeds toward student scholarships.
He and his wife have three children and seven grandchildren.
The Louise Young Diversity Lecture was established in 2008 with a $10,000 endowment from Young, an ECU graduate, to the ECU Foundation Inc. The annual lecture brings a speaker to campus each year to speak on various aspects of diversity.
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