Max Rodrigues Garcia
Having survived Auschwitz, Max encouraged us all to “enjoy life!”
Max Rodrigues Garcia
6/28/1924 – 1/9/2021
Max Rodrigues Garcia was born in Amsterdam, Holland to a Dutch Jewish family in 1924. In 1942 his sister was tragically one of the first Dutch citizens to be arrested by the Nazis shortly after her 16th birthday. In 1943 Max went into hiding in a home arranged by the Jewish Underground. Later that year he was arrested in Amsterdam for being a Jew, beaten repeatedly by police for refusing to discuss details of the underground, and then focused his smarts and energy on surviving two death marches and five concentration camps: Westerbork, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee. His liberation day, May 6, 1945, was treated as a birthday in our family.
Watch Michelle Garcia Winner, Founder & CEO of Social Thinking, interview her father Max Rodrigues Garcia
Luckily, Max was adopted by the US Army as an interpreter immediately after his internment. Colonel Clark sponsored his passage to the USA in fall of 1946. Max became an official member of the US military while establishing his life in the USA. He was a highly intelligent man whose formal education as a child only lasted until he was 13 years old; while in the military he was able to take some college courses. Ultimately, without a college degree he managed to become a licensed architect through discipline and self-study. In the early 1960s he was able to achieve one of his life-long dreams, to open his own successful architecture practice. He met his wife, Priscilla Alden Thwaits (Pat) in 1956, a skilled writer working for Newsweek. Together they raised three children, David, Tania, and Michelle in San Francisco, California. Pat became Max’s counsel and support system, helping to raise Max out of the Holocaust while also documenting his life story in the book, Auschwitz, Auschwitz…I Cannot Forget You as Long as I Remain Alive.
Max and Pat also helped to found the Holocaust library in San Francisco, California and they became active in Holocaust memorial projects in Europe. During that time, they learned when and where his parents and sister were murdered along with dozens of distant family members.
Auschwitz, Auschwitz…I Cannot Forget You as Long as I Remain Alive
This book is the first-person story of Max Garcia, his beloved family, and his survival of Holocaust tortures at concentration camps. But this isn't a story only about the past. It is about the present and the future.
From tales of cunning within the camps to those of how Max rebuilds his life after liberation, the book recounts how the Holocaust could not extinguish Max's dreams. And in San Francisco, Max realized those dreams: having a family and becoming a successful architect. Max today inspires generations with his story and character. As Max's grandson writes in the new final chapters of the book, each written by Max's children and grandchildren: "To me the knowledge I have gained from reading and hearing this story helps me understand better the kind of person I want to be and to apply my Grandpa's lessons to my everyday life."
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