Max Glauben, who as a teenager survived the Nazi invasion of his native Warsaw and his own harrowing internment in a death camp, and who became a tireless advocate for the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, died early Thursday on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his family who said the cause was complications from cancer.
Glauben moved to Dallas in 1951 after proudly enlisting in the U.S. Army. He served as a mess sergeant at Fort Hood. “I felt I owed them,” he said, having been liberated by Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army tank division.
In later years, he promised to tell the world what happened to him and millions of other Holocaust victims, including his own family. He and other Holocaust survivors launched a spirited local campaign of sharing their testimonies in 1977, and seven years later, Glauben (pronounced GLOW-ben) was part of a movement to have a Holocaust museum opened in the basement of the Jewish Community Center of Dallas.
Even then, he believed the memorial needed to be more visible. He longed to see, in his lifetime, a permanent memorial in his adopted Dallas, and in 2019, it happened, with the opening of the 55,000-square-foot, $78 million Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
“Max endured the unimaginable,” said Mary Pat Higgins, the president and CEO of the Dallas museum. “He also somehow managed to move on with his life and create an incredible family, a very successful career and be a very active member in his synagogue and the Jewish community of Dallas. He devoted his life to sharing his testimony, to ensure that people couldn’t deny that the Holocaust had happened and to try to impact their attitudes and change their behavior.
“He was robbed of the opportunity to finish his education — in elementary school. He lost both his parents and his little brother, and when he would speak to children, he told them to take advantage of their education and not take it for granted and make the most of all the opportunities that they are given. And to honor and love their parents. He realized what a gift that is.”
Glauben’s own story is a permanent part of the chilling narrative expressed in the museum, where he appears as a holographic image meant to last until the end of time. His is one of 19 interactive testimonies, taken from Holocaust survivors all over the world. He appears in the Dimensions in Testimony Theater, which costs $2.5 million to assemble. The holographic project is a partnership between the museum and the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by three-time Oscar winner Steven Spielberg.
In many ways, Higgins said, Glauben became the museum’s inspirational leader. “He would always have just the right thing to say to make everybody feel really encouraged, to redouble their efforts to make this happen.”
And when the project was completed, Glauben considered it a dream come true, calling Higgins and others who made it happen its “angels.”
In 2021, the museum designated Glauben as its Hope for Humanity honoree.
“Any living person in the United States, regardless of religion, color or which nation or country they come from, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, could come into this facility and ask a question of Max Glauben about the Holocaust," Glauben said in 2019. "And he will answer about how he was treated 80 years ago during the darkest period in our history.”
Glauben’s mother, younger brother and much of his extended family died in the gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp in Lublin, Poland, one of many ghastly sites whose story is told in a museum display. Glauben and his father were transported to a labor camp, which for a while meant hope — temporary, albeit grim survival.
Soon, his father also was killed, with only his shoes left on the street as a cruel reminder of the good man who had loved and protected his son for as long as he could. Glauben often called it his life’s most searing moment, fueling decades of nightmares.
Despite the horror of such memories, those who got to know Glauben often remarked on how funny he could be. He never tired of sharing his story, especially with children, and yet, his personal testimony was often laced with a sharp and endearing wit.
In the days before the Holocaust museum opened on Houston Street in 2019, a woman who was part of the technical crew testing the display asked Holographic Max how he managed to survive. Glauben sat quietly, listening to how Holographic Max might respond.
“I survived by cheating,” replied Glauben’s holographic image. “Maybe lying, maybe stealing, maybe outsmarting somebody, maybe doing something that elevated me ... but I didn’t do it viciously, I did it by necessity. There are times in life when a small lie or a big lie might make it possible for you to sustain life.”
Moments later, Real Max said the answer given by Holographic Max made him feel momentarily Catholic. The technical crew looked puzzled.
“Why?” he said with a sly grin. “Because I gave my confession.”
Jori Epstein, who began writing Glauben’s memoir, The Upstander, when she was covering the Dallas Cowboys for USA Today, traveled with Glauben along with dozens of other teenagers on a March of the Living trip in 2012 to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka. Glauben led the trip more than a dozen times, enduring the rigors of transcontinental travel even into his 90s.
“I think Max’s legacy will be using the horror and trauma of what was inflicted upon him to teach others not to hate,” Epstein said. “Because of what he went through, he had a moral authority that most of us don’t have and never will. He showed us that — in the end — hate will end up hurting you, it will consume you, far more than the people you fear or hate.
“I believe his legacy to be that, no matter what happens in life, it’s important to keep a positive outlook, to find your strength, to leave behind anger and hatred. He once told me that the one thing that would make him feel fulfilled is if, somehow, he could reduce or eliminate all the hatred in the world."
Glauben often said his holographic image was a tool — designed to achieve exactly that.
To complete the task of programming Holographic Max, a team of interviewers asked Glauben more than 1,000 questions. And he responded with as much detail as he could muster to address any conceivable question a visitor might ask, now or centuries in the future.
The details of Glauben’s experience are staggering. He survived the Warsaw ghetto, five concentration camps and a death march from the Flossenbürg concentration camp to Dachau.
His happiest moment came when Patton’s American tanks arrived to free him and thousands of others lucky enough to survive the Nazi tyranny. That made him happy, as did the birth of his three children, who produced seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His survivors also include his wife, Frieda.
In 2020, days before receiving an honorary doctorate from Southern Methodist University, Glauben gave an interview to The Dallas Morning News, in which he expounded on the need for resilience in the face of trauma.
“Don’t think about the past,” he advised. "Don’t think about the future. Think about right now. If something happens to you, and God gives you the power to overcome it, then it becomes the greatest gift you ever got. God forbid you catch the virus, but then, if you recover, it becomes a blessing, one you can and should share with the world.”
Glauben’s testimony about his own Holocaust experience has been so dynamic, he was named Texan of the Year in 2019 by The Dallas Morning News.
“We might say Max Glauben started becoming the 2019 Texan of the Year in 1941 when he wriggled into a cramped smuggler’s space under the false bottom of a horse-drawn wagon to sneak out of the Warsaw Ghetto in search of food,” began the newspaper’s editorial.
“Glauben made these trips many times, each time finding a clever way to sneak past Nazi guards, each time returning with a little food, a new weapon, or a report that he had successfully delivered a missive to the Jewish underground. He was 13,” The News noted in making the award.
Phillip Glauben is well aware of his father’s legacy and what it means for thousands of people. He’s the oldest of Glauben’s three children, who makes a distinction between Max the father and the person he calls Holocaust Max, which is of course his father’s public persona.
Until he was a teenager nearing his 20s, Phillip says he rarely if ever heard his dad discuss the Holocaust, much less his own harrowing experience. “For all those years,” leading up to that moment, “he was just Dad the dad. He wasn’t Dad the survivor. He wasn’t anything except Dad the dad.”
Few of the people who have heard him speak over the years know, Phillip says, that during the 1950s, his father was a toy buyer for Neiman Marcus. He then went to work for Southwest Toys & Sporting Goods as a general manager. He left there to go into business with his brother-in-law for a company called Imperial Garment Supply.
Phillip the adult has traveled with his dad to his native Poland. He has seen where his father grew up in Warsaw, where he first learned to master the skills needed to stay alive. Phillip has gone with his dad to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and to Majdanek, where the elder Glauben’s mother and brother and other family members were killed in the gas chamber. The elder Glauben has escorted hundreds of people on trips to Europe that are part of the International March of the Living, last doing so in 2019. For years, Max Glauben was a perennial fixture on the March of the Living. It is defined on its website as an educational program that brings “individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hatred.”
Despite the joy of his adult life, Max Glauben often worried that the horror of the Holocaust could happen all over again, even in his beloved America.
To avoid such a monstrous déjà vu, people need to be “upstanders” rather than “bystanders,” he liked to say, calling it the mantra of the Dallas museum.
Glauben compared the museum to, of all things, a car wash. But this car wash, he said, cleanses the soul. He said there’s no better place for such a car wash than Dallas, where a president was killed.
Because of how it honors the victims of the Holocaust, Dallas, he said, "can become the No. 1 city in the country to fight bigotry and hatred and anti-Semitism or whatever is bad in this world. Because of this museum, in Dallas, Texas, this city can help the world become a much better place. And I am grateful to have been a part of it.”
On the day the museum opened, Glauben looked around at what he helped create.
“Now," he said simply, "I have my closure.”
Services for Glauben are pending. In addition to his wife, Frieda, he is survived by his children, Phillip Glauben and his wife, Linda Glauben; Shari Glauben Becker and her husband, Norman Becker; Barry Glauben, whose wife, Michelle, died of cancer last August; 7 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. Those who wish to honor Max Glauben’s memory are encouraged to make a donation to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
Glauben’s testimony will be featured in the museum’s Dimensions in Testimony Theater each day through May and every Friday thereafter.
Correction, April 29 at 1:25 p.m.: An earlier version of this article misstated when the March of the Living last took place. 2019 was the last year Max Glauben led the march, not the last year it occurred.
