National Post 
Sat Feb 6 2010 
Page: A17 
Section: Toronto 
Byline: Nicole McIsaac 
Source: National Post 

A Toronto businessman who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a teenager was awarded an honorary diploma from a Summerhill private school yesterday morning.

Martin Maxwell, 85, had so inspired students at The York School during a Holocaust education week speech in November that they arranged for an honorary degree in place of the one he didn’t get when he fled the Nazis.

“There were so many life lessons that Mr. Maxwell taught us that morning that we truly felt we owed him so much,” David Hamilton, York’s upper school principal, said at yesterday’s ceremony.

Mr. Maxwell accepted the diploma with tears in his eyes, his wife, son and grandchildren watching proudly. “I receive this not only for myself, but for my two little sisters and the million and a half children who died in the Holocaust and other children who never had a chance to live long enough to go to school and graduate.”

Orphaned at a young age in Austria, Mr. Maxwell left a Vienna orphanage at 14 following Kristallnacht, and never received his high school diploma.

He narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp, where his two younger sisters lost their lives, and was one of many Jewish children who became part of a Quaker-organized kindertransport to England.

Mr. Maxwell was adopted by a family in Britain, where he served in the army from 1942 to 1945. Mr. Maxwell was wounded during the battle of Arnhem in Holland, captured and held in a prisoner camp for seven months starting in 1944.

He came to Canada in 1952, and has been successfully running a health and beauty aids business, called National Home Products, for the past 50 years.

Mr. Maxwell said he never spoke of his past for much of his life, but after a friend asked him to fill in for a Holocaust speaker who could not make it, he felt the burden of his history lift. “I finally understood that I could talk about it without reliving it.”

Since then, Mr. Maxwell has travelled the world with the UJA’s Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, speaking about the Holocaust and describing how to overcome life’s obstacles.

At York School, he told students about his mother telling him to get up off his sore knee so that she could kiss it better, and a story about how a single meal purchased for a homeless man helped the man turn his life around.

“What’s the lesson in life? It’s not the falling down that counts, but the getting back up,” he said.

After the visit, an English teacher, Alison Hunter, asked school administrators on behalf of staff and students to award Mr. Maxwell the honour. “Could we give Mr. Maxwell the high school graduation that he did not receive?”

Yesterday, German-Canadian siblings, Tobias and Hannah Sparwasser Soroka, spoke at the ceremony on behalf of the students, Tobias translating what his sister spoke in German.

“Thank you for your inspiring story, and thank you for reaching out to young people like us,” they said.