Max Mannheimer,a Jew born in Novy Jicin, the district town close to the Tatra factory, was imprisoned from the end of January 1943 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Via Warsaw he ended up in the Dachau concentration camp. In early 1945 he was transferred to the external camp Mühldorf that was evacuated on April 28,1945. At a successive evacuation transport he was liberated by the Americans on April 30, 1945 in Seehaupt. Neither his first wife Eva Bock has as much as his parents, James and Margaret, his brothers Ernst and Eric nor his sister Katherine survived the Holocaust. Only his brother Edgar and he got away.
After his discharge from the hospital, he left Germany and vowed to never again set foot on German soil. But shortly afterwards he fell in love with the German Elfriede Eiselt, his second wife, and went back to Germany in 1946. His second wife died in 1964 of cancer. Nowadays he is married to an American. Mannheimer has a daughter and a son. He lives near Munich. Since 1988 he is chairman of the Dachau camp community. Since 1950 he works as a painter and uses Ben Jakov as a artist name.
Max Mannheimer has become known for his lectures on his experiences in concentration camps. He often visits schools and institutions (eg, in the Bundeswehr) to tell his audience about the horrors of the Third Reich and National Socialism.
Mannheimer about his presentations: “I come as a witness in the schools, not as a judge or prosecutor.”
Mannheim is a member of the advisory board of the Association Against Forgetting – For Democracy.
His love for Moravia never disappeared. He even bought a pre-war Tatra T 87 in the eighties and was proud of its RHD, a symbol for the independent Czechoslovakia shortly before its occupation in 1938-1939. He refused to convert the steering wheel from the Czechoslovak RHD position to the German LHD side, so emphasizing his identity. Apart from using his Tatra to transport him to his lectures, helping him to tell about his native town Novy Jicin, he took his Tatra to some rallies like the 100 year Tatra Rally Vienna-Koprivnice. Getting older and older, he sold his T 87 some years ago to concentrate on his mission, to tell the German youth about his experiences. 
His brother Edgar bought himself a Tatraplan in the eighties and took it to the 90 years Tatra Rally Vienna-Koprivnice After his death, it was sold to the late Adolf Kunz and is now owned by German Tatra enthusiast Josef Krumpelbeck who recently has been in contact with Max and suggested TW to pay attention to Mannheimer’s story.
Mannheimer tells about his live in German (his T 87 plays a supporting and modest role):
Video1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia9aTKTDGSU&feature=related (T 87 starts after 1.12)
Video2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDMeClLhM0Y&feature=related
Video3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ua-UjHyeEU