For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today: A Memoir

This is the story of Martin Maxwell. Born Max Meisels in March 1924 in Vienna, Maxwell grew up as a Jew in impoverished post-First World War Austria, experiencing antisemitism and the rise of Nazism firsthand. Left an orphan after the deaths of his mother and father, he escaped with his older brother Leo to Britain. At age seventeen he joined the British Army and in June 1944 participated in a D-Day glider operation that was intended to hold back German forces so they could not push back the Allied troops coming ashore in Normandy. In the closing months of war, Maxwell was held in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and after the Allied victory he travelled to Washington, D.C., to investigate Axis war crimes. In the early 1950s, he emigrated to Canada, where he became a successful businessperson, married and raised a family. All the while he sought to keep the memory of his fallen wartime comrades and their sacrifices alive. He spoke widely on his pre-war and wartime experiences, and attended commemorations of the liberation of Europe in the Netherlands. Late in life he set pen to paper to write the story of his life. The result is this book, For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today. It is a remarkable narrative of an equally remarkable life.