Tibor Schaechner, El Paso’s last living survivor of the Holocaust during World War II, died Tuesday, Sept. 29, at age 98.
“I would like to leave a message that I hope that the generation (that) will come after us will be not soft,” Schaechner said in an oral history for the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center. “Whatever the future brings, you have to get up, get up and fight for your rights, whatever the consequences are. Don’t care about the consequences. Well, this thing should never happen again.”
Schaechner, who was Jewish, was born in Hungary in 1928. After the Nazis invaded in March 1944, his father, Sandor, was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered.
Shaechner became a forced laborer for Nazi military forces, but narrowly avoided deportation to a death camp.
“I don’t know how you call fate or luck.Two, three times I escaped certain death,” Schaechner said in his oral history.
His 10-year-old sister, Magda, and four other relatives were killed by a Russian bomb in 1945 as Soviet forces pushed the Germans out of Hungary.
He and his mother, Sara, survived the war. Schaechner lived in Hungary until 1949, then in an Austrian refugee camp. He emigrated to Montreal, Canada, in 1951.
In Montreal, he married fellow Hungarian Holocaust survivor Agnes Klein. Her parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and her twin brothers survived experiments by the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.
Tibor and Agnes Schaechner moved to Brooklyn in 1960 and then to El Paso in 1961, where her relatives in the Schwartz family lived and owned The Popular department store. Tibor worked as a buyer for The Popular until 1995. Agnes Schaechner was a social worker before her death in 1998.
They raised three daughters, Lillian Schaechner, Audrey Lavi and Susan Schaechner, who survive them.
His funeral will be at 1 p.m. Thursday at B’Nai Zion Cemetery.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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