Tibor Schaechner, El Paso's Last Living Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 98

Tibor Schaechner, El Paso's last living Holocaust survivor, died Tuesday, Sept. 29, at age 98, according to El Paso Matters.

Schaechner was born in Hungary in 1928. After Nazi forces invaded in March 1944, his father, Sandor, was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered. Schaechner became a forced laborer for Nazi military forces but narrowly escaped 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 an oral history recorded by the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center.

His 10-year-old sister, Magda, and four other relatives were killed by a Russian bomb in 1945 as Soviet forces advanced through Hungary. Schaechner and his mother, Sara, survived the war.

After 1949, Schaechner lived in an Austrian refugee camp before emigrating to Montreal in 1951. There he married Agnes Klein, a fellow Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered and whose twin brothers survived experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Tibor and Agnes moved to Brooklyn in 1960 and then to El Paso in 1961, drawn by Agnes's relatives in the Schwartz family, who owned The Popular department store. Tibor worked as a buyer for the store until 1995. Agnes, a social worker, died in 1998.

Schaechner left a message for future generations through his oral history: "I would like to leave a message that I hope that the generation (that) will come after us will be not soft. 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 is survived by three daughters: Lillian Schaechner, Audrey Lavi, and Susan Schaechner. His funeral is scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday at B'Nai Zion Cemetery.