Tibor Schaechner was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 28, 1928. His father owned a feather and down business, and Tibor and his sister, Magda, enjoyed a comfortable middle class upbringing. Starting in 1939, the Hungarian government adopted the Nazi ideology. In 1941, Tibor’s maternal grandparents and two of his uncles, who had problems with their Hungarian citizenship, were picked up in a raid with thousands of other people in similar predicaments. They were taken to Poland and shot. However, Tibor and his family continued to live in relative safety until 1944, as Budapest was the safest city for Jews in Hungary at that time.
In March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary, Tibor’s father was taken into a slave labor battalion, and he never returned. He died in a concentration camp in Austria. Tibor was assigned to a labor battalion, where he and other boys built tank barriers around the former Shell Refinery. One day Tibor overslept and missed his transport to the work site. He caught a city bus, but before reaching the city limits, the bus driver told Tibor to get off the bus because the labor battalions were being sent to Auschwitz. Tibor jumped off the bus and went home. Of 179 boys in his labor battalion, not one returned. In June 1944, Tibor and his cousin were rounded up for a “death march” toward the Austrian border, but they both ran from the column and escaped once again. Tibor had numerous other brushes with death but luckily escaped each time. For a time, he also lived with his mother and sister, Magda, in several safe houses, one of them set up by Raoul Wallenberg. But by the middle of December 1944, at the age of sixteen, Tibor was forced into the Budapest ghetto with his mother and Magda. His sister was killed three days before liberation by a bomb from a Russian air attack during the house to house fighting in the ghetto.
Tibor and his mother were liberated by the Soviet army on January 19, 1945. Tibor escaped from Hungary to Austria after the war, from the very structured life under communism to the west and freedom. He eventually came to New York, where he met fellow Holocaust survivor, Agnes Klein. They married in 1956 and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they had three daughters. In 1960, they moved to El Paso, and Tibor worked for the Popular Department store until 1995, when the store closed. He married Ann S. Goodman in 1999, after his wife Agnes’ death.
Connecting Stories: Agnes Schaechner, Sarah (Schaechner) Biro