Many young people have come through Baruch College and made new lives for themselves, but few had to survive and escape Nazi concentration camps to get there. Ted Kessler was one of them.
Theodore Kessler (born Tibor Keszler) from Nyirbator, Hungary, endured the Nazi Holocaust and was the sole survivor from his family. He was imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, and Berga and was just 16 years old at Liberation. He came to the U.S., served during the Korean War, earned a degree from Baruch College, became a certified public accountant, and raised a loving family.
When he died on Oct. 14, 2011, at the age of 82, his youngest son, Andy, commented at the funeral on his father’s rare ability to see the big picture, put things in perspective, and look on the bright side. “He almost always would see the positive qualities in people and anticipate the best possible outcomes for situations. . . . He survived the worst things that could ever happen to someone . . . and [yet he] believed [that] things were only going to get better.” Where does such equanimity and resilience come from?
In Ted’s case, it may have come from enduring the worst and finding people willing to help even amidst extreme conditions. He was with his father in Buchenwald, but his father was sent to Zeiss as a slave laborer, leaving Ted alone in the camp. Underground activists moved Ted into Children’s Block #8, and he was protected there from June to December 1944. In the late fall of 1944, the camp activists began to worry that Nazi SS guards would clear out the children and youths and send them to Auschwitz. In anticipation of that event, the activists arranged for some youths to be transported to Berga, assuring them they would find more help there. They did. They were placed in the kitchen, which was both warm and close to food, and spent the final months of captivity peeling potatoes while others—Holocaust prisoners and American GIs—died at a high rate.
At war’s end, the young Kessler was on a death march from Berga but escaped, wandering off on his own to Allied territory. He found Yiddish-speaking American soldiers, who embraced him and gave him food. He later found himself in the displaced persons’ camps in Germany and on a waiting list for orphans seeking asylum in America. He finally arrived in New York in late 1947, where he worked for an uncle in Brooklyn. He was drafted in 1951 and served a year in Korea. Home from the war, he attended CUNY colleges on the GI Bill, graduating from Baruch in 1959. He married and had two sons.
Ted always said that attending CUNY and graduating from Baruch was an important milestone in his life, which was a happy and productive one, despite what he experienced at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Berga.
His avocation was talking about the past and reading all the literature on the Holocaust. He was extremely knowledgeable, spoke in schools and synagogues, and, in the late 1990s, took his family to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He also did a Shoah Visual History Foundation videotape. Like many survivors, he did not speak about the past while building his new life. But later, he returned to the task of integrating past and present.
—Kenneth Waltzer
About the Author: Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University (MSU) and professor of history in James Madison College at MSU, is completing a book on the rescue of children and youths at Buchenwald.
More About Theodore Kessler (’59): Andy Kessler, Theodore Kessler’s son, created a website about his father’s Holocaust experience. Visit it at http://thekesslers.com/family/tibor/tibor.html
BCAM thanks Professor Waltzer and the Kessler family and regrets that we missed the opportunity to interview this extraordinary alumnus.
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