In a Budapest labor battalion of 179 Jewish teenagers in 1944, every boy but one was eventually put on a train to Auschwitz, and none of them came back. Tibor Schaechner was the one left behind, spared, by his own account, by either a bus driver's warning or a morning he simply overslept. He carried that memory for the rest of his life and became, in the end, El Paso's last living Holocaust survivor. Schaechner died on September 29, 2026, at 98.

He was born March 28, 1928, in Budapest to Alexander and Sara Schaechner, who ran a feather and down business and raised him alongside a younger sister, Magda, according to the El Paso Holocaust Museum. His maternal grandparents and two uncles were executed in Poland in 1941. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, his father was arrested and did not survive the war.

After the occupation began, the family was made to wear the yellow Star of David and briefly held at a racetrack with no facilities before being relocated to the Budapest ghetto in December 1944, according to KVIA. Schaechner himself was conscripted into a labor battalion assigned to dig tank barriers on the outskirts of the city, while his mother and sister remained in the ghetto. For a time he sheltered in a safe house connected to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the museum's biography states. Three days before Soviet troops reached the ghetto in January 1945, a Soviet air attack killed his ten year old sister.

After the war Schaechner made his way to New York. There, in 1956, he married Agnes Klein, a fellow Hungarian survivor born in Debrecen to an Orthodox Jewish family, who had been forced into a ghetto and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau before her liberation the following spring by American forces, per the museum's biography of Agnes Klein Schaechner. The couple settled in Brooklyn, raised three daughters, Lillian, Audrey and Susan, and moved the family to El Paso in 1960.

In El Paso, Schaechner spent more than three decades as a buyer for the Popular department store, working there until it closed in 1995. Agnes went on to earn a master's degree and spent 22 years as a social worker for the Texas Department of Human Services before her death in 1998. Schaechner married Ann Goodman the following year.

Schaechner was among the survivors instrumental in founding the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, and for decades afterward he served on its board and as a docent, recording an oral history and guiding visitors through its exhibits until mobility problems ended his tours, according to KVIA. "Never again," he told the station in 2023. "That's the main thing." He put it more fully in another recollection reported by El Paso Matters: "I don't know how you call fate or luck. Two, three times I escaped certain death." Of the generations coming after him, he said, "You have to get up, get up and fight for your rights, whatever the consequences are... this thing should never happen again."

Schaechner died Tuesday, September 29, 2026, passing peacefully, surrounded by friends and family, according to the family's obituary cited by El Paso Matters. The family asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the El Paso Holocaust Museum. The museum's executive director, Jamie Flores, said Schaechner was survived by a large family in El Paso. His daughter Audrey Lavi said his insistence on speaking openly about the Holocaust shaped her own willingness to do the same, recalling that "my father really was vital in having me understand about the Holocaust and how important it was to tell people about what happened, especially now with all the anti-Semitism going on in the United States and all over the world." Another daughter, Lillian Schaechner, said her father "really wanted us to live our lives giving. He was not a taker. He was the first to step up wherever and whenever anybody needed anything, and say, 'How can I help? What can I give you?'" A third daughter, Susan Schaechner, remembered him simply as "always being available, and being supportive and very family oriented." Funeral services were held October 1 at B'nai Zion Cemetery in El Paso.

What remains of Tibor Schaechner is concrete. A recorded oral history sits in the archives of the El Paso Holocaust Museum, his photograph hangs among the museum's wall of survivors, and the documents his daughter Lillian donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum keep his and Agnes's names on the record. For sixty six years El Paso was his home, and for the last stretch of his life its Holocaust museum was where he stood in front of strangers, again and again, to say plainly that it should never happen again.