Ben Dunlap's Lecture of a Lifetime

I was his professor. But my 90-year-old student taught me more than anyone I'd ever known.

There's not a drop of Hungarian blood in my veins, but at every critical juncture in my life, there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor beside me. I even have dreams that seem to take place in Hungarian landscapes.

How do I explain this mysterious affinity? Maybe it's because my native state of South Carolina, which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary, once imagined a future for itself as an independent country. And as a consequence of that presumption, my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army-an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village throughout the country's long and troubled history. Though this presence in my life is difficult to account for, ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration for people with a complex moral awareness, their heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado.


Click the screen above to watch the video.

Case in point: On the first day that I began teaching an interdisciplinary course in literature and culture at Wofford College in South Carolina, I was reassured to find, among the auditors in my classroom, a 90-year-old Hungarian. This man was surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhine maidens. His name was Sandor Teszler, and he was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead and whose grandchildren lived far away. In appearance he resembled Mahatma Gandhi—minus the loincloth, plus orthopedic boots.

He was born in 1903 in a province of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, part of which would later become Yugoslavia. He was ostracized as a child, not because he was a Jew—his parents weren't very religious anyhow—but because he had been born with two clubfeet, a condition that, in those days, required institutionalization and a succession of painful operations.

He went to the commercial business high school as a young man in Budapest. There, he was as smart as he was modest, and he enjoyed considerable success. After graduation, when he went into textile engineering, his success continued. He built one plant after another. He married and had two sons. And he had friends in high places who assured him that he was of great value to the economy.

Once, as he had left instructions to be done, he was summoned in the middle of the night by the watchman at one of his plants, a hosiery mill. The watchman had caught an employee stealing socks. Apparently, this employee had simply backed up the truck to the loading dock and shoveled in mountains of socks.

Mr. Teszler went down to the plant. He confronted the thief and said, "But why do you steal from me? If you need money, you have only to ask." The night watchman, observing how things were going and waxing indignant, said, "Well, we're going to call the police, aren't we?"

But Mr. Teszler answered, "No, that will not be necessary. He will not steal from us again."

Well, maybe he was too trusting, even after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria and the arrests and deportations began in Budapest. And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film, local townspeople who were sympathetic to the Germans held a rampage against the Jews-and the leader of that gang was the very same thief who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler's hosiery mill. This man, however, spent all night standing guard in front of the Teszler home to make sure Sandor and his family weren't harmed.

The situation continued to worsen. Mr. Teszler took the precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets that could be worn about his neck and those of his family. And then, in time, it happened. Teszler and his family were arrested and taken to a death house on the Danube.
In those early days of the Final Solution, it was handcrafted brutality. People were beaten and shot to death, their bodies tossed into the river. None who entered that death house had ever come out alive.

Teszler and his family endured a brutal beating at the hands of a young Nazi officer. The next day, as they were being taken to the river, one of Mr. Teszler's sons, Andrew, looked up and said to him, "Papa, is it time to take the cyanide now?" The same Nazi officer who had administered the beatings overheard this and whispered to Teszler, "No, do not take it. Help is on the way."

A car soon arrived from the Swiss embassy, and the Teszler family was spirited to safety. For the duration of the war, they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers. Probably Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts; he also used his good connections to get his family to Great Britain, and then to Long Island, and then to a major center of the textile industry in the American South, which, as chance would have it, was Spartanburg, South Carolina, the location of Wofford College.

There, Teszler began all over again. Once again he achieved immense success, especially after a new fabric called double knit was introduced.

In the early 1960s, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, when the Klan was resurgent all over the South, Mr. Teszler said, "I have heard this talk before." He asked a top assistant, "Where would you say, in this region, racism is most virulent?"

"I reckon that would be Kings Mountain, Mr. Teszler," the man said, referring to a nearby area in North Carolina.

"Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain, and then announce we are going to build a major plant there." The man did so, and shortly afterward Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain—at that time, the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated.

The white mayor said, "Mr. Teszler, I trust you're going to be hiring a lot of white workers."

Teszler told him, "Why are you saying this? Did you think you were coming here to help me?" It had been Teszler's intention from the start to hire the best workers, regardless of race or color.

He also received a visit from a member of the black community, a minister, who said, "Mr. Teszler, I hope you're going to hire black workers for this new plant." And Teszler gave this answer: "When the time comes, I will call you, and you will recommend to me high school graduates—boys and girls—from honest families." In the end, Mr. Teszler hired 16 workers: eight white, eight black. They were to be his seed group, his future foremen. In an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, Teszler had installed the heavy equipment needed for the new double-knit manufacturing process. For two months, these 16 employees would live and work together, mastering the new procedures.

After an initial tour of the facility, he gathered them all together and asked if there were any questions. There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet. Then a white worker stepped forward and said, "Well, yeah. We looked at this place, and there's only one place to sleep, only one place to eat, only one bathroom, only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated, or what?"

Mr. Teszler replied, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region, and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?"

"No, I reckon I don't."

And two months later, when the main plant opened and more than one hundred new workers, both white and black, poured in to see the facility for the first time, they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder. The group toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and inevitably, the same question arose: "Is this plant integrated, or what?"

One of the white foremen stepped forward and said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers in this industry in this region, and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?" And there were none.

Mr. Teszler was one of the first to integrate the textile industry in that part of the South. It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi-handled with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint.

In his 80s, Mr. Teszler, having retired from textiles, adopted Wofford College, auditing courses every semester. Because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved, he became affectionately known by all and sundry as Opi, which is Magyar (Hungarian) for "grandfather." Before I got there, the library of the college had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived, in 1993, the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler "professor of the college." This was done partly because he had taken all the courses in the catalog by then; but mainly it was done because he was so conspicuously wiser than any of us. To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe.

Wise he was, indeed, but Mr. Teszler also had a wonderful sense of humor. Once, for an interdisciplinary class I was teaching, I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's great 1957 film The Seventh Seal. As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild-goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden only to find the specter of death waiting for him, Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students.

And as Death opened his cloak to envelop the knight in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice. "Oh, oh," he said. "This doesn't look so good."

Music was his greatest passion, especially opera. On the first occasion that I visited his house, he asked me to choose the piece of music we would listen to. I delighted him by rejecting Cavalleria rusticana in favor of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. I love Bartók's music, as did Mr. Teszler, and he had virtually every recording of Bartók's music ever issued. It was at his house that I heard for the first time Bartók's Third Piano Concerto and learned from Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina, in the last years of the composer's life. He was battling leukemia, and he dedicated this concerto to his wife, Dita, who was herself a concert pianist.

Into the slow, second movement, marked adagio religioso, Bartók incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard outside his window in what would be one of his last springs. He was imagining a future-for her-in which he would play no part. Clearly, this composition was his final statement to her. It was first performed after his death and, through her, to the world. Just as clearly, it is saying, It's okay. It was all so beautiful. Whenever you hear this, I will be there.

After Mr. Teszler's death, I learned that the marker on Bartók's grave in Hartsdale, New York, was paid for, in part, by Sandor Teszler.

Not long before Mr. Teszler's own death at age 97, he heard me deliver a lecture that described history as a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality. With gentle reproach, Mr. Teszler said to me afterward, "You know, human beings are fundamentally good." And I made a vow to myself then and there that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise had reached that conclusion, I would not presume to differ.

What he showed me in the brief time I knew him was the secret of his success. It was an insatiable curiosity, an irrepressible desire to know—no matter what the subject, what the cost, even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 91 years from now.

"Live each day as if it is your last," the saying goes. "Learn as if you'll live forever." That's what I'm passionate about. It is an inextinguishable appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, esoteric, or seditious it might seem. And this truly defines the Sandor Teszler I was lucky enough to know.