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.


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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?"

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