Americans and the Holocaust

Survivor Stories - Tibor Klopfer

Tibor Klopfer will detail the atrocities his Hungarian Jewish family members experienced during the Holocaust.

Tibor Klopfer has been a Holocaust education speaker since 2013. He was born in Hungary but grew up and attended public schools in Indianapolis. As a second-generation survivor, he presents vivid stories of his family’s experiences as Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust. With family photos, maps, and other illustrations, he puts human faces on historical events and provides a perspective on the Holocaust that transcends sterile renditions of events, dates, and statistics. Beyond personal family history, he explores how lessons from the Holocaust apply to current events in the United States and globally. For his Kokomo-Howard County Library presentation, he will include a parallel timeline covering American attitudes, perceptions, and responses during the time periods corresponding to the stories of his family members. 

Among the family members whose life stories he describes are his mother, his father, and an uncle. His mother, Manci, was deported from a ghetto in rural Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was moved to an industrial slave labor camp and ultimately was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration near Hannover, Germany. His father, Michael, was processed through Auschwitz and worked in forced labor camps before being liberated from Dachau, near Munich, Germany. He lost all his immediate family, including his first wife and two young daughters. His Uncle Alex, his mother’s youngest brother, 13 years of age at the beginning of the war, witnessed the devastation of his extended family and survived a whirlwind of farm and industrial forced labor camps before being liberated from an Austrian factory camp.

Our volunteer guest speakers come to us from the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council.

In conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association's Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries, the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library has planned an accompanying event series to explore important themes related to the exhibition. This event is part of that series.

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