David

David Schaecter

David was born on 4 August 1929 into a family of four children from Czechoslovakia, in the Snina wine region. As soon as the war broke out in 1940, his father was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Later in 1941, the rest of the family was arrested by the Slovak Nazi Party. David, then aged 11, his 15-year-old brother Jacob, his mother and his two sisters were deported to Auschwitz. On arrival at the camp, the two brothers were separated from the women in the family and selected for work. Their task was to wash the cattle cars which transported the deportees. After surviving 18 months at Auschwitz, they were both sent to the Buchenwald camp to do the same job. That’s where David's older brother, Jacob, exhausted and despondent, drank poisoned water to put an end to this unbearable life.
At the end of the war, David was 15 years old and weighted only 83 pounds. He was the only survivor out of the 105 members of his family. He was placed in an orphanage in Prague and stayed there for 5 years. A Jewish organization then sent him to the USA to study. That’s where he met his future wife and pursued a career as an engineer.
In 1989, along with other survivors, David founded the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach to honor the memory of his family, especially his brother Jacob, and the 6 million Jews who perished.