On her eighteenth birthday, Clara Knopfler‘s mother made her a magnificent cake - three slices of hoarded bread coated with marmalade. The month was January, 1945, and the place was East Prussia. They had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp.
Clara was born in Transylvania and lived a comfortable, village life. Her father was a shoe manufacturer, and Clara dreamed of becoming a teacher. Life was pleasant until 1940 when Transylvania was occupied by Hungarians, Hitler‘s first allies in World War II. During her sophomore year in high school, her family was taken to Auschwitz. Her 19-year old brother was shot to death in front of her father, who later perished in a death march. In all, thirty-seven members of her extended family died.
Pepi Deutsch, Clara‘s mother, protected her daughter fiercely as they weathered months of hunger, cold, lice and savagery from their guards. They developed a habit of caring for each other that persisted for five decades, from Communist Romania to immigration to the United states in 1962 and in the new life they built here and enjoyed until Pepi‘s death at age 101 in 1999. Clara‘s biography,
"I Am Still Here” My Mother’s Voice is her tribute to Pepi.
Liberated from the camp in April, 1945, Clara recuperated and studied for school exams with the Christian friends who inspired her as they shared their books and class notes. She re-entered high school as a senior and passed the baccalaureate. At the University, Clara became a language and history major – she speaks seven languages and knows classical Latin! Here she met her future husband, Paul, who had also lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He received his degree as a pharmaceutical chemist; they married and had one son. Unfortunately, Paul lost his life at age 68 in an industrial accident in his own plant.
For thirty-two years Clara taught high school in the United States, primarily languages, but sometimes about literature in languages she didn‘t speak. She didn‘t speak Italian, but she taught Dante‘s The Divine Comedy; not speaking Spanish, she nevertheless taught Cervantes‘ Don Quixote. But Clara‘s life mission is to tell the story of the Holocaust. Through her book and lectures, she is still doing her part to insure that the infamy will never be forgotten or repeated.
Clara‘s son George, who lives in Thousand Oaks with his family, discovered University Village. Clara has traveled the world extensively and has spent much of the past two years with family and friends in Scarsdale, NY. But her story offers an insightful understanding of the human soul – the depths to which it can sink, and the heights to which it can soar. She deeply appreciates her University Village home and the friends of whom she is now a Noteworthy Neighbor.