Sandor Teszler was a Jewish Hungarian man born in 1903. He faced several personal adversities in his childhood and adulthood resulting in qualities of passion and resilience. In 1948, Teszler emigrated to America after facing professional and economic hardship in post-WWII Europe, and in 1961 he moved to Spartanburg, SC to work with his son Andrew, a Wofford College Board of Trustee. Later, the Sandor Teszler Library was built in his honor. After retirement, Teszler became an auditor at the college, began attending classes, and would often leisure the library that shares his name. He was voted to become a Wofford College Humanities professor at 93 years old with Dean Dan Baker Maultsby stating, "[A]lthough you have come to campus as our student, the truth is that we have been your student for years,". The students attending Wofford College at this time lovingly referred to him as "Opi", the Hungarian word for "grandpa".

By the time that Hitler had come into power in 1933, Sandor Teszler was living an extremely happy life with his wife and two sons, Otto and Andrew, in Yugoslavia. He came into professional success as the head of production in a knitting plant that he and his brother had started. By 1938, Hitler's effect could soon be seen through his eyes from Austrian friends seeking assistance while fleeing the country. Teszler's position was favorable at this time, as Yugoslavia was an open country at this point, in which people could travel to and from anywhere in the world. It was due to this that Teszler lived a relatively normal life until the April of 1941 when Hitler invaded the country.

It was around this time that German sympathizers in the country started participating in violent antisemitism, however he and his family were protected due to the kindness showed to one of his factory employees after said employee had stolen from the company previous to the invasion; this man happened to be the leader of the sympathizers in town. The Teszler family was also protected for a long while because Sandor had made friends with the commander of the Hungarian troops as well as other Hungarian troop members. This was due to the fact that the family was from Hungary. The family ended up moving back to their mother country to escape the German occupancy, but in 1944 Hungary, too, became an occupied territory. Later in April 1944, the Teszler family went into hiding in a small house in their factory for six months to evade being sent to death camps. After these six months, they were arrested, released, sent to a Jewish house, and eventually transported to a death camp from the Synagouge-turned-Ghetto that they were appointed to stay in. Teszler recounts a day, November 25, in which they were brutally beaten as a family.

Given the circumstances, each member of the family carried a small bag of cyanide around their necks, "[w]e would not go alive", Sandor recounts in response to Nazi officers taking Jewish people to the Danube River to be shot and killed. However after the beating on November 25, a fascist officer noticed these bags and advised the family not to take them due to the fact that the Swiss consul, who was protecting Yugoslavian interests at the time, was soon to arrive and because the family were citizens of Yugoslavia this protection applied to them. Several decades after this, when writing his memoirs, Sandor admits that, "I am still very much hurt by the way the people of my country, Hungary, treated us... My family had been living in Hungary for five hundred years; our culture was Hungarian and of course we considered ourselves Hungarians."