Donald Klaber oral history interviews

Donald Klaber was born February 28, 1916. He grew up in Essen, Germany where he and his mother observed French soldiers in 1920 march up the street on which they lived. One soldier struck a German laborer, who was moving dirt in a cart, with the butt of his rifle.  Post World War I, the French felt the reparations were not coming to them fast enough and took out there anger on the German population.

Mr. Klaber spent much of his youth in northern Germany on his grandfather's large farm. Klaber's father died of a kidney ailment when Donald was nine years old. At age 14, Donald Klaber's political consciousness began to take form. Donald's mother remarried, and her second husband adopted Donald. At age 17, he was part of a discussion group in his teacher's home where Hitler was the topic. In 1933, Klaber knew "I had to leave."

Klaber lived in Europe, Palestine, and England, volunteered for military service in the British Army during WWII, lived his life and made his choices as a non-religious Jew, all prior to his arrival in the United States.

He arrived in New York in 1946. He married Margot in 1950, whom he met at a Quaker meeting, the Fifteenth Street Meeting. The Klabers relocated to Chicago where Donald Klaber worked for Swift & Company tracking inventory and they were part of the Fifty-Seventh Street Quaker Meeting. At the Quaker group he met the general manager of the Hyde Park Co-op where he became employed and through them he became employed at the Duluth Co-op in 1956. He became employed in the New York Life insurance industry. The Klabers had three children.

He and Mrs. Klaber are members of a Quaker group in Duluth, Minnesota. Mrs. Margot Klaber was interviewed separately.