From: The Jewish Press Review: Masquerade: Dancing Around Death In Nazi-Occupied Hungary More Articles By Middle East Newsletter Middle East Newsletter Posted Nov 10 2001 Title: Masquerade: Dancing Around Death In Nazi-Occupied Hungary Author: Tivadar Soros Publisher: Arcade Publishing Reviewed by Michael Skakun
Few men sit so commandingly astride the worlds of international finance and philanthropy as does George Soros. Widely acknowledged as one of the most successful investment managers in history, the billionaire financier is a controversial colossus with definite opinions. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, is a figure of exceptional acumen and derring-do ? the founder of the Quantum Fund, an off-shore hedge fund which averaged sizable returns for 25 years running (before it skidded badly) and the man who "broke the Bank of England." He is an equally magnanimous donor of worldwide influence, a man with philosophical and historical ambition. His Open Society Institute, based on the anti-totalitarian principles of Karl Popper, has spent billions in an attempt to craft a democratic model of governance across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It is said quite rightly that he is perhaps the only man in the United States who has his own foreign policy and has the funds to execute it. George Soros has stated repeatedly that, "I learned the art of survival from a grand master." Tivadar Soros, his father, is that virtuoso of confidence, self-possession and cunning he is referring to, and "Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary" is his compelling story. Editor and translator, Humphrey Tonkin, who seconds George Soros's opinion, writes of Tivadar as, "The father every boy dreams of when peril is near." A big-city sophisticate, bon vivant and lawyer (during the war he became the private attorney of Okanyi Schwartz, the Rothschild of Hungary), Tivadar Soros (né Teodor Schwartz) enjoyed the pleasures and the perks of the former imperial city on the Danube, yet always remained a loyal family man. Georg Buchner once wrote, "Das Leben der Reichen ist ein langer Sonntag" (the life of the rich is one long Sunday). Rarely was this as true as it was for some in the autumnal splendor of Central Europe. But within a matter of years, the scenario would change horrifically. When Eichmann arrived in Budapest in March 1944 and the Holocaust descended upon Hungarian Jewry with its full annihilating fury, Tivadar Soros summoned every ounce of resourcefulness, protectiveness and ingenuity to save his family, friends and acquaintances. He was a wiz at acquiring a series of false identity papers and arranging lodgings in various locations in the capital and beyond. Indeed, he served as a one-man rescue operation and his two sons, George and Paul, who each write a moving forward to "Masquerade," owe their lives to him. The second oldest of 10 children of relatively prosperous and secularized Hungarian Jews, Tivadar Soros was born in Nyirgyhaza, 150 miles east of Budapest in the rich agricultural country bordering the northern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain. He studied law and spend time in Heidelberg. His first great test of endurance was his survival during World War I. In perhaps one of his rare instances of naivete, he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army in search of adventure. "It was not patriotic enthusiasm that drove me to enlist, but rather that I would miss out on the war. I was sure that this was the last world war: if I let it go by, I would miss a unique opportunity." He found adventure in spades, far more than he had ever bargained for. Taken prisoner by the Russians during World War I, he was deported to Siberia. How he survived this ordeal ? crossing the frozen Amur River, traveling on foot through mountains and rafting down rivers that drain into the Arctic ? is the subject of his first book, Crusoes in Siberia, which originally appeared in the Esperanto magazine, Literatura Mondo, which he launched in the Soviet Union in 1922 with his friends Kalman Kalocsay and Gyula Baghy. It should be stressed that the worldly Tivadar became a lover of Esperanto, the international language founded by Lazar Ludovik Zamenhof, the Polish Jew, in hopes of advancing understanding among nations. It stands almost to reason that assimilated Central European Jew ? idealists, all ? should have created and pursued the very idea of a tongue that transcends boundaries, effectively converting language into universal citizenship. Indeed, Masquerade, as we might well expect, is itself, ably translated from Esperanto by Humphrey Tonkin, university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Hartford. Tivadar Soros's Siberian escapades set the stage for his life-dealing strategies in the Budapest of 1944. An expert assembler of contacts, he understood that "self-assurance is more important than any document." More than any other attribute, "an insouciant optimism masking a wary and canny protectiveness," as Tonkin puts it, helped him through the perilous labyrinth. He knew how far to go without going too far. Tivadar quotes the Latin saying, mendacem oportet esse memorem (a liar must have a good memory) as one of his guiding principles. By necessity, he cultivated a memory as vast and intricate as the unfolding tragedy. As part of his father's scheme of survival, George Soros went into hiding at the age of 14 in the home of a Mr. Baufluss, an official at the Ministry of Agriculture, whom he joined on his expeditions taking inventory of confiscated Jewish estates in the Hungarian countryside. Tivadar, to be sure, had slipped Baufluss, a man of German origin married to a Jew, several thousand pengos and so George was able to spent part of the war assuming a new identity and dining at such model estates (by then expropriated) as that of Baron Moritz Kornfeld, a Jewish aristocrat. A high level of secular acculturation helped Tivadar Soros pull off his many ruses. He practiced law, managed real estate, lived on the fashionable east bank of the Danube, wrote an occasional newspaper article and was a connoisseur of cafe society. His sang-froid inspired so much confidence in his son that he concedes in the foreword, "It is a sacrilegious thing to say but these ten months (the Nazi occupation of Hungary) were the happiest times of my life... We were in great peril, but my father was seemingly in command of the situation... I did not believe in my hearts of hearts I could get hurt." The flipside of assimilation, however, was a tenuous, highly ambivalent, relation to Judaism, not uncommon among middle and upper-middle class Central European Jews. (Hadn't Herzl thought of converting the Jews before he finally turned to Zionism?). George Soros's mother, Elizabeth, was, in her son's words, "quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish." Tivadar writes that in 1944 "anyone watching her bitter expression as she sewed the yellow star on to various garments could see that here was a woman whose very individuality had been wounded." George modeled himself after his father, but he concedes he was far closer to his mother. Is it any wonder that today he wanly identifies himself as a Jew, a posture that governs much of his contemporary philanthropy. To further complicate the picture, his father's coolness toward the Jewish community was compounded by his contempt for the Jewish Council (Zsido Tanacs) in Budapest which worked with undue diligence to keep order. Tivadar and his family survived in no small part because he kept a safe distance from Budapest's wartime Jewish elite. He writes poignantly, "After the war, a marble plaque was unveiled in the Bar Association bearing the names of over six hundred Jewish lawyers who perished through Jewish Council summonses in 1944. Many of them could have avoided the glory of martyrdom by refusing to answer the call." Even before the fateful arrival of the Nazis in Budapest on March 19, 1944, Jews trapped within the expanded boundaries of wartime Hungary had suffered atrocities. In the autumn of 1941, 20,000 Jews, mostly inhabitants annexed from former Czech lands, were expelled to German-held Galicia and machine gunned to death over a three-day period in Kaments-Podolsk by the German SS, headed by Lt. Gen. Franz Jaeckeln and enthusiastically assisted by Hungarian troops. This horror served as a prelude to what would henceforth be the fate of a nation's Jews. When the Nazi Sondereinsatzkommando (Special Task Force), led by Eichmann and Wisliceny, descended on Budapest, the harrowing of Hungarian Jewry reached its culmination. Lies were used to cover genocide. Eichmann told Regent Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, that "the provincial ghettos are like sanitoriums. Finally the Jews have started living in the fresh air and have exchanged their old way of life for a healthier one." Within the seven weeks separating Passover from Shavuos, hundreds of thousands of Jews, mostly from the Hungarian countryside, met their deaths in Auschwitz. The government of Sztojay, staffed by such virulent pro-Nazi elements as Laszlo Endre and Laszlo Baky, state secretaries of the Ministry of Defense, and assisted by vicious Arrow Cross gangs (Nyilas), expedited the scope of annihilation. During history's long dark night, Tivadar Soros's self command and ingenuity stayed the hand of murder. But for all his canniness, his success depended in no small measure on sheer luck. He would be the first to admit it. Indeed, the opening line of Masquerade set in pre-war Budapest gets to the point immediately: "Life is beautiful-and full of variety and adventure. But luck must be on your side." Thankfully, Tivadar's mazel quotient and skill were high, so high, in fact, that he saved many. George Soros fully realizes that he is his father's son. In the post-war years, especially in the seventies and eighties, the younger Soros learned to be as deft with options, futures and other derivatives as his father had been in the far more dangerous business of acquiring false papers and hiding places. He came, in the relative safety of America, to learn how to translate his father's gold standard of independence, wit and self reliance to gild the Soros name in the financial and philanthropic firmament. I'm not going to speak about this again. Soros own people don't hold him responsible and that's good enough for me. As far as the Gypsies are concerned, 3/4 of the Gypsy population of the world were murdered in the camps, then European countries including Switzerland stole their kids. Chris claims that they gave them back. When I did the work on the Gypsy Carmen in 1994 that hadn't happened yet and the kids were taken in the seventies. So who do we believe? I don't know. As for the Soviets? Talk to the Russians here in every segment of society. What you said Chris is exactly what the press said during the cold war but is not what I was told by the Russian immigrants and they had no reason to praise the Soviets. They were here as immigrants. As far as predators are concerned. We disagree. That's the way it is. As for bigoted and stereotypical: My judgment in saying that Soros natural father had helped Soros to steal from other Jews. That is not what is on the internet. In fact in Soros own words, he was put with a gentile who was then hired by the authorities to "harvest" Jewish property. Soros said that he had no feelings about it because he had no control over it and was not responsible. A barely fourteen year old kid losing everything, being put with strangers and not knowing what the morrow held is not someone to look to for anything other than survival. You slandered him when you claimed it was his natural father, which it wasn't. You sound like Ann Coulter and the religious right wing here that calls themselves conservative when the only thing they are conserving is post war European economic thought translated to America. Chris did get one thing right. Those Swiss Immigrants with John Smith at Jamestown were scum. They collaborated with and started something that ended with the death of millions. Chris's comments about First Nations people here are ignorant and book learned. Let him come amongst the people and spend more than a summer and get to know the remnants of many once great peoples. Then we can talk. Otherwise I have no more to say on this. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Christoph Reuss Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 4:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Shouldn't High Unemployment = Less Work To Do? REH wrote: > 1. Give your sources about Soros His father wrote about it in his book "Masquerade: dancing around death in Nazi-occupied Hungary". > I know a lot about that story. You always know the NYC version of history. > It would be easy to group stereotype them as > predators according to your definition. But I don't stereotype any GROUP as predators! Gurstein does, and you didn't disagree with him. > They came with the marauders to > Jamestown and were not particularly moral but were particularly venal and > ignorant. They have been here from the first invasion and the only things > that's saved them is the benign image of chocolate which they stole from us. The fact that some of our scum was part of the first invasion (like the scum of other nations) doesn't say much about the Swiss who remained here. > I can be just as prejudiced, bigoted and stereotypical as you. Hello? Can you quote a single statement from me that is "prejudiced, bigoted and stereotypical"?? Your statements about "the Swiss" certainly are. > We do not have a good history with the Swiss. You don't have a good history with any nation, not even with other First Nations. But of course it's always easy to blame "the Swiss", which is chic especially in NYC. > 2. You missed the point completely about the "reality show". You missed it. > 3. Wealthy people have property. Apparatchics had no property and had only > a pension upon retirement. They also lost their connections. Are you kidding? Apparatchics had datchas, expensive cars, even hunting grounds (as Predators want), privileges, ... you name it. And many kept their connections. They're called turn-coats for a reason. > I see no > comparison at all except as technocrats they were paid better than others That's nonsense. A technology professor earned less than a taxi driver. The "techno" part didn't matter -- the apparatchik part did. > 4. Did the Swiss ever return those Gypsy Children they stole from their > families? Yep. Did the NYT ever notice that this practice wasn't limited to Switzerland at all (not even to Europe)? The Gypsies here drive around in Mercedes cars & mobile homes -- do the Cherokees too? (I guess most of them can't even afford a Jeep Cherokee.) > Should I stereotype all Swiss this way because of you and your comments > which I consider border on slander? Your claim is slander. Quote my statements of "stereotype". > I don't like talking the way I did above. You already talked that way long before I began talking of Predators. > Putting myself in another person's shoes is a foundational part of my > culture. Earlier, you claimed that people of your culture would immediately stop talking to me and walk away, and you just keep talking because you're a NYer. > When I assume the shoes of the person writing these posts to me, > it does not feel balanced somehow. You should think about that. First provide my quotes that justify your slander. Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
