Posted on 11/25/2004 12:16:30 PM PST by Destro
The Soros Family's Dance around Death
Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary
Tivadar Soros
Edited and translated from the Esperanto by Humphrey Tonkin
Forewords by Paul and George Soros Arcade Publishing
by Diana Simonds
Noted financier and philanthropist George Soros was a 13-year-old living in Budapest, Hungary, when the Nazis occupied the city in March 1944. Soros, a Jew, escaped death by assuming a new identity and disappearing from sight for the remainder of World War II. The story of the survival of the Soros family is told in Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary, a newly published, gripping account-an account that had gone largely unnoticed-written over 35 years ago in Esperanto by George's father, Tivadar Soros (1894-1968).
Now, Humphrey Tonkin, president emeritus of the University and currently University Professor of the Humanities, has translated the story into English, together with an account of the historical background and extensive notes. George Soros, who turned 71 in August, writes in the book's foreword, "I cannot be objective about this book. It deals with the formative period of my life, and it is written by my father who was the most important figure in my life at that time."
Among the passengers on the first train bringing top Nazi officials to Budapest was Adolf Eichmann, charged with applying the Final Solution in Hungary. Hungary's Jews until then had largely escaped the Nazis' clutches.
Tivadar Soros, whose survival skills had been honed as a prisoner of war in Siberia during World War I, concluded that the best way to avoid Eichmann and his accomplices was simply to disappear. As an attorney, he had access to legal papers, and he located contacts who were able to forge documents for him and his wife, Elizabeth; his sons, George and Paul; his mother-in-law; and many friends and clients. With new, Christian identities, they scattered and disappeared. George was lodged with a sympathetic Hungarian government official; his elder brother, Paul, rented a room elsewhere in Budapest. Elizabeth left for the country, and Tivadar took up residence in a secret room in an apartment building that, in happier days, he had owned.
Tivadar describes the harrowing final months before the arrival of the liberating but ill-disciplined Russians, when gangs of Fascist thugs roamed Budapest, Russian planes strafed the streets, and the retreating Nazis organized death marches to herd the remaining Jews toward the Austrian border. While estimates vary, by the end of the war, well over half a million Hungarian Jews had lost their lives. Perhaps 130,000 Jews, the Soros family among them, survived.
Before writing his memoir of the Nazi occupation, Tivadar Soros had long been literate in Esperanto, an international language created in the late 19th century and spoken today by a million or more enthusiasts. His interest began when he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Captured by the Russians, Tivadar escaped from prison camp and trekked through the Siberian mountains, making his way to Moscow in the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Here, he helped to establish the Soviet Esperanto Union. He later returned to Budapest, where he and two friends launched an Esperanto literary magazine and he published a memoir of World War I in Esperanto. After the end of World War II, Tivadar and George attended the 1947 World Esperanto Congress in Switzerland as part of the Hungarian delegation.
Tivadar fled Budapest in 1956, at the time of the failed Hungarian Revolution against the Communists, and emigrated to the United States. In 1965 he published an account of his World
War II experiences through a small Spanish publishing house specializing in books in Esperanto. Long out of print, the book was translated into English by Tonkin at the urging of the Soros family, particularly Flora Fraser, Paul Soros's daughter-in-law. She is a noted historian whose account of the life of Queen Caroline, George IV's notorious consort, was published in 1996. Tonkin, a linguistics scholar, knows Esperanto well and has published extensively on its history and background.
George's financial acumen may be traced in part to the ingenuity and risk-taking of his courageous father. His current interest in building democratic institutions in Central and Eastern Europe also has its beginnings in the idealism of Tivadar, who dreamed of a better world in which people would understand one another, perhaps through Esperanto. Tivadar's hope that people would learn to work together for freedom and dignity remained with him until the day he died, despite the agonies of two world wars and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary is published by Arcade Books, New York. The British edition, Maskerado, was released last year. London's Sunday Times carried excerpts on Sept. 24, 2000, and the Scottish publisher Canongate launched the book a week later. The next month, favorable reviews of Maskerado appeared in The Times and Sunday Telegraph. German, Russian, and Hungarian translations are in preparation, and a Turkish translation is out. A new edition of the Esperanto language original, edited by Humphrey Tonkin, was published in June of this year.
Once George called our president a Nazi, when he palpably is not, he lost all credibility with me. I just don't care what this jerk did or does or says.
Details please.
Strange Bedfellows: Bush and Soros Unite Against Georgia - Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated goal of ensuring that Mr. Bush is not re-elected in November.I don't agree with the conclusions and tone of the above articles but the facts are basically correct.Despite his professed desire to see President Bush turned out of the White House come November, Soros and Bush have some of the same friends—and some of the same goals, though they may differ on the means of achieving them. Consider Soros’ ties to James Baker, a member in good standing of the extended Bush political clan: Soros’ business partners at the Carlyle Group, in which Soros has reportedly invested more than $100 million, include the former secretary of state as well as George H.W. Bush. Baker himself is a lobbyist for Azeri oil interests.
Remember that Clinton, the ChiComs and Wal-Mart were all in bed together at the time, the later two having been major contributors to the 1996 reelection effort. Since China's economy was and is pegged to the U.S. dollar Soros got a two-fer-- (1)Huge profits on the currency contracts of the Tigers which he sold short, (2)Scaring the multinationals into accelerating the move to China since profits would be repatriated in a devalued currency rather than one pegged to the dollar.
thanks, it is that--interesting.
it seems he's interested in power, more than ideology.
Ping
Specifically, one of the Hungarian officials responsible for identifying Jews, expropriating their property, and giving their names to the Nazis. Young George collaborated in this effort - indeed, his knowledge of the Hungarian Jewish community substantially aided his "godfather" in the task of implementing the Endloesung: a period that Soros would later call "the happiest days of my life".
Soros fled Hungary in 1947 to escape just retribution at the hands of the post-war government.
Interestingly, the Soros' own family wealth survived. George's father, Tivador, forged himself new identity papers that said he was a Christian. He then sold the family real property and sequestered the money abroad. This later became the seed corn of Soros' current vast fortune.
Bump.
I read that article a while back and I didn't agree with the conclusions or tone, either. Saying Soros is invested in Carlyle Group has a significantly different connotation than saying he's G.H.W. Bush's business partner, IMO. The way I see it Soros and some Carlyle members like Baker have mutual business interests in supporting oil development in Azerbaijan, but those business interests function within a different geopolitical agenda for someone like Baker--who in this context largely represents the US oil lobby in its competition with Russian and European oil companies for a share in Caucasus oil development--as opposed to Soros, who has his own private agenda which is more oriented towards carving out a personal political base in the Caucasus--autonomous from both US and Russian control--so he (and whoever his silent partners are) can dominate the oil industry there. IMO Soros' geopolitical agenda seems to coincide less closely with Bush or Baker's than with another Carlyle player, Brent Scowcroft, who was more on the same page with Soros during the debate over Iraq and during the 2004 election.
So the moral of the story is his father cut and ran breaking up the family instead of defending it?
Wages in Thailand, particularly with the devalued baht, are only slightly less than in China. However, Thai workers expect better treatment, shorter hours, the right to unionize, etc. You know, all those things that cut into the profits of people like Soros.
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