My father cooked food for Nazis in Auschwitz. Was he a collaborator?
No, he was a fortunate survivor. He was lucky enough to have a skill that the Nazis deemed "important". I had an uncle who also survived a few camps because he was a tailor. His wife and son, who had no such usable skills, were sent to the showers.
Soros was NOT in a concentration camp, doing what he could to survive the gas chamber. Maybe he was on the streets doing what he could to avoid the camps, but in his own words, he showed no remorse nor regret over what he had done. If your father was like my uncle, he was thankful for having survived, but never quite got over the horrors of the camps.
Then again, my uncle became a life-long Red Sox fan when he came to the US in the 1950s, so I guess he did serve some kind of penance :).
Did he have a choice?
I think the actions speak for themselves.
It is one thing to cook (passively working), and another thing entirely to actively separate people from their property (according to him, only he knows the true level of his activity) and send them to their deaths, even as a juvenile.
We understand “him or me” self preservation but there is another level where one goes from passively working to actively participating.
Nazis ate food cooked by Jews? Kosher?