Eva Hoffman

GEORGE SOROS IS A MONUMENTAL FIGURE whose outsize dimensions can be measured in many ways: in the sheer size of his fortune, in the international impact of his human rights and pro-democracy work, and in the success of the various causes he has supported.

All this we more or less know. But what do we know of George Soros as a person? Is it possible to envisage him as a child, or an adolescent boy? I doubt that many people’s imagination would extend that far. Like many world-famous figures, Soros, to those who don’t know him personally, is a kind of abstraction, or a brand, rather than a living, breathing, emotionally complicated (as which one of us is not?) human being.

And yet, of course, George Soros was once a child; and as it happens, his childhood was extremely eventful. It was also—and for more than personal reasons—powerfully formative. Soros was born in Budapest in 1930; when World War II broke out he was nine years old. During the months of 1944–45, when Hungary was invaded and occupied by Germany, he turned fourteen. For those who are at all acquainted with the course of World War II, these dates speak volumes. They mean that George’s childhood and early adolescence coincided with the most cataclysmic event of the twentieth century, which, moreover, wrought its greatest ravages in Eastern Europe, and particularly to its Jewish populations. And yet, several decades later, in his foreword to Masquerade, his father’s memoir of those years, George Soros, reflecting on his wartime childhood and particularly its most dangerous period, wrote, “It is a sacrilegious thing to say, but these ten months were the happiest times of my life. We were pursued by evil forces and we were clearly on the side of the angels because we were unjustly persecuted; moreover, we were trying not only to save ourselves, but also to save others. … What more could a fourteen-year-old want?”¹

Later still, when I asked ninety-year-old George (during a COVID-bound Zoom conversation) if he still stood by those startling sentences, his first response was to joke that his memory isn’t very good anymore, and that he “only remembers the future.” “I think more about the future,” he added. “And also, I happen to be very happy now.” To hear this from a person of his age is wonderfully inspiriting—even inspiring—and it is possible that his capacity for happiness was also seeded in his early years. Eventually, George said that he stood by his “sacrilegious” statement; and I think those sentences about his wartime childhood provide quite a few clues to who he is and who he has become.

For those who lived through World War II, and especially through the Holocaust, that experience of ultimate danger and survival affected everything that came after: personal fate, inner life, views of the world, and the shape of character. This was true for George and his older brother, Paul, no less than for their parents. But for all of them, there was life before, which had its shaping influences as well. It is perhaps hard for most of us to imagine life in “the Other Europe” in the early part of the twentieth century; but prewar Budapest, where Paul and George grew up, and where their parents spent a good portion of their lives, was a beautiful Mitteleuropean city, situated on two sides of the Danube, its former grandeur as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire inscribed in its splendidly ornate parliament building, its long and complex history readable in its many monuments, its epicurean character palpable in its luxuriant public baths and in its many cafes, which especially before the war were sites of intimate conversation and lively political discussion.

Prewar Mitteleuropa was a much less puritan or work-driven part of Europe than its Western regions, never mind North America. It was also home to highly sophisticated cultures. In his own memoir, written in America in the 1990s, Paul Soros, born four years before George, remembers that in the city of his youth, despite “the hateful undercurrents” of nationalist chauvinism and anti-Semitism, “political discourse, literature and sports flourished, as did theatre, music, opera, in a cosmopolitan atmosphere that, despite our best efforts and greater material resources, we were not able to match for our children.”²

Culture matters—and Tivadar Soros, George’s father, was a very Mitteleuropean personality. He was a lawyer by training, multilingual, worldly, well read, and well informed; but by the time the 1930s came around, he had forsworn hard work and spent much of his time in those pleasant baths and cafes, eating delicious pastries in good company, and undoubtedly flirting as well. This was true of many Hungarians of his class and financial means; but as George pointed out in conversation, in Tivadar’s case there was an important difference: before his turn to this easy-going lifestyle, his father had lived through his own life-changing experiences of extreme danger and survival.

These are worth dwelling on, if only because of their impact both on Tivadar’s actions during World War II and on George’s imagination and later attitudes. In condensed summary, Tivadar’s time of trial followed on his volunteering to fight in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. He apparently took this step not out of patriotism, but because he didn’t want to miss out on the adventure. But if adventure was his aim, he eventually got more of it than he bargained for. After a period of relatively easygoing soldiering, he was captured by the Russians and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. While there, he managed, rather amazingly, to publish a newspaper called The Plank; he also used the time to bolster his knowledge of Esperanto, a “universal” language invented at the end of the nineteenth century, which became the lingua franca of various international movements. Tivadar would remain engaged in the Esperanto movement and its publishing house until late in his own life; Masquerade was first written in that language. George’s internationalist tendencies had good family precedents.

Tivadar’s period of captivity, however, also included more grimly instructive incidents. During his internment, he witnessed the execution of a “prisoners’ representative” after some captives managed to escape. This led to his refusal to accept such a position himself, and to the lesson—very useful during the war to come—that it doesn’t always pay to be prominent. Instead, realizing that the situation was increasingly hopeless, he proceeded to organize a mass escape. This involved travel by “train, raft, mule, and pony”³ and an unfortunate geographical mistake, which meant that for a while, the escapees found themselves unintentionally headed toward the Arctic Ocean. Once they reversed tracks, Tivadar’s journey home took several months and involved various dangers and privations, possibly including torture; but eventually he made his way to Moscow—by that time, the capital of postrevolutionary Russia—and then, through further guile and deception, back to Hungary.

One can easily imagine the impact such true tales of danger and derring-do had on the impressionable young minds of his sons. As George put it in his foreword, “I learned the art of survival from a grand master.”⁴ World War I, Esperanto, and his father’s adventures were part of George’s prehistory—even if they were deeply internalized and vividly present in his imagination. But for Tivadar, these were apparently adventures enough. In George’s view, his father, after living through the Russian revolution, came back a changed man. Before his escapades, he was apparently an ambitious young man, trained as a lawyer and eager to achieve great things; afterward, he was simply happy to be alive. He decided to devote himself to enjoying life rather than to more conventional achievements—especially since money didn’t seem to matter to him very much. In his foreword, George says that his father was the only man he knew “who systematically decumulated his assets.”⁵ Mind you, much later, George did something analogous, on a much larger scale, when he decided to stop devoting himself to making money and to dedicate his time to worthwhile causes instead. That was when he was already very much his own man; but perhaps one can discern his father’s influence in this radical and highly unusual step as well.

Tivadar’s easygoing lifestyle was greatly facilitated by marriage to his second cousin, Erzebet Szucs, whom he met when she was just sixteen. Marriages of such close relations may seem unusual or even dubious to us today, but in that earlier age, and especially among Jewish families, they were not uncommon. Erzebet was ten years younger than Tivadar, and, according to her oral memoirs, fell in love with him at first sight, giving up her ambition to acquire a college education in order to enter into a relationship with him. She was a very different character from Tivadar: quite timid, given to spiritualist tendencies, and suffering from nervous states and occasional ulcers. She also brought to the marriage considerable material assets. Her father, Mor Szucs, was a successful businessman until he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at a late age, nurturing the unfounded conviction that his wife was unfaithful to him with his business partner. Given his state, he could no longer manage his wealth. Instead, Tivadar was put in charge of his businesses, which included a famous fabric shop as well as properties in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin; he received a management fee for various transactions and accumulated a very satisfactory income without putting in too many working hours.

This too was part of George’s significant history. His own story began in the interval between the wars, with what can fairly be described as a happy childhood. His earliest years don’t seem to have been marked by any unusual drama, but one important event occurred in 1936, when he was six years old, and his parents decided to change the family name from Schwartz to “Soros.” This was not an uncommon practice among educated and assimilated (or at least acculturated) Hungarian Jews; but it is also possible that Tivadar stayed alert to worrying developments in Germany and that his decision was driven by a sense of potential danger. In 1936, anti-Jewish laws had not yet been enacted in Hungary, but Tivadar, who was multilingual and politically savvy, listened to the BBC’s German broadcasts, and probably read newspapers in German as well as Hungarian (perhaps in those sociable cafes, where newspapers were kept on hand for customers). Most of all, he knew how to read the signs of the times. If George could say, several decades later, that his family was different in its attitudes from other Hungarian Jews—in ways that soon came to have crucial consequences—this was because of Tivadar’s Russian education, and what it taught him about totalitarian systems. He undoubtedly followed the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, and was aware that the infamous summer Olympics that year took place under the sign of the swastika. In another vein, Erzebet argued for a name change as well, so that her sons would not be stigmatized, especially since George was beginning school that year. The choice of the particular name might have had some added significance. “Soros” means “next in line” in Hungarian, and possibly indicated a symbolic passing of the baton by Tivadar to his sons. In addition, Tivadar would have known that in Esperanto, the word “soros” is the future tense of the verb “to soar”—a connotation that undoubtedly appealed to him.

Apart from such serious events, life for George and his older brother in their early years was easygoing, pleasurable, and full of vigorous physical activities. In the 1930s, the family spent their summers on Lupa Island, an outcropping on the Danube just outside Budapest that could be reached only by water, and which featured a small number of summer cottages, about half of them owned by middle-class, acculturated Jewish families. The Soros “cottage” was a small but striking, Bauhaus-style villa, designed by the well-known architect Gyorgi Farkas, who was a family friend. There were two tennis courts established on the island at Tivadar’s initiative, where George probably acquired his passion for tennis (at the age of ninety, he still plays three times a week), and his parents had a small stand where they sold coffee and pastries, which became popular with the island’s vacationers and the numerous rowers who passed alongside the island. (Erzebet was trained in making Gerbeaud pastries, made famous by a renowned Budapest cafe.) George spent a lot of time kayaking in the Danube, and he and Paul were allowed to swim in the deep river by themselves from an early age, to the surprise of many onlookers.

But apparently, leisure and pleasure were not sufficient for George, and in an endearingly childish version, he began to show philanthropic tendencies early on. While vacationing on the island, he established a newspaper called Lupa News, and according to a local reminiscence by a rather more conventional journalist, dated December 1939, nine-year-old George was this publication’s author, editor, reporter, and distributor, using his earnings from its sales to contribute to worthy causes. In the journalist’s account, the “apple-faced smiling little guest” visited his quarters in order to donate money “to the Finns. They are fighting a freedom fight now, Daddy said.”⁶ Whether Daddy also suggested the donation is not recorded in the annals of history, but his influence on George was clearly discernible in this gesture.

Perhaps one can also discern early signs of George’s business instincts (as well as his self-confidence) in an anecdote recounted to Tivadar by a stationery shop owner in Budapest and recorded in Erzebet’s later recollections. After coming into the store one day, George looked around and decided that the goods were not displayed to the best advantage. He then proceeded to advise the rather astonished shop owner on how to rearrange things—advice which the man apparently followed and did not regret.

On Lupa Island, Tivadar played with his own and other children as if he were one of them. He invented a cry—“Papuuaa!”—by which they could summon each other, as if they were brave Indian warriors. He also recounted an ongoing story—a sort of children’s serial—called “Amosarega,” about a miraculous machine whose name combined beginnings of the words for “airplane,” “motorcycle,” “car,” and “garage,” and which could be magically converted into any of these things. According to an account by Michael Kaufman in his biography of George Soros, “Tivadar would, for example, inform the boys that he had received a call from Mahatma Gandhi in India who, it seemed, needed their help. In that case, as he told it, he and the brothers first flew to Central Asia and then, after turning Amosarega into a car, drove over the Hindu Kush, talking their way out of difficulties among the fierce Pathans as they headed toward their rendezvous with Gandhi.”⁷ Such tales kept his young listeners in a state of enchantment and, without any overt didacticism, provided incidental lessons in geography and important issues of the day.

Of course, no idyll is complete without its difficulties. Aside from play and pleasure, there was, during George’s childhood, a webwork of less overt family relations, and these were—the word follows almost inevitably—complicated. In her later reminiscences, recorded in a long interview, Erzebet was full of wonder at Tivadar’s love of his children, from babyhood on. “I’ve never seen a man love babies so much,” she said, describing her husband as being almost more maternal than she was.⁸ He loved to hold his baby sons, to play with them and, later, to teach them and guide them. And yet, many decades later, the ninety-year-old George touchingly remembered that, as a child, he felt his father didn’t love him enough. “I never understood why he liked my brother more than me,” he said. “He was the favorite.” Paul, according to George’s reminiscences, was the forceful personality, the one who merited their father’s attention. Was this simply sibling rivalry, and the younger child’s almost inevitable insecurity? Probably—and George eventually became convinced that he was much loved by his father as well. Still, it is testimony to the depth of those earliest emotions that they continued to thread their way through George’s psyche for so long—and in the face of so much contradictory experience and information.

Reinforcing this picture, there are George’s remarks in the afterword to his brother’s memoir, published in 2006. “Let me add some of my own reminiscences,” George wrote. “As children we were not on the best of terms. He liked to torture me. I would complain to my parents but they would ignore my complaints for lack of independent evidence. This was my first encounter with injustice in the world and it must have played a role in shaping the objectives of my foundation; we took a strong stand against torture.”⁹ This is even more astonishing: that George, in his later years, could trace the roots of his important political ideas and his morally informed stand against torture to childish scare games is, again, testimony to the force of early feelings—or perhaps George’s unusual ability to understand the relationship between his subjectivity and his values.

The resentment George felt toward his older brother did not go unreciprocated. Paul wasn’t at all happy about the arrival of a younger brother on the scene when he was four years old, and throughout their childhood years he continued to regard George as something of a nuisance. Eventually, however, brotherly relations improved. “I thought I would never forgive him,” George continues his afterword, “but Paul, being the torturer, did not hold any grudges against me. When I left Hungary for good at age 17, Paul gave me his best, green flannel suit. I was touched. He has been a good brother ever since.”¹⁰

That was later; but when they were growing up, there was, aside from brotherly rivalries, a division of parental attachments. In her reminiscences, Erzebet told her interviewer that George “got very much love from me because it was easy to love him. He was not resisting or stubborn like Paul.”¹¹ During boat trips or their frequent ski excursions, George always ended up staying close to her, while Paul accompanied Tivadar. These weren’t planned decisions, she adds, but somehow it seemed to happen. George, recollecting this in conversation, confirmed that his older brother had an uneasy relationship with his mother. Erzebet, he said, was “very didactic”; and Paul, being a strong-willed and tough kid, resented this. “I was much more malleable,” George said. “I considered myself a softie.”

But if he had a good relationship with his mother, he positively “adored” his father. “Mother also adored him,” he added. Tivadar’s philosophy of child-rearing was the opposite of Erzebet’s: it was to instill strong principles in his sons, while leaving them maximum autonomy—and perhaps this allowed George to differ from his father on one important matter, which was the way in which Tivadar treated Erzebet. George was apparently aware, even at a young age, of his father’s flirtatious and perhaps philandering tendencies. In conversation, he recalled that he once saw his father walking arm in arm with a young woman, which was disconcerting. And when a family friend asked young George, “What kind of a man is your father?,” George replied that he was “a married bachelor.” For an adult, such a reply would have been witty and slightly damning; but for a young child, it surely suggested not only precocious perceptiveness, but some unease.

Erzebet, in her reminiscences, remembers that George was very upset when his parents had fights; even several decades later, he recalled an incident in which his mother, in a fit of anger, set off in a rowboat by herself. George went after her and brought her back. Speaking to his biographer, Michael Kaufman, about this, George said that “I expressed it at the time to my parents, saying I loved them both—but I really disapproved of my father for the way he treated my mother. … There were big fights between them. And there was sexual tension.”¹² For a young child, this was both unusually sensitive, and courageous; in our conversation, George told me candidly that he struggled with the question of his father’s character—and whether he was a strong or a weak man—for quite a while. His doubts sprang from his suspicion that Tivadar married Erzebet not for love but because her family’s properties enabled his easygoing lifestyle. George’s skepticism ceased when he witnessed his father’s tireless efforts to protect his family in time of great danger; but his ability to question and criticize his adored father implies a strong sense of personal morality, from which a more developed ethics can grow.

Whatever the complexities of marital relations, Erzebet’s own most vivid memories from the prewar period are of family excursions, particularly in Germany or the Austrian mountains, which she recollected as occasions of pure pleasure. The whole family loved to ski, and Paul later took it up as a competitive sport. It’s unclear when George began skiing, but from early on, he was enchanted by the beauty of mountainous landscapes. “That’s God’s mountain!” Erzebet remembers him saying, as he contemplated a snow-covered peak—a lovely observation for a child to make. In 1938, however, a trip to Germany delivered an upsetting revelation. In a pub where they stepped in for a drink, there was a big sign: “NO JEWS ALLOWED.” Erzebet’s reaction is worth quoting: “I wanted to turn my back and go out; it was a terrible feeling. Institutionalized: No Jews Allowed. And Tivadar said, ‘You are a foreigner, that’s not for you.’ But it was a terrible feeling so we didn’t stay, just two or three days I think.”¹³

The incident was a foreshadowing of things to come all too soon in Hungary itself. The Hungarian experience of World War II was exceptionally complicated, and, in its last phases, exceptionally appalling. In the 1930s, the Kingdom of Hungary, as it was then known, relied on trade with the future Axis powers of Italy and Germany for recovery from the global Great Depression, and for help in settling some territorial disputes—a matter of great importance for a country that, after World War I, lost the greater part of its territory in the Treaty of Trianon, a settlement imposed on it by the Allies and long remembered as the “Trianon trauma.” In 1940, partly because of its geopolitical situation, and in the hopes of recovering some of its lost territory, Hungary entered into an alliance with the Axis powers. The pact was negotiated by the prime minister, Béla Imrédy, apparently with some initial reluctance. But there were also early signs that when required, the Hungarians proved themselves to be very willing executioners. In 1941, when Hungarian forces participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, their exceptional cruelty was noted even by German observers. For other Hungarians, however, the compromises involved in the pact were unacceptable; and the country’s subsequent prime minister, Count Pál Teleki, killed himself not long afterward.

Neither Teleki, however, nor any other politicians were willing to protect Hungarian Jews from the country’s increasingly vicious anti-Semitism. In 1938, the first “Jewish laws” were enacted, granting citizenship only to those who could prove that they were resident in Hungary before 1914. Severe quotas were imposed on Jews in certain professions; and in order to continue practicing law, Tivadar was required to recruit a non-Jewish partner for his office. In 1941, when George began high school (adopting an option which allowed such early entry), Jewish pupils were segregated in separate classes; in the same year, Paul had to transfer to a newly established all-Jewish school.

Anti-Semitism was now not only a matter of personal prejudices—it was, in Erzebet’s perceptive word, institutionalized; and that made all the difference. How people feel or what they say in the privacy of their homes is one thing; what they are permitted to do by law or official encouragement is quite another. Not many Jewish citizens of Hungary could provide proof of long-term residence, since there was no need for such documents in the decades and centuries before—and the consequences were dire. In 1941, several thousand Hungarian Jews were deported from the countryside to the Ukraine, where atrocities had already begun. Indeed, they were probably among the earliest groups of people subjected to methods of persecution and mass murder, which we have come to know as the Holocaust. In a rare instance of what we might call denial—or at least, a refusal to face facts head-on—Tivadar, in his autobiography, acknowledges that “untouched directly by such calamities, we felt that we were somehow above them. Our final line of defence was not to believe that such barbarisms were happening at all.”¹⁴

Of course, even if Tivadar and others had confronted such facts squarely, they could not have done very much about them. The denial was undoubtedly reinforced by the odd atmosphere of simultaneous menace and normalcy that, after the initial burst of murderous cruelty, prevailed in Hungary until 1944.

This was, paradoxically, the effect of the pro-Axis alliance, which meant that until 1944 Hungary did not suffer war on its territory. Indeed, for most of its inhabitants, it remained a relatively safe country, in which life could continue uninterrupted—if, for the Jewish part of the population, hardly undisturbed. From the beginning of the war, the atmosphere of anti-Semitism, especially among the part of the population belonging to the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, was becoming more toxic, and its expressions more routine. Still, in Budapest itself there were, as yet, no active persecutions or violence directed at the Jewish population. For the Soros family and their friends, there were bridge games every Sunday, maids in spacious apartments, meetings with friends in cafes, and the sense, deriving perhaps from middle-class complacency, that nothing terrible would happen to them.

It is evidence of the odd normalcy in abnormal times that, in 1943, George decided to go through the Jewish ceremony of initiation into adulthood—a bar mitzvah. His decision was entirely self-motivated; certainly his father, with his policy of giving maximum autonomy to his children, did not steer him in this direction. Having grown up in an earlier generation, Tivadar was closer to traditional Jewish life, and more aware of its customs and habits—as well as the ubiquitous Jewish jokes, some of which he offers in a chapter of Masquerade called “A Little Jewish Philosophy”—but he was not himself religious in any conventional sense. Indeed, he was apparently quite syncretic in his spiritual readings, which included the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, a book called The Story of Christ, and Martin Buber’s Jewish Legends. As for Erzebet, she was actively opposed to any display of Jewishness, although she had spiritualist tendencies of a rather occult sort.

George’s decision to undertake the studies necessary for a bar mitzvah was all the more surprising since he was apparently a middling student during his high-school years—perhaps paradoxically because of his self-confidence rather than its lack. He simply didn’t care very much and clearly didn’t think his fate would depend on good grades. But he was initiated into several languages, including German, English, and French, as well as some Latin and Esperanto. If this seems quite exceptional to us, it probably wasn’t so for Hungarians of his social class. Hungarian does not belong to any of the major categories of European languages and is extremely difficult for foreigners to learn. Therefore, educated Hungarians have had to learn other languages—which, in my experience, they pick up with impressive ease. George also wrote stories and poems throughout his early years, which suggests an active inner life and a drive to express it, or perhaps make sense of it.

Hebrew, however, was not among the languages included in his school curriculum, and he attended Hebrew classes on his own initiative. His bar mitzvah did not include the extensive rituals or parties we now associate with such events, but took place in an almost empty synagogue, where he read the appropriate section of scripture and was formally initiated into male Jewish adulthood.

In long retrospect, George said his decision was prompted by a brief but intense period of interest in spiritual matters. He thought a lot in those days about the ultimate questions of death and the meaning of existence—which, he added, seemed to him natural for someone his age. It undoubtedly was; but given the circumstances, translating such interests into practice was a strong gesture. Clearly, even at a young age, George felt an impetus to give his inner convictions expression and meaningful enactment, something that can be discerned in his later humanitarian and political work.

George decided to have his bar mitzvah at a time when it was still relatively safe to do so; but not long after, everything changed, changed utterly. In March 1944, Hitler summoned Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, for a conversation in which he informed the country’s ruler that Hungary’s allied status no longer held and that Germany intended to occupy Hungarian territory. No armed resistance was possible, not only because the Germans were so much stronger, but also because a faction of the Hungarian government itself was pro-Nazi. Tivadar, like most others, learned about this startling turn of events from the news, but initially it was difficult to appraise its implications. On the Sunday when the announcement was made, the weekly bridge game went on as usual, although the latest developments were the subject of lively discussion as well as some indignation about the lack of resistance on Horthy’s part.

Soon after, however, the informal grapevine delivered more shocking news. Even as the bridge game was in progress, it was learned that prominent politicians and journalists (presumably of a more liberal or left-wing persuasion) had been arrested, and that Polish refugees—undoubtedly trying to flee from their deeper circles of the inferno—were to be deported. After the guests left, Tivadar turned from the Hungarian radio, which continued with its usual fare of light music, to the BBC’s transmission from London, where the occupation of Hungary was the lead story—apparently, delivered in several languages. On the radio, this sounded like just another news item; but he immediately grasped something that many others—for far too long—didn’t. “I had the feeling,” he wrote in his memoir, “that no radio could convey the real news—the death sentence of a million Jews.” There was also a broadcast from US president Franklin D. Roosevelt appealing to Hungarians to help Jewish people in the face of the collective death threat that Nazi occupation clearly spelled for them. Given the ambiguous role the United States played in the Holocaust—its refusal to take in refugees, or to intervene—it is striking that Tivadar felt this was a “poignant and human statement, the first touch of humanity I had heard all day.”¹⁵

By the time of the Nazi invasion, the Allied powers were pressing Hungary to end its Axis pact and to do more to protect its Jewish population; but it was too little too late. In an expressive phrase used by George, the progress of the Holocaust in Hungary is difficult to understand, because—in contrast to events in Poland, for example—it happened in a sudden “crescendo” of violence in the final year of the war. Indeed, reading about the speed of change from seeming normalcy to mass murder, about the relentless determination of the leading Nazis to complete the process of extermination in Hungary with ruthless efficiency, and about the cooperation of numerous Hungarians in carrying out this gruesome task is—even after all that we now know of the Holocaust—horrifying to the point of implausibility. It’s difficult to take in. Perhaps it is no wonder that many ordinary, upstanding Jewish citizens were unprepared to deal with the events. Of course, news of the horrors that had been unfolding in Poland since the war’s beginnings had reached people in Hungary, but if Tivadar chose to ignore such developments, then so, undoubtedly, did everyone else. Hungary’s Axis alliance also contributed to creating a false sense of safety; that, after all, was its point. And indeed, even on the evening of the Nazi takeover, events were happening only on the radio. Budapest itself remained quiet, with no invading armies in sight.

Tivadar, however, aside from his grasp of the news’ terrible implications, understood something that many others didn’t: he knew that he needed to be afraid. This may seem paradoxical, but a sense of danger and its realistic appraisal was, at that terrible time, crucial to survival. It meant that, at least, you could try to make provisions to protect yourself. In Tivadar’s case, the instinct for danger was honed during his Russian captivity and escape, and although in Masquerade he says that on the day when the Nazi invasion was announced he didn’t want to appear “afraid or defeatist,” he tried to convey to his family the perils they were facing and the need to protect themselves. As we contemplate the Holocaust from our long distance, and with all the retrospective knowledge of the range of responses to that atrocity, I think it should go without saying that Tivadar’s grasp of ultimate danger, and his fear in the face of it, was not a sign of cowardice but, on the contrary, of a wiser courage.

The grip of fear, however, was followed by a cool-headed appraisal of the new situation and what it meant for him and his family. In long retrospect, what George found admirable about his father during the time of utmost danger was that he “managed to overcome his fears—and to appear fearless; to make it a happy experience for us.” “Happy,” once again, may seem like an incongruous word, but to clarify, George added that even if his father sometimes felt fear himself, “he managed to give me the sense he knew what he was doing—that I was in safe hands—and this gave me a sense of happiness.” Perhaps also the sense of safety provided by his father’s protection allowed George to feel that facing danger was his own adventure; his own great game.

For Tivadar, however, there were literally life-and-death decisions to be made. After considering several possibilities, he decided that the only way to save himself and his family was to disguise their identities and to live as non-Jews. This decision was indirectly aided by the actions of the Jewish Council, set up by the Germans immediately after the invasion and consisting of Jewish community leaders. The role of Jewish Councils in the Holocaust has been a much-debated subject—and none has come under more scrutiny or criticism than the one established in 1944 in Budapest. These organizations were created in effect to act as representatives of the Nazi authorities within Jewish communities, and to make the new rulers’ work easier. The leaders of such bodies were faced with agonizing decisions about which actions would save—or lose—the greatest number of lives; but in Budapest, the council’s leaders complied with the Nazi orders all too eagerly, in the hope of saving themselves and their families. In Masquerade, Tivadar states his views on this sorry episode unequivocally. “When systematic persecution of Jews began,” he writes, “it was carried out not by the Germans, nor by their Hungarian lackeys, but—most astonishingly—by the Jews themselves. … There was nothing the Germans could request that they were not ready, without a second’s thought, to provide.”¹⁶

George had his own brief encounter with the council, when he was required by its representative to deliver a “summons” to addresses housing Jewish inhabitants, ordering them to report to a “Rabbinical Seminary” with a blanket and food for two days. When Tivadar asked his son if he knew what this meant for the people responding to the summons, George responded that he thought they would be interned. This was perceptive, although he could not yet understand what might follow from internment; Tivadar, however, could, and he instructed George to deliver the summons, but to tell people not to obey the order.

But the tragic fact was that people did obey—including large numbers of Jewish lawyers, who subsequently perished in concentration camps. The habit of trusting official authorities was apparently deeply ingrained, but the collusion of the Budapest Jewish Council with the Nazis enabled and aided this, with awful consequences. Indeed, the role of the Council seems even more dubious in retrospect, as information about a document called the Vrba-Wetzler Report has come to light. This eyewitness account by two escaped inmates from Auschwitz described what was taking place in that concentration camp, including details of the gas chambers. Some decades after the war, a former employee of the Council, Gyorgi Klein, wrote that he saw the report when it was delivered to his boss in 1944. After reading it, he managed to avoid boarding a train which would have taken him to Auschwitz. The Council, however, did not tell the Jewish community about the report—probably for fear of losing favor with their Nazi overseers. When I talked about this with George, he said, in a tone that suggested the gravity of what he was saying, that “this was a tragedy of the Holocaust,” since the Jews who went along with the Council’s directives were in a sense “willing victims”—a real tragedy, he added, that was very difficult to articulate. Indeed, in the aftermath of traumatic histories, shame and humiliation are the most difficult emotions to contend with.

Tivadar’s own well-justified anger at the Jewish Council never subsided, and he had no intention of answering its summons, or indeed waiting for it to reach him. Instead, he proceeded to find ways to provide false identity papers for various family members. He had no doubt about the rightness and the necessity of such a decision; and yet he felt that if he was going to follow it through, he needed to address “the moral problem of breaking the law.” His reflections on this are worth quoting: “I felt fully entitled, morally and legally, to disobey the state when it threatened me unjustifiably,” he says in his memoir, and then goes on to extend moral questions to the international order. “Not only does every state have a right to intervene in the internal affairs of another state if that state violates fundamental human rights, but it has a moral responsibility to do so. … We all of us have an obligation to help the helpless when their human rights are violated and when atrocities are perpetrated against them.”¹⁷ Undoubtedly, such reflections were prompted by the failure of the Allies to come to the aid of less powerful countries, or to intervene in the horrors of the Holocaust. And surely one can see the influence of Tivadar’s ideas on George’s later activities—most notably the Open Society Foundations, which were established within authoritarian states to enable oppositional free expression and sometimes action. In conversation, George reiterated that his father “wanted me to form my own views.” And yet, he added, “I am his faithful copy.”

Following the Nazi betrayal, events unfolded with lightning speed. When Germany occupied Hungary, the invading troops included a division led by Adolf Eichmann, who arrived there to supervise the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. To cite just one terrible statistic, between mid-May and the beginning of July 1944, more than 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in gas chambers. Historians have apparently wondered at the pace of the transports, given the gruesome fact that the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz were already struggling to cope with the numbers of inmates to be “processed,” and that the war was clearly drawing to a close. But surely, that was precisely why the “crescendo” of the Hungarian Holocaust gathered its speed and pitch: Eichmann and his fellow executioners wanted to finish the job before it was, from their point of view, too late.

Initially, the situation was worst in the countryside, where ghettos were set up immediately as gathering places for deportation to Auschwitz. Tivadar had reports of these events from people who had managed to escape, and he says that he felt them deeply. He also noted the spate of suicides that took place immediately after the Nazi takeover, and the instant rise in denunciations of Jews. And yet Masquerade mostly reads more like a suspenseful thriller than a narrative of traumatic events.

Throughout the terrible period following the invasion, Tivadar continued to search for ways of protecting his family from discovery as Jews. This involved two basic strategies: creating or finding hiding places, and obtaining papers to prove non-Jewish identities for each of his family members, and in some cases, for other people as well. (George estimates that Tivadar may have helped about fifty people in these ways.) The task of obtaining false but credible identity papers for people of different ages and genders involved a gesture of goodwill from a manager of a property Tivadar administered, who provided an initial set of personal documents—as well as some failed attempts—but eventually, Tivadar’s search brought him in contact with a forger of genius who was willing and able to provide perfectly plausible papers for all the members of the Soros family, and a few friends as well.

Once convincing papers were obtained, Tivadar decided that various family members would live in different places to minimize chances of discovery. In some cases, this involved approaching people whom he knew—for example, the building manager who had given him the identity documents—and trusting them not to betray their Jewish tenants, even if they were aware of their real identities. Approaching such potential helpers in the first place involved a degree of risk; but Tivadar was a quick and discerning judge of people’s character. He often made instant and instinctive decisions about whom to trust—and who might prove unreliable or buckle under the strain. Fortunately, he never made major mistakes.

Eventually, Tivadar decided to live in the building whose manager he knew well, and which he chose partly—even then!—for its proximity to a good restaurant and convenient access to a swimming pool (where he continued to meet his sons throughout the next months). He also found a roommate named Lajos Kozma who happened to be one of the most renowned architects in Hungary, and the two converted their living quarters into a well-designed hiding place.

Aside from providing family members with false identities, Tivadar decided that it was safer for them to live separately. George, through the mediation of a barber who was fond of him (he seemed to have a talent for endearing himself to people), was placed with a man named Baufluss, who was officially assigned by the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture to provide inventories of confiscated Jewish estates. Baufluss (who had a Jewish wife) was mostly away from Budapest, leaving George unhappily alone. On one occasion, realizing that his fourteen-year-old charge was having a hard time, he took George along on a trip to the countryside, where he was working on a very grand estate of a Jewish aristocrat who preferred to leave with his family and his life, rather than preserve all his wealth. While there, Baufluss even allowed George to ride horses around the estate. (Several decades later, this was the source of a bizarre CBS television program in which George Soros—by that time a renowned figure, as well as the target of exceptionally vicious anti-Semitism—was accused of helping the Nazis to confiscate Jewish property. Needless to say, George was entirely baffled by this line of attack, but the baseless charge was repeated on a number of occasions in the fringe right-wing media, to George’s great dismay.)

Paul decided early on not to respond to his draft notice when he reached the age of eighteen—a decision that Tivadar typically left up to him, and which turned out to be possibly life-saving, as many young recruits, including one of Paul’s close friends, never came back. Instead, he found more or less satisfactory flats for himself. The member of the family whom it was most difficult to protect was Erzebet’s aging mother, whose response typified an extreme form of denial. She did not believe that the occupiers were doing anything more than moving people from place to place, or that deportations culminated in the gas chambers. “Such things simply aren’t possible,” she said, and Tivadar notes that in some sense she was right: such things shouldn’t be possible. She did, for a while, accept being placed in a hotel, but after several weeks she came back to her apartment, claiming that she wanted to clean it out. She eventually accepted a safer place in a building where she knew some people, but Tivadar suspected that her visit to the apartment was to protect her furniture and other possessions—a motive he saw in others as well, and of which he was rather scornful, especially when it led to greater dangers.

But it was Erzebet, the most psychologically fragile member of the family, who had the closest brush with danger. She was living in a suburban country cottage under a pseudonym when she was visited and interrogated by two policemen. Given her proneness to nervous states, she might well have succumbed to anxiety, or even panic. But instead, she entered a state often described by people who have experienced moments of deadly danger: in her recollections, she said that it was as if she were standing beside or above herself, observing what was going on with almost preternatural serenity. She calmly answered all the questions put to her, in accordance with her false identity papers, and allowed the increasingly flustered policemen to inspect her premises, watching them as they struggled to fill out a report on their visit—after which, with some apologies, they left. Later, she said that this was her own finest hour. She passed the hardest of tests with flying colors and was proud of it. Not that she could maintain this state for long—this is also well known from accounts of extreme experiences—but it’s possible that she became less afraid of being afraid. After moving to another location near Lake Balaton, partly to be close to a young woman she was fond of, she even delivered a message alerting another person of danger; but her stay there was mostly safe and included some bucolic moments of mushroom picking and other rural activities.

In fact, Erzebet’s descriptions of life in the countryside led George to decide that he would like to live there as well, and he moved to a place nearby—although, following Tivadar’s principle of family separation, he stayed in a different location. Neither of them was informed on, or met with immediate danger in subsequent months, but being Jewish required constant alertness. When members of the family did meet in public places, they addressed each other by their pseudonymous names, and when George fell ill with tonsillitis, his mother judged it too dangerous to summon the local doctor since he was a member of the Arrow Cross—and in a state of undress, George’s Jewishness would have been easily discerned.

George, however, soon recovered, and his need for pleasure and company returned. Village life was pleasant, but he soon got bored with it and moved in with the Prohászka family, whom he met through Baufluss on that later misunderstood trip, to their home in Buda hills (across the Danube from the main part of Budapest). These sympathetic and apparently entirely unprejudiced people were Christian Royalists who added George to their small family and who, in Tivadar’s words, “lavished on him all the parental love he missed and really still needed.”¹⁸ The affection was apparently reciprocated, and in a thoughtful gesture, George told Tivadar that “the Prohászkas are so good to me—I’d really like to do something for them. Perhaps we could do rounds of the drugstores and try to buy some baby-food.”¹⁹ Tivadar agreed, and after discovering better-supplied suburban drug-stores, he reciprocated the Prohászkas’ care of his son by delivering large supplies of this hard-to-find product.

Tivadar’s own situation, in the meantime, was once again made precarious by a political development that, among all the Nazi-occupied territories, was unique to Budapest: the creation of so-called Jewish Houses. This was a tactic similar to that used earlier in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in the Czech territory where the Nazi authorities managed to convince a Red Cross delegation that it was a legal and in fact quite pleasant internment camp. In Budapest, instead of creating a ghetto, which would have been a clear sign of oncoming extermination, the Nazi overseers recruited the Jewish Council to prepare an inventory of houses owned by Jews—a task the Council fulfilled with alacrity—which were then marked with a yellow Star of David. The entire Jewish population of Budapest, consisting of about 150,000 people, was crammed into these quarters. The building where Tivadar and Kozma were staying was among the so-called Yellow Star houses, which meant that, in order to keep up their disguise, they had to move to another place.

At the same time, the international community began, however belatedly, to take some action, and in Budapest, several embassies designated their own safe houses for Jews—although Tivadar decided it was best to stay away from those as well. Perhaps this was because he saw the deadly scams perpetrated on Jewish people whose desperation may have made them even more credulous. In one incident, a large number of Jews boarded a plane that was supposedly going to take them to Cairo, and even yielded their watches before take-off. None of these unfortunates returned alive, and in Masquerade, Tivadar expresses a combination of chagrin and contempt for their naivete.

Among the few heroic figures to emerge from this dark history, the best known was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat and special envoy to Hungary who used his position at the Swedish Legation in Budapest to issue Protective Passports to Jews and shelter them in houses designated as Swedish territory. On one occasion, he appeared personally at the railway station in Budapest and insisted, using all his official powers, that the people on the train, who he knew were bound for concentration camps, should be allowed to disembark. He succeeded in this, and in saving thousands of Jews, before vanishing and most probably being killed in a Soviet prison himself. The mystery of his disappearance has never been fully solved, despite repeated attempts to do so after the war—but his legend, and monuments to him erected in various countries, lives on.

Less well known but no less courageous was Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who held posts in the United States and what was then Mandatory Palestine before serving as the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest from 1942 until the end of the war. In that position, he cooperated with the Jewish Agency and, through a deal with the Hungarian government and the Nazis, obtained eight thousand safe-conduct documents, which enabled Jews to emigrate to Palestine, and which he deliberately applied to families rather than individuals. Altogether, he is credited with saving sixty-two thousand Jewish lives. A memorial to him has been erected next to the US embassy in Budapest.

The endgame of the war and the Holocaust in Hungary was as infernally complicated as its previous progress. In Masquerade, Tivadar follows it in detail, in all its political twists and sudden turns, as he learned about it through the street grapevine and the BBC’s German-language broadcasts. The roller coaster began on October 15, with Admiral Horthy declaring the end of Hungary’s alliance with the Nazi regime, which, he said, had betrayed its promises to his country, and announcing an armistice with “our former enemies”—i.e., the Allies.

For people like Tivadar and many others, this announcement was met with euphoria. But this was short-lived, as the news delivered the next turn of events: the takeover of the government by the fascist Arrow Cross Party, under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi. Even a realist of Tivadar’s stripe didn’t initially want to believe this; he knew that Arrow Cross rule spelled utter disaster for the Jewish population of Budapest. As soon as Szálasi came to power, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to the Austrian border in death marches; most forced laborers in the army were deported to Bergen-Belsen, among other places. Two ghettos were now established in the city—one ostensibly under the protection of neutral international powers—and Arrow Cross raids and mass executions took place brazenly in both. The one achievement of the diplomats overseeing the “Small Ghetto” was to issue a few thousand safe-passage documents out of the Hungarian inferno to its inhabitants. In addition, although exact estimates are hard to come by, Arrow Cross guards murdered upward of seven thousand Jews, who were either herded and shot into the Danube in January 1945 or killed by more conventional methods. Coming so close to the end of the war and the fascists’ inevitable defeat, this was surely one of the most vicious acts of “gratuitous violence,” in Primo Levi’s phrase—that is, violence committed not in the aims of conquest or victory, but purely to wipe out the identity, or the very existence, of a group, as well as individual victims.

Nevertheless, for the Soros family, protected by their assumed identities, life briefly continued almost as before, although with a new awareness of the surrounding horror. On the day of the Arrow Cross takeover, Tivadar met his wife and older son for their scheduled rendezvous at the Cafe Mienk. Erzebet, alias “Julia,” was clearly very upset and broke into tears when a group of Jews being herded by Arrow Crossers marched nearby, with their arms up in the air. Paul supported his father in urging her to go back to the country, saying, “We men can get by easier here.”²⁰

Toward the end of December, the now allied Russian and Romanian troops surrounded and raided Budapest, ushering in a period of violent struggle within the city itself. Tivadar, noting the collapse of a major bridge between Buda and Pest, summoned George back to Pest, judging that it would be much harder to come back later. Even then, however, their personal adventures weren’t quite over. The violence hadn’t yet reached their part of the city and for a while, Tivadar continued his daily visits to Cafe Mienk, where he noted a large presence of young Frenchmen, who presumably had escaped from imprisonment or an internment camp in France and somehow made their way to Hungary, which may have been, for them, a safer place. Observing them for a while, Tivadar was impressed by their esprit, their elegance, and their ability to attract good-looking young women. Impressed enough, in fact, to make them part of a bold venture in which George was recruited as his father’s intermediary. This involved a valuable gold bracelet entrusted to Tivadar by an acquaintance who was hard up and asked if he could sell it for her at a good price. Tivadar judged, correctly, that the French boys might be interested in such a transaction; he also decided that it was safer to send George on this errand than to go himself. Decades later George explained, with just a hint of apology, that his father did this because a young boy was less likely to be arrested, but Tivadar must have had great faith in his son’s ability to judge the situation as well. Indeed, on this occasion, George had to make the kinds of instant decisions in which his father specialized—whether, for example, to entrust the bracelet to the “French boys” while they went looking for a buyer. It turned out that his trust was not misplaced; after a long wait, which made Tivadar increasingly anxious, George returned triumphant, money in hand. Perhaps this was an early initiation into economic risk-taking, for which the future financier became so widely renowned. Certainly, no risks were greater, and no decisions required greater self-confidence, than those taken during the war.

But as the siege and bombardment of the city intensified, Tivadar decided that going out on the street was becoming too dangerous; and the next weeks were spent, together with his sons and his fellow conspirator Kozma, in the hiding place they had prepared in the earlier stages of the war. Even then, the Soros men didn’t let themselves get dispirited. Stuck indoors, Tivadar and his sons played games involving geographical questions, and checking answers against large maps hanging on the wall. Not surprisingly, Tivadar kept winning these with great consistency, and at some point, George accused “Uncle Lexi” (referring to his father by his alias) of cheating. Tivadar, who clearly cared about his sons’ opinions of him, took considerable umbrage at this, but allowed them to ask the questions from then on. After a few rounds of the game, Paul said there was an additional problem: Tivadar not only kept winning, but also “ate his winnings” by consuming tasty and hard to obtain cookies—and thus reduced the chances of the boys ever winning them back. This was followed by a serious debate on the rights and wrongs of the situation, in which George, in a clinching argument, told his father that for him and Paul this was “more a moral than a material question.”

The refusal to be dispirited sustained the sequestered threesome through the deteriorating situation, the lack of food, the need to haul water from the outside, the broken windows that George tried to replace with cartons—thus risking being shot—and the inability to go down to the air raid shelter because Paul, who was clearly of draft age, might be recruited. But toward the end of the battle for Budapest, father and sons faced yet another, more serious moral test. While the fighting was going on, a young German soldier—he turned out to be seventeen years old and looked, in Tivadar’s words, like “the very embodiment of that Aryanness whose fanatical adherents had sought to enslave people and exterminate races”²¹—accidentally made his way into the bathroom in their hiding place. Once he was discovered, the question, of course, was what to do with him. When the moment of decision arrived, “the eyes of 14-year-old George seemed filled with tears.”²² Tivadar offered the confused young man cigarettes and sent him out the way he came in. George’s tears were clearly a response to an individual young man’s plight; but perhaps, in that moment of great ambiguity, he was also influenced by Tivadar’s principles and his refusal “to identify Hitler and what he stood for with the German spirit,” or to blame a whole nation for what some, or even most, of its members had done.²³ Certainly, such principles were evident in much of George’s later human rights work, which extended to many countries where factions of the population behaved inhumanely—but where others nevertheless needed and deserved protection.

The last encounter described in Masquerade announced the beginning of the war’s endgame—although it did not immediately usher in anything resembling peace. On January 12, 1945, when the cry of “The Russians are coming!” was raised in the expectation of the oncoming German defeat, Tivadar found two Soviet officers outside their building and invited them in for tea. Thanks to his knowledge of Russian language and sensibility, acquired during his World War I adventure, he knew how to deal with his guests, and with problems that arose as the new victors took over and flaunted their power, sometimes in highly unpalatable ways. Wristwatches had to be surrendered on demand by anyone wearing them, and although Erzebet didn’t talk about this at first, she was one of the many women who had the horrifying experience of being raped by Russian soldiers. George also remembered “perhaps the weirdest thirty-six hours” of his life, spent in a posh hotel where Erzebet’s mother had been placed by Tivadar after she made her second escape from a hiding place and moved into one of the Yellow Star houses in the ghetto. In the hotel, they were tyrannized by a Russian soldier who refused to let them leave, accused Tivadar of being a spy because he spoke Russian, and alleged that George and Paul were parachutists because they didn’t. The soldiers forced them to spend the night in a downstairs cellar with a strange collection of people, which included fascists and resistance fighters as well as a Russian who got very angry when he found in the morning that he overslept, and threatened to blow everyone up with a grenade.²⁴

War is rarely over when its end is officially declared. The postwar period in Hungary, as elsewhere, had its share of chaos—and excitement. Hyperinflation reached levels unprecedented even during the Weimar period in Germany, and black market operations thrived. Tivadar, as usual, coped very well, and for a while worked as a translator for the Americans, who set up quarters at the Swiss embassy. Paul for a while traded sweaters for potatoes. George engaged in various more or less legitimate transactions, and gained early financial insights when he was asked by an acquaintance to exchange dollars for Hungarian currency and discovered that rates differed in various, hardly conventional venues (one of which was a market set up in a synagogue). He was therefore able to obtain a more advantageous rate for his client, and argued that in his role as broker, he deserved a higher cut. This, however, was refused, which provided another early lesson in the perils and advantages of various financial roles—although at this point in his development, George had no thoughts or fantasies of pursuing any of them.

What he did want to pursue was not yet at all clear. He had always been an avid reader, and his early ambitions involved politics, philosophy, journalism, and writing, although he apparently didn’t think of studying any of them through formal education. Indeed, going back to school was not a happy experience. Some classmates were missing, and although segregation of Jewish students was no longer officially sanctioned, a group of non-Jewish students were quite aggressive. This was bigotry to which by then George would have been highly sensitized, and although he was clearly not of a pugilistic nature, he challenged one of his classmates to a boxing match—which he, rather satisfyingly, won.

Although George later remembered this period as one of continuing adventure, the accumulated tensions of the war (however well he was protected from its actual horrors) may have led to a buildup of internal anger. This was evident in a school newspaper (its one copy displayed on a wall), in which George was emulating the newspaper his father produced as a prisoner in Siberia—with the difference that his publication “attacked everybody. I attacked my history teacher. I accused him of corruption because he used to sell a magazine in class and everybody was expected to subscribe.” When the teacher failed his unruly pupil, George retaliated by writing, “A good grade for a bank note. Only from Professor Takacs.”²⁵

It was perhaps experiences like these that, as he approached college age, prompted him to think about studying abroad—and his initial impulse was to go to the Soviet Union. This seemingly strange choice was propelled, he later told me, by his sense that “communism was very important” and he wanted to understand it. In this case, however, Tivadar decided to intervene. He had enough experiences of what had gone on in revolutionary Russia to know that this would be a dangerous step. George listened and decided to emigrate to Great Britain instead. This involved a very long wait for a passport and repeated letters to distant relatives who eventually agreed to take him in but gave him a very lukewarm welcome.

Altogether, after the drama of war and survival, life in London was weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. He arrived there in the period of rations and bad coffee, without access to good universities or interesting people. His spoken English was not very proficient, and he kept being rejected by young women with whom he didn’t know how to flirt. But the lessons of war and survival did not go unheeded: he had learned how to fend for himself, how to demand fair treatment when he was treated badly, and, occasionally, how to engage in small but advantageous financial transactions. He took jobs as a waiter (a role in which he was promised advancement to the position of assistant to head waiter if he worked hard enough!) and a swimming pool attendant, which not only brought him close to his favorite sport, but gave him ample time to read.

Throughout his time in London, George exchanged weekly letters with his family; here are some excerpts from one of the few available in English, in the Soros family archive:

Last week I thought that I would write a psychological letter. I did it: I wrote about you, although not with an overwhelming success. Yet I hope that my departure gave Pali [Paul] back his original position, that he had so much lacked since I had been born: the position of the only, if not the unique, child. And why could it not be that the difference between Pali and me was the cause of all the differences within the family? …

But what I planned to do last week did not concern you. I wanted to analyse myself. I needed it. I was discontent with something. I had to find out, with what? You know that hidden grievances are very dangerous: they disturb the whole countenance and are incurable as long they are hidden. The trouble with me was really not very serious. Yet, I do not like troubles with me, even in the small extent. … I am discontent, because I did not conquer England as I hoped. In all probability, I shall not conquer her. So I must resign myself to that.

I am discontent, because I have not found friends, I have not found a good company … but thousands of girls are running on the street and that makes my mouth water. I make great efforts but I am not attractive: I have no money, I do not speak English well enough, my interests are absolutely different from theirs. Moreover, I do not drive, I do not smoke and—I am afraid to dance … I am an austerity man. And I am astonished, because I never knew that before.

The letter is touching in its candor, and fascinating in its emphasis on internal states and the need for self-knowledge—as well as the trail of those early childhood conflicts.

While we now think of George Soros as a man of action, his intellectual as well as his inner life in this period was intense. After being enrolled in the “truly third-rate” Kentish Polytechnic, he managed to make his way (somewhat illicitly at first, as he wasn’t officially admitted) to the London School of Economics, where, once he was officially accepted, he majored in economics, while nurturing his passion for philosophy and encountering such fascinating figures as Harold Laski and Karl Popper, who became his intellectual guiding light. Under Popper’s influence, George wrote papers on “fallibility” and “reflexivity,” which became his central philosophical concepts, but he was at that stage too shy to show these to his mentor. He also wrote a highly critical paper on Freud—perhaps to burnish his intellectual credentials—but was surprised when I mentioned it in our conversation. He said that he came to admire Freud’s writings and ideas greatly, and eventually, during an anxious period, he entered into a short, modified psychoanalysis, which was apparently very successful. The specific reason for this, he told me, were problems with one of his own children, for which he took full responsibility. “I was too permissive,” he said, adding that in this, too, he was trying to follow in Tivadar’s footsteps.

In London, his practical situation gradually improved. He made friends and connected with a young woman who became his first girl-friend. Eventually, he got a job at a small, Hungarian-owned financial firm, where he started in a rather low-level position; but on that score, the rest is history.

In 1956, George emigrated to the United States, where Paul was already living; later that year, Tivadar and Erzebet, along with many others, made their risky escape from Hungary, following its tragically failed anti-communist uprising, and rejoined their sons in New York. There, they tried to establish themselves in ways that resembled their earlier life (attempting, for example, to set up a stand on the beach in Brooklyn selling coffee and pastries, as they did on Lupa Island). But Tivadar, for all his flexibility and ability to cope with new situations, found adjustment to American culture quite difficult. George recounts that during a job interview, his father was asked what he would like to accomplish at his potential place of employment. “I would like to start at the top and move to the bottom,” Tivadar insouciantly responded, undoubtedly hoping to amuse. Instead, he failed to get the job. In late 1950s America, with its puritan ethic of hard work and upward striving, self-deprecating humor was not the way to get your foot in the corporate door.

Nevertheless, for George, Tivadar continued to be a lodestar. When I asked George whether he thought the idea of “fallibility” would have been useful for his father during the war—whether Tivadar could afford self-doubt as he had to make his life-or-death decisions—George replied simply that in addition to his sharp sense of judgment, Tivadar had “experience,” and that made all the difference.

He was referring to the lessons of Tivadar’s Russian experiences, which registered deeply in George’s consciousness as well. This stood him in good stead when he decided to sponsor an Open Society Foundation in the Soviet Union—an undertaking, he told me, that he considers his “most important political involvement”—and which was the beginning of his own great adventure. In connection with this, he met the great Russian human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who, on hearing about George’s intentions, opined that his money “would soon line the KGB’s coffers.” In turn, George assured the famous dissident that he was “not an innocent American,” and that he understood the Soviet Union better than most well-meaning but often very naive Western well-wishers. Indeed, he absorbed some of his own early lessons as well; it is amusing to see him (in a documentary film by Jesse Dylan about his international activities) offering his rather splendid watch to one of his Russian hosts, who had noticed it on George’s wrist. Russian love of watches evidently survived many changes of regime.

The scope of George’s pro-democracy work has been nothing short of mind-boggling, and his dedication to it unflagging. He is, of course, not unaware of the size of his achievements, but here too he pays tribute to Tivadar, saying that the Open Society Foundations are “a monument to my father” and to the principles he instilled in his sons early on. More than that, he thinks that his father’s form of pragmatic altruism during the war was in a way more admirable than his own activities, because Tivadar “was more genuine in his contacts with people. I was operating on a level of abstraction.” With a flicker of humor in his voice, he added, “My father dealt in retail, while I work in wholesale.”

THIS IS ENDEARINGLY self-deprecating; but if George values “retail” over “wholesale,” that is because the personal is as important to him as the political—and he prefers the two to be closely interconnected. This, indeed, may have accounted at least in part for his startling change of direction in midlife. When I noted the rarity of his decision to stop engaging in financial activities, he said that being rich was “a liberation” because it gave him freedom to do what he wanted and to speak as he wished. Aside from finding the financial milieu frankly quite boring, he felt that working in it meant he had to be very careful about what he said. This was “a constraint” that he found highly discomfiting. “There is this big drive in me to speak freely,” he told me—a statement that surely points to an impulse driving much of his work. Freedom of expression is a personal as well as a political principle.

But George added that if wealth can be a liberation, it also creates an obligation—to use it well and accomplish something meaningful. In his Open Society Foundations and many other humanitarian activities, he found a way to fulfill this obligation on a very grand scale and in ways that mattered to him most. And perhaps it was the intertwining of the personal and the political that made his efforts—in his own view—most successful in Central Europe. After all, he grew up there, and the sensibility, the modes of communication, and human relations in that region are familiar to him, making interpersonal understanding—on which so much depends—much easier. The place where he has been least successful in his own estimation is China—largely, he says, because “I didn’t understand their culture.” Culture, even in our globalized world, matters.

George and Paul were young enough when they emigrated to the United States to become completely acculturated there, but George, for one, has continued to value his Hungarian beginnings. When I noted that both Hungarian and Jewish cultures have contributed much more than their share of talented people to the world, George said, “Yes—and they are all of my generation.” The wartime generation, in other words—whose experience of extremity was so informative about the human condition, and whose witnessing of destruction led to so much creativity. George also mused about an alternative scenario that might have come to fruition if Tivadar had his way before the war and sent Erzebet to the United States in 1939, promising to join her later. Erzebet refused to be separated, probably because she knew that Tivadar wanted her to leave in order to pursue a serious affair. But George is glad it didn’t happen for a different reason—because then, he said, “I would have become a different person. And I am happy to be the person I am.”

Origins matter, and the person George Soros has become is a multifaceted human being who has worked tirelessly to counter the worst tendencies in our collective life, whose consequences he witnessed firsthand in his childhood—and he is not ready to rest on his laurels yet.