George Soros — finance with roots in the Russian Empire
George Soros was born György Schwartz in Budapest on 12 August 1930, the son of Tivadar Schwartz, a lawyer and well-known writer in Esperanto who edited the literary magazine Literatura Mondo and brought his son up speaking the language, and Erzsébet, whose family ran a silk shop. In 1936 the family changed its name to Soros. He has no Russian ancestry. His connection runs through his father, whose years in Russia were the defining episode of the family's history.
Tivadar, a Hungarian Jew serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, was taken prisoner by the Russians and held in a camp in Siberia. He remained a prisoner through the Revolution, and only after the war's end made his way out of Russia and back to his family in Budapest. A generation later, when Germany occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, the family survived the occupation and the deportations.
In 1947 Soros left Hungary, then under Soviet control, for London. Supporting himself as a railway porter and waiter, with help from an uncle and a Quaker charity, he studied at the London School of Economics, taking his bachelor's degree in the early 1950s and a master's in philosophy in 1954; there he came under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper and his idea of the open society. He worked for the London merchant bank Singer & Friedlander and in 1956 moved to New York, where he worked as an analyst and trader, from 1956 to 1966 at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, and became an American citizen.
In 1969 he founded the Double Eagle fund, later renamed the Quantum Fund, and in 1973 Soros Fund Management. From 1979 he turned increasingly to philanthropy, setting up the Open Society Fund, followed in 1993 by the Open Society Institute, which grew into the Open Society Foundations, a network active in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States. In the 1980s his foundation in Hungary supported the country's peaceful transition from communism, and in 1991 he founded the Central European University, endowed in Budapest. He has given more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations.
"Left Budapest in 1947, aged 17, for Paris and then England."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Budapest (born); father a prisoner of war in Russia during and after the First World War
No Russian ancestry. His father, Tivadar Soros, a Hungarian Jewish lawyer serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, was a prisoner of war in Russia, held in Siberia during and after the First World War and through the Revolution, before making his way back to Budapest.
No Russian ancestry is documented. The family connection is his father's captivity in Siberia during and after the First World War.
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Budapest (born); father a prisoner of war in Russia during and after the First World War. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.