Only at TNR Online | Post date 02.09.07
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E-mail this article artin Peretz falsely accused me of having been a "young cog in the Hitlerite wheel" ("Tyran-a-Soros," February 12). I need to set the record straight. In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, my father arranged false identities for his family. He placed me with an official of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture who claimed that I was his godson. In return, my father arranged a false identity for the official's Jewish wife. In my capacity as 14-year-old godson, I accompanied the official on a trip to inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country. That is the episode "60 Minutes" quizzed me about in the interview that Peretz quotes. In the same interview I also said "I had no role in taking away that property." The facts are documented in Michael Kaufman's biography, (Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire). I have also described the events at length in my own books and my father, Tivadar Soros, gives an account of our adventures in 1944 in his book Masquerade.
As regards my use of the term "de-Nazification," I am not too proud to admit this was a bad choice of words. I certainly do not put the United States and Nazi Germany in the same moral category. What I meant was that the United States needs to engage in a profound soul searching about the harm the war in Iraq has done to others and ourselves. Post-war Germany underwent such a process to its lasting benefit. Perhaps truth and reconciliation would have been a more felicitous expression, although it is also inaccurate because we need to be reconciled with ourselves not the terrorists. For the record, I am not equating the U.S. to South Africa either.
George Soros New York, New York
Martin Peretz Responds:
George Soros lived through the depredations of Nazi Germany. I only learned of them from books and the oral testimonies of others. But nearly every scholar of this darkest era describes the difficulty of excavating the precise narrative of events from the trauma and chaos that defined them. Soros points to his own father's memoirs, for instance, which paints a more complicated picture than the son's response. But this is quibbling. What provoked my article was not Soros's biography; it was his casual suggestion that America has "to go through a certain de-Nazification process." I am glad that my article spurred him to abjure his words--and doubt that he would have retracted them in its absence. If he hasn't noticed, America is now in the midst of an anguished debate about Iraq. No one in that debate seems intimidated or has been arrested. About half the country seems to be completely against the war. More are against it when you take into account those who have some mixed feelings. Opposing the Bush administration in this free country hardly qualifies as an act of dissidence. Even after this clarification, I find his logic utterly baffling and his assumptions no less pernicious.