Shaped by the Holocaust, a Survivor Donates Millions to Related Causes

It was a struggle that first year in America, just after World War II. Laszlo Tauber and his wife lived in a Virginia apartment so decrepit the landlord warned them not to step on the balcony because it might fall off.

But with the frugality and generosity that have characterized his life, Tauber saved $250 from his income of $1,600. Then he gave it away.

“I am a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust,” Tauber wrote in a note to doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where many war veterans were recovering. “As a token of appreciation, my first savings I would like you to give to a soldier of your choice.”

In the intervening years, Laszlo Tauber built a thriving surgical practice, started his own hospital and in his free moments created one of the region’s largest real estate fortunes. Estimates of his wealth exceed $1 billion.

He has already donated more than $25 million to medical and Holocaust-related causes. Now he’s giving $15 million for scholarships to descendants of anyone who served in the U.S. military during the war years. An additional $10 million honoring Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, will go to organizations that memorialize the Holocaust and students in Denmark and Wallenberg’s native Sweden.

Tauber hopes the gifts will inspire--or, if necessary, shame--other Holocaust survivors who have the means to give.

Generous in philanthropy, parsimonious in his business dealings, Tauber is, his friends say, the most complicated man they’ve ever met.

Asked to describe himself, he responds, “I am a righteous, miserable creature of God.”

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At 84, Tauber still sees patients, does minor surgery and makes all major decisions about his varied business and philanthropic enterprises.

He’s proud that he charged dirt-cheap prices for his medical services and ignored overdue bills. But he also squeezed every dime of profit from his real estate deals and pursued one failed venture all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He lives on a 36-acre estate in a Washington suburb and gives away millions. But he stoops to pick up stray paper clips and writes, in tiny script, on the back of used paper.

Everything about him--his quirks, his drive, his outlook on life--he says can be explained by the Holocaust.

Tauber shuns publicity and must be prodded to discuss his past. People whom he believes exploit the Holocaust for personal glory he calls “dirty no-goods.” With the current gift, he wants to get the message to other survivors, so he will talk.

In the fading photographs he keeps in his office, the team of gymnasts from the Budapest Jewish High School looks so young, and so proud. Tauber will never forget a meet in 1927, when he was 12.

“Everyone was standing, singing the Hungarian national anthem, and people started throwing rotten apples at my team, yelling, ‘Dirty Jews,’ ” Tauber says. He pauses, tears welling in his eyes. “I thought to myself: ‘Bastards. I will train. I will beat them. I will show them.’ ”

Within two years he was a national and European champion.

“Am I competitive? Yes, unfortunately so,” he says today. “Did I become a happier man? Definitely not. But my experiences made me always stand for the underdog.”

Hungary was not occupied by Germany until the spring of 1944, by which time the country had the only large reservoir of Jews left in Europe. Between April and June of 1944, roughly 437,000 Hungarian Jews in the countryside were sent to Auschwitz.

“Almost all were gassed on arrival, or soon after,” says Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Jews of the capital city were next on the list.

In this atmosphere, Tauber, at 29, became chief surgeon at a makeshift hospital for Jews. His memories of that time are described in staccato images, interrupted by cracking voice and silent tears.

“A mother begged me to save her son. But you understand, he was dead already.”

Reich says Tauber is an unsung hero, worthy of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Imagine the irony, he says, of running a hospital for people slated to die.

“It’s strange, and crazy, but also necessary, and compelling and ultimately noble,” Reich says. “And he did it in a manner that foretold his future.”

Tauber came to the United States to take a fellowship at George Washington University, where he was paid a small stipend and supplemented his income by giving physicals for 25 cents each.

Hugo V. Rissoli, a retired professor, says Tauber was brilliant but the doctor assigned to be his mentor virtually ignored him, and Tauber was not asked to stay on.

Tauber sensed anti-Semitism and reacted much as he did at 12: If discrimination was to keep him from rising at an established hospital, he’d build his own, the now closed Jefferson Memorial in Alexandria, Va. In his spare time, with a $750 loan, he began amassing a fortune in real estate.

“Real estate meant independence, to practice as I wish,” he says. “I spent 5% of my time on real estate but got 95% of my money from it.” His development portfolio was diversified--office, retail, government, residential. In 1985 he became the only doctor ever named on the Forbes magazine list of richest men.

Tauber takes enormous pride in his surgical skills but shows none in his real estate prowess.

Real estate, his son Alfred thinks, is the means his father uses to steel himself against an unstable world. But, says Alfred, a medical doctor and director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, it also “appeals to his competitive streak. He takes delight that he can play the game better than most.”

Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin marvels at Tauber, whom he met in the early 1950s. “It took every ounce of my energy to run my real estate business,” Pollin says. “I was much less successful at it than him, and he did it while running a full-time medical practice.”

Tauber’s daughter, Irene, a San Francisco psychologist, says she never realized growing up that her family was wealthy. They lived simply, in an apartment building that was part of a Tauber development in Bethesda, Md.

But they were initially unwelcome in the neighborhood, even though they owned it.

Tauber says that soon after he submitted the winning bid to buy the land in the late 1950s, an agent representing the owners asked that he agree not to sell any of the residential tracts to blacks or Jews.

The agent was amazed when Tauber told him he was Jewish. Under threat of a lawsuit--and at the agent’s urging--the owners went through with the deal.

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Tauber’s only concession to his wealth is the home he shares with his second wife, Diane. (He and his first wife, now deceased, divorced years ago.) But even his home cost him little: He made a huge profit by selling off some of the surrounding land.

But although he doesn’t spend money on himself, he gives it away.

One-third of the new $15-million grant will be funneled through GWU, the rest through Boston University and others to be named. Recipients, to be selected by the universities, will be required to take one Holocaust-related course or tutorial.

Tauber says he hopes the gift will prompt students to think about their forefathers’ sacrifices. The funds are dedicated to the memory of his parents, as well as his uncle and his only brother, both of whom died in the Holocaust.

Why do it now?

“I don’t stay here too long,” he says. “At my age I should not start to read a long book.”

The money, most of which will become available at Tauber’s death, will be awarded with one unusual guideline: The percentage of African Americans who receive the scholarships must be at least as large as the percentage who served during World War II--or about 6%, according to military historians.

“It cannot be tolerated,” Tauber explains, “that those of us who were discriminated against should ever ourselves discriminate.”

The Americans who fought in foreign lands for strangers, Tauber says, rescued a remnant of his people, and they saved the world.

“It is not enough,” he says, “to shake hands and say thank you.”