COURAGE

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George Soros (born in Budapest in 1930), an American businessman of Hungarian descent, is one of the world’s foremost businessman and philanthropists, having given away over $12 billion to date. His funding has supported individuals and organizations across the globe fighting for freedom of expression, transparency, accountable government, and societies which promote justice and equality.

His efforts have often focused on those who face discrimination purely for who they are. He has supported groups representing Europe’s Roma and others who have been pushed to the margins of mainstream society, such as drug users, sex workers, and LGBTI people.

Soros experienced intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–45, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews. His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same. Soros later recalled that “instead of submitting to our fate, we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—yet we prevailed. Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”

As the communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a railway porter and a nightclub waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments, where he made his fortune.

In 1970, he launched his own hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, and went on to become one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States.

Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations, a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 100 countries. Its work and its name reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the work at the Open Society Foundations.

Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in the communist Eastern Bloc by providing photocopiers with which people could make copies of banned texts. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he founded Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking, a concept which at the time was alien to most universities in the former Soviet states. He funded cultural exchanges between Eastern Europe and the West, playing a pivotal role in helping the Soviet society he himself had briefly lived in open itself to the world.

With the Cold War over, he expanded his philanthropy to the United States, Africa, and Asia, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes evolved over time, they continued to harmonize with his ideals of an open society.

Over the years, Soros has supported paralegals and lawyers representing thousands of unlawfully held individuals, underwritten the largest effort in history to integrate Europe’s Roma, and provided school and university fees for thousands of promising students from marginalized groups. And he has reached beyond his own foundation, supporting independent organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Now in his 80s, Soros continues to take an active personal interest in the work of Open Society Foundations, traveling widely to support its work and advocating for positive policy changes with world leaders both publicly and privately.

But throughout Soros’s philanthropic career, one thing has remained constant: a commitment to fighting the world’s most intractable problems. He has been known to emphasize the importance of tackling losing causes. Indeed, many of the issues Soros has taken on (and he would be the first to admit this) are the types of issues for which a complete solution might never be found.

“My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people,” Soros once wrote. That independence has allowed him to forge his own path towards a world which is more open, more just, and more equitable for all.

Today, Soros is considered one of the 30 wealthiest men in the world, though he has lately donated two-third of his private fortune as down-payments for public humanitarian projects undertaken by philanthropic and human rights institutions worldwide. Although he continues to be passionately attacked by countless nationalistic propagandists and populist governments in several countries, he has remained a devoted defender of democracy, human rights, and social justice.

György Soós (or Soosur Georgiosz, his nom de plume) is a painter, graphic designer, and former member of the underground bands Electric Petting and Art Deco, performing industrial music. Soós began studying art in the Secondary School of Visual Arts located at Török Pál Street. Later, he studied typography at the Hungarian University of Arts and Design, where due to the encouragement of his teacher, József Baksa, he also started to pursue painting in addition to his interest in graphic design.

After finishing his studies, he mostly worked in the field of applied art: posters, album covers, set designs, as well as trompe-l'œil and decorative paintings. Audiovisual work—pictures, music, theatre, design—was very important for his development as an artist. It was not only an organic part of the culture of the eighties, but these experimental artworks were a kind of physical manifestation of his “musical drives.” In Electric Petting he was making music together with György Bp. Szabó, his high school mate. Soós created several outstanding posters for underground bands, such as Ági és a Fiúk, ETA, and of course Electric Petting and Art Deco, but also worked on album covers for the state-run (and only) label, Hungaroton. As the art historian Anikó Katona observes, his posters exhibit an ironic play with the monumental qualities and favored themes of totalitarian aesthetics. It also relies on the tradition of Russian constructivism and the propaganda art of the 1920s. He often worked with socialist-realist elements and a strong, red and black color palette. In some of his posters, however, he is equally sarcastic about consumer society.

Sándor Soós, was born in 1939 to a worker family with four children in Budapest. When the revolution broke in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, he was a 17-year-old apprentice miner in Oroszlány. Together with some fellows, he came to Budapest and soon joined a group of freedom fighters defending the New York Palace, a hotel and press center in downtown Budapest, with a machine gun from the Russian tanks, and only fled to the West with the last group of insurgents one week after the second Soviet invasion.

From the refugee camp of Traiskirchen, Austria, he soon got to Germany, where he worked as a miner, and then to France, where in 1958 he joined the French Foreign Legion. He served under the French tricolor and the red-green banner of the Legion in Algeria, Djibouti, Corsica, and Orange 19 years in total before leaving the army and getting married. He became a French citizen quite early, in 1966, but could visit his native land, Hungary, for the first time only in 1985. As a civilian he took a job in Marseille as a port guard, and for many decades he was also the voluntary president of a residence community in Septémes les Vallons, a suburb of Marseille, where he has been living for a half a century together with his family. Sándor Soós has three adult children, and two grandchildren; together with his Alsatian wife, Marie-Thérese, he often visits Hungary.  

Tamás Soós in 1984, along with Zénó “Kelémpájsz” Kiss and Tamás “Atom” Bernáth, started the band Csokonai Vitéz Műhely. Their intention was to tunnel Hungarian and European culture into the international sphere. However, due to the constant hampering of the Hungarian state, this ambitious goal could not be realized. Nevertheless, the band had some successes. Besides concerts, they were editing a samizdat magazine, and they also released a cassette in the German Democratic Republic. Meanwhile, Soós was the one who designed the posters for his band, characterized by striking colors, like pink and neon tones, dynamic graphics and montage. He particularly like to reference pop art and psychedelic rock posters. In 1988, the band received an invitation to perform in the Netherlands, and they stayed there for a few years, operating under the name Uralbeat.

Árpád Spaller (b. Cluj, 22 June 1945) obtained his degree at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in 1970, in special education (health pedagogy) and Romanian language and literature. After graduating, in accordance with communist policy he was officially sent at first to Șimleu Silvaniei (Sălaj county), and from there to Popești and then Tileagd (both localities in Bihor county) where he worked as a teacher. Many circumstances contributed to his desire to “escape,” and in July 1987 he and his family moved to Hungary. After a short period in Budapest they moved to Tolna county as special education teachers (his wife having a similar qualification). After a year, mainly because of their children’s studies, they moved back near Budapest. First they lived in Gyál, then in Felsőpalkony, and then they were able to move to Budapest, where they managed to find jobs that suited their qualification. In 1989, as an attempt to offer the “newcomers” as much assistance and information as possible, he founded the Association of Hungarians from Transylvania. After the change of regimes, between 1990 and 1995, he edited under the auspices of the Association the journal entitled Vigyázó (Watchful), a quarterly with a selection of articles published in Hungarian-language newspapers in Transylvania. He is also the author of several articles published in Romanian and Hungarian professional journals(Interview with Árpád Spaller. 2008; Spaller and Spaller 2006).