[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 81 (Wednesday, June 9, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1197-E1198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO DR. LASZLO TAUBER

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 9, 1999

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, last week the Washington Post published an 
excellent front-page article about the unique life and the outstanding 
philanthropic contributions of my dear friend Dr. Laszlo Tauber. I call 
this to the attention of my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, because in many 
ways the story of Laci Tauber reflects what is best about this 
wonderful country of ours.
  Dr. Tauber, who received his initial medical training in Hungary 
before World War II, survived the horrors of the Holocaust in Budapest. 
He not only preserved his own life, he risked his own life to use his 
medical training to help those who were suffering the most at the hands 
of German Nazi troops and Hungarian Fascist thugs.
  After coming to the United States, Mr. Speaker, Laci Tauber 
encountered problems and obstacles that face many of those who emigrate 
to this country seeking freedom and opportunity. He rose above those 
obstacles, establishing a highly successful medical practice in the 
Washington, DC, area and creating a real estate empire in this area 
that is the envy of many real estate magnates whose names are far 
better known in this region.
  Mr. Speaker, Dr. Tauber has sought to give back something to this 
country which welcomed him and which provided him outstanding 
opportunities. His most recent and creative act of generosity involves 
the establishment of a scholarship fund to assist the grandchildren and 
other descendants of those men and women who served in our nation's 
armed services during World War II. Dr. Tauber and I feel a strong debt 
of gratitude to those brave men and women who risked their lives to 
liberate the peoples of Europe who were enslaved by Nazi Germany's evil 
Third Reich. This is only the most recent and most creative of Dr. 
Tauber's philanthropic endeavors.
  I invite my colleagues to join me in paying tribute to Dr. Laszlo 
Tauber. I ask that the article from the Washington Post which details 
his exceptional accomplishments be placed in the Record.

                [From the Washington Post, June 2, 1999]

        Giving With a Point: Holocaust Survivor Donates Millions

                            (By Cindy Loose)

       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 Hospital, 
     where many veterans of the war were recovering from their 
     wounds. ``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 largest real estate fortunes in 
     the region. Estimates of his wealth exceed $1 billion. He may 
     be the richest Washingtonian you've never heard about.
       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.
       Several local foundation leaders say even they have never 
     heard of Tauber, but all call the latest donations 
     remarkable.
       Tauber hopes the gifts will inspire--or, if necessary, 
     shame--other Holocaust survivors who have the means to give.
       When Tauber gives money, he always intends to make a moral 
     point. And when he knows he is right, the 84-year-old says, 
     ``you can move the Washington Monument more easily.''
       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.''


                        Formed in the Holocaust

       He 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 Potomac and gives away 
     millions but 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 who 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 Northern Virginia 
     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

[[Page E1198]]

     the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Jews of the capital 
     city were next on the list.
       In this atmosphere, Tauber, at age 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.''
       Zoltan Barta, a friend and former schoolmate, was hit in 
     the head with shrapnel. His last words: ``My dear Laci, save 
     me.''
       Sandor Barna, who refused to wear the required yellow star, 
     begged Tauber to fix the hooked nose that threatened to 
     betray his ethnicity. But Tauber didn't have the equipment. 
     The Nazis killed Barna. ``If I could have operated on Sandor 
     Barna,'' Tauber says, ``he would be alive today.''
       But 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 as a young man. And he did it in a manner that foretold 
     his future.''


                           Giving and Getting

       Tauber's son, Alfred Tauber, remembers as a young boy 
     visiting New York City. ``At night, I'd walk with my father 
     around Times Square,'' he says. ``I'd ask, `What are you 
     doing? Why are we here?' He'd answer, `I'm looking for my old 
     friends.' ''
       And sometimes, amazingly, they would find one. If the 
     person needed money, Tauber would arrange to give some.
       Tauber had come 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. ``I offered my services for less than a decent 
     prostitute would charge,'' he says now.
       Hugo V. Rissoli, a retired professor, says that Tauber was 
     brilliant, but that the doctor assigned to be his mentor 
     virtually ignored him, and Tauber was not asked to stay on.
       Tauber sensed antisemitism and reacted much as he did when 
     he was 12: If discrimination was to keep him from rising at 
     an established hospital, he'd build his own. He built the 
     hospital, the now-closed Jefferson Memorial in Alexandria, in 
     part so he could train other young doctors who had earned 
     their degrees abroad.
       In his spare time, with a $750 loan, he began amassing the 
     necessary fortune in real estate.
       ``Real estate meant independence, to practice as I wish,'' 
     he says. ``I spent 5 percent of my time on real estate but 
     got 95 percent 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.''
       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 real estate empire brought many battles. As the 
     federal government's biggest landlord, he was known for 
     building exactly to code, with no frills.
       For two years, nine federal agencies fought being 
     transferred to an 11-story building on Buzzard Point that the 
     General Services Administration was renting from Tauber for 
     $2.5 million a year. It was so spare, they couldn't imagine 
     working there. Finally, the GSA strong-armed the Federal 
     Bureau of Investigation into moving there.
       Rissoli likes to tell of the time neighbors complained 
     Tauber was putting up a three-story apartment building in an 
     area zoned for lower buildings. Tauber took off the roof, 
     removed a few rows of bricks and called it a 2.5-story 
     building.
       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, between 
     Massachusetts Avenue and River Road.
       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.


                           The Uses of Money

       Some years ago, Tauber was due at a reception at Brandeis 
     University, where he had donated $1.6 million to establish an 
     institute for the study of European Jewry. He needed a white 
     shirt and steered his daughter toward Korvette's, the New 
     York-based discount store. Inside, he headed for the 
     basement.
       ``Daddy, Korvette's is already cheap,'' Irene protested. 
     ``You don't have to go in the bargain basement.''
       Tauber's only concession to his wealth is the home he 
     shares with his second wife, Diane. (He and his first wife, 
     now deceased, were 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. He harbors resentment about the treatment he says he 
     got at George Washington University decades ago, but he 
     agreed to donate $1 million to the campus Hillel Center on 
     the condition that a room be named in honor of Rissoli.
       Rissoli says he did nothing more than be friendly to 
     Tauber. But Tauber says that by being kind, Rissoli restored 
     his faith in humanity.
       One-third of the new $15 million grant will be funneled 
     through GW, 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 the sacrifices of their forefathers. 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 percent, 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.''

     

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