Paul Soros, Shipping Innovator, Dies at 87

The idea sprang from his boyhood in Hungary. He remembered seeing buoys being used to create floating piers on the Danube, where he and his younger brother, George, who would grow up to become one of the richest men in the world, spent peaceful days at the family’s summer home before war changed everything for them.

Replicating the system in the United States, Mr. Soros, who died early Saturday at his home in Manhattan at 87, went on to build Soros Associates, which has dominated the port-building industry and shifted international trade and production patterns through its shipping innovations.

The Brazilian national mining company, for example, used Soros designs at its port of Tubarão to become the world’s largest iron ore producer, more than quintupling Brazil’s output in the process. Mr. Soros’s company, with projects in 90 countries, either designed or expanded seven of the 10 largest bulk ports in the world for bauxite, alumina and coal as well as for iron ore.

Mr. Soros died at his home on Fifth Avenue, his son Peter said. He had been treated for Parkinson’s disease, cancer, diabetes and renal failure. He had lost a kidney as a young man and later an eye in a freak accident during a golfing lesson. Earlier he had lived through harrowing times, threatened by Nazis and taken prisoner by Russians before managing to flee to the West.

And he lived in the long shadow of his brother, who found fame as an investor, philanthropist and promoter of progressive political causes. Indeed, Paul was often called “the invisible Soros.”

He was born Paul Schwartz on June 5, 1926 in Budapest, the son of Tivadar Schwartz, a well-connected Jewish lawyer, publisher, investor and former officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and the former Erzebet Szucz, the daughter of a well-to-do fabric store owner. During World War I, his father was captured by Russian troops and imprisoned in a Siberian camp before escaping and making his way to Budapest.

Theirs was a comfortable and cultured life, with ski vacations in Austria and summers on the Danube. Paul became an expert skier and a star tennis player and attended a technical college in Hungary.

But in 1936, as Hungary began aligning itself with fascist powers and anti-Semitism spread, the family changed its name to Soros. When German troops entered Budapest in 1944 and began rounding up Jews for deportation to concentration camps or shooting them outright on the banks of the Danube, Tivadar forged identity papers that gave the family false names and portrayed them as Christians. They survived a year of terror, living in safe houses and scraping together supplies until the Russians came and the Nazis were defeated.

The Soviet authorities, however, accused Paul Soros of being a fugitive SS officer and sent him on a forced march east with other prisoners “in rows of four,” Mr. Soros wrote in an unpublished memoir for his family. As they approached a stream beside a village, he recalled, “I knew that, after the bridge, there were no more villages, just open country. With snow on the ground there was no way to get away or hide.”

So as the prisoners and their Russians guards squeezed across the bridge, “I simply made a run for it,” Mr. Soros wrote, escaping the guards’ notice. He hid himself in a burned-out farmhouse and “watched the column pass for about an hour” before walking back to Budapest.

Afterward he became a member of the Hungarian ski team and would have joined it at the 1948 Olympics had it not been for an injury. He soon left home for Soviet-occupied Austria, where he became the country’s No. 2 tennis player and an expert at forging passports. Seeking to defect to the West, he managed to make his way to New York in 1948 on a one-year student visa.

George, meanwhile, at 17 and with his father’s help, fled communist Hungary under the pretense of attending a conference in Switzerland. He traveled to London, where he enrolled in a technical school with a distant relative’s help, did odd jobs to support himself and later was admitted to the London School of Economics.