Here's Margaret Wente writing a puff piece about billionaire Peter Munk:
Wente: “’I arrived in this place not speaking the language, not knowing a dog,’ he says. He was 18 – an alien, a foreigner, a Jew in a funny-looking suit. In Europe, people were living in the ruins, like rats”.
Hmnn, that’s a quite a contrast from this bio in the Globe by Andy Hoffman, in April 2008:
“He was born Nov. 8, 1927 in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish family rich with real-estate holdings...”
(The article informs us that Munk’s family spent much of that fortune to escape to Switzerland where life wasn’t so bad).
But “young Peter failed to gain admission to a top university and in 1948 it was decided that he would be sent to Toronto for his education, and live with his aunt and uncle...Peter and his friends met to consider his fate in a Zurich café. He didn't want to leave Switzerland. ‘In Zurich it was gorgeous. There were bars and we could drive down to the casino and see the dancing girls. It was a cultured, civilized place,’ he recalls.”
So Munk may ‘not have known a dog’ in Toronto, but he did know his relatives. And while Wente wants us to think the poor man was scurrying around the ruins with rats, he was apparently living the high life in Zurich’s bars and casinos.
