Laszlo Tauber

Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber (February 18, 1915 – July 28, 2002) was a Hungarian-born surgeon who saved other Jews in the Budapest ghetto during World War II, then made a real estate fortune in Washington, D.C. and became a major philanthropist to medical research and Jewish causes. Dr. Tauber was the medical director and chairman of the department of surgery at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, a hospital he founded. He was a brilliant Hungarian student and champion gymnast in his youth whose life story was "right out of the pages of Horatio Alger." Immediately after becoming a physician at the outset of World War II, the young Dr. Tauber found himself drafted to be chief of surgery at the hospital serving the Jewish community of Budapest. He remained there throughout the war, rescuing many Jews not only with medical attention but as well with forged papers that forestalled their deportation. Some 6000,000 Hungarian Jews were ultimately rounded up and sent to Nazi concentration camps in the last y