Adorable Story #18: Felix Rohatyn, The Financier Extraordinaire
This week we go back in time to Vienna in the 30s to learn about the adventurous life of Felix Rohatyn
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This week Adorable Story will take us to the tumultuous times of Vienna in the 30s, and then, through a perilous journey, to Paris, Casablanca, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and finally New York City where a young boy became a financier extraordinaire.
Rohatyn Family
Felix George Rohatyn was born in Vienna on May 29, 1928, the only son of Alexander Rohatyn, a Polish Jew of Ukrainian descends, and Edith (Knoll) Rohatyn, a native of Austria.
The Rohatyn family was quite well-to-do: his great-grandfather, Feivel Rohatyn, was Chief Rabbi of Zlotshov, 50 km from the Ukrainian town of Rohatyn, which in Ukrainian means “Horn Stacket”.
From Vienna, his father managed breweries controlled by the family in Austria, Romania, and Yugoslavia.
Escape from the Nazi
After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the desire for a political annexation of Austria (Anschluss) into the “Greater Germany” started gaining traction among the German political elite.
During an attempted coup in 1934, Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by Austrian Nazis.
At the same time, Jewish communities in Austria felt increasingly unsafe because of a prospect of ethnic cleansing occuring in Austria in case of a forced unification with Nazi Germany.
Quite presciently given the circumstances, the Rohatyn family — notwithstanding their business ties with Central Europe — decided to leave Austria for Paris, France in 1935 (the Anschluss would have occurred in 1938, with persecution of the Jews in Austria starting, indeed, immediately thereafter).
At the time, things started being increasingly dangerous for the Jews also in France and, as a precaution, Felix was sent to boarding school in Switzerland (“which I didn’t like”, Felix would recollect many years later).
After the German invasion of France in 1940 and the sudden collapse of the French army, the Rohatyn family — without any papers or visas — decided to abruptly leave Paris, took their car, two mattresses and their gasoline coupons (bought at the black market) and directed straight south to the Pyrenees in the attempt to reach neutral Spain.
Unfortunately, not only the roads to Spain were jammed by the mass exodus of people attempting to flee France (it took them more than two weeks to reach the Pyrenees), but the actual border between France and Spain was already closed by the Vichy puppet-government and the only way to escape would have been to cross the Pyrenees (illegally) on foot at night-time.
Since Felix’ grandmother was 80 years old at the time, the family decided to give up the idea of crossing the mountains on foot and opted to reach Cannes instead.
After a long wait there, the family was somehow able to obtain diplomatic visas to Brasil.
Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, the Brazilian ambassador to France (Brazil’s “Oscar Schindler”), illegally granted Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Holocaust, saving them from certain death: one of these visas allowed the Rohatyns to escape the Gestapo and finally flee to Morocco.
In fact, in an escape that lasted well over 2 years, they fled first to Casablanca, then to Lisbon and, after another excruciating wait there, in 1941 they secured a seat on a transatlantic boat to Rio de Janeiro.
Felix went to school in Rio de Janeiro for almost two years before the Rohatyns managed to enter the United States in 1943-44 under the “Polish Quota”.
A wonderful interview of Felix was recorded in 2009 in the video below, kindly provided by The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
Career at Lazard Frères
"Investment banking is like a high-class form of prostitution. You have to do whatever the client wants."
— Felix Rohatyn, in an interview for the The New York Times, November 9, 1975.
After studying at McBurney School and Middlebury College, in 1948 Felix joined the New York office of the investment bank Lazard Frères as an entry-level clerk, under André Meyer’s helm.
André Meyer was a legendary French-American investment banker who at the time was a senior partner at Lazard Frères: he would be later called “the Picasso of Bankers”.
Coincidentally, André Meyer also escaped France in the 40s in order to avoid the jewish prosecution there: differently from Felix, and crucially, André and his family were somehow able to secure almost instantaneously the visas to Spain (notwithstanding the closed border) and a much coveted seat on the PAN-AM Clipper seaplane (notwithstanding a multi-year waiting list), on the direct route from Lisbon to New York1 .
In New York, André became the mentor of Felix, who was made partner in the firm in 1961 and later became its managing director.
While at Lazard, Felix brokered numerous, major mergers and acquisitions, notably on behalf of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), where he became a director in 1966.
Some of the notable deals he played a key role in include:
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