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<\/p>\nPeter Munk, right, and his wife Melanie go to the company’s AGM in Toronto in 2014.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
He maintained homes in Paris and Switzerland, as well as three homes in Ontario and a 40-metre yacht.<\/p>\n
The remarkable story of Munk\u2019s escape from eastern Europe, while millions of his fellow Jews were killed, and his subsequent welcome by Canada shaped the corporate leader that he would become.<\/p>\n
He was born in 1927 to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest. In 1944, when he was 16, the German army occupied Hungary. In June, Munk crammed on to a train with his family and more than 1,500 Jews \u2014 their Nazi SS guards in a separate coach \u2014 and headed for Germany.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nPeter Munk at age 20 aboard the SS Ascania, the ocean liner of the Cunard Line on which he sailed from Liverpool, across the Atlantic to Halifax when Munk immigrated to Canada in early 1948.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Such a trip could have easily turned into the end of Munk\u2019s story; it was only the beginning.<\/p>\n
Munk\u2019s train did stop \u2014 for weeks \u2014 in Bergen-Belsen, one of Adolph Hitler\u2019s concentration camps. Most trains to the camp brought Jews to be exterminated in the gas chambers.<\/p>\n
But Munk\u2019s train eventually moved on, with the Nazis sparing the families on board in exchange for vast sums paid by the U.S. Jewish community. The Munk family also gave the Nazis a safe stuffed with gold coins, bank notes, precious stones and gold-encrusted jewelry.<\/p>\n
In August that year, the family made it to Switzerland, and safety. There, Munk\u2019s story veers from sombre to silly. The teen attended high school, but he was a party animal. He also joined a group that traded rare stamps, nylon stockings and foreign currency.<\/p>\n
\u201cI made enough money of my own to pay for tea dances and entertain all the dates I wanted,\u201d Munk told Richard Rohmer in the biography Golden Phoenix. \u201cI went on long skiing holidays with friends up in the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, his father, Louis Munk, said to Peter, \u201cThis can\u2019t go on. You\u2019re going to dances instead of promoting your career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter Munk didn\u2019t have the grades to attend a Swiss university. But his mother, Katharina, who had survived the Auschwitz camp and returned to Budapest, urged her son to head to the New World. Luckily, the boy had an uncle in Canada.<\/p>\n
In 1948, Munk sailed from Liverpool to Halifax on the SS Ascania. He attended high school in Toronto to learn English, and won acceptance to engineering the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n
Even then, the young man\u2019s propensity to party almost sank him. On a trip to New York, he blew the tuition money his uncle Nick had given him on a young woman.<\/p>\n
Munk\u2019s uncle said, \u201cI can\u2019t help you,\u201d and chided him for his failure to follow such Munk family traits as hard work and discipline.<\/p>\n
Munk found a job picking tobacco and earned his tuition. In university, he launched a business that brought in and sold Christmas trees \u2014 an odd enterprise for a Jewish kid. All went well until a freak snowstorm one winter left Munk with thousands of unsold trees. Still, the setback helped to shape him as a resilient entrepreneur.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPeter Munk’s 1948 Hungarian passport, which he used on entering Canada in 1949.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Most remember Munk for the seminal companies he built and controlled, including Barrick Gold Corp. \u2014 the world\u2019s largest gold producer \u2014 and the TrizecHahn Corp. real estate empire.<\/p>\n
But his first big business break came in 1958 when he and a Toronto partner, David Gilmour, founded Clairtone, which built high-fidelity equipment in sleek, Scandinavian-style wood cabinets.<\/p>\n
The brand, endorsed by Frank Sinatra, Hugh Heffner and Sean Connery and whose ads promoted the \u201cbrilliant engineer\u201d Peter Munk, proved a roaring success in the 1960s.<\/p>\n
The company made a misstep when it moved its manufacturing to a huge new factory in Nova Scotia, far from the company’s inventory and expertise, and bet heavily on colour televisions, which Canadians failed to buy.<\/p>\n
In 1967, Munk and Gilmour lost control of Clairtone, which closed in 1971. The brutal loss did not slow Munk\u2019s ambition.<\/p>\n
\u201cClairtone was the single most formative experience in my life because it was so traumatic,\u201d Munk later told the New York Times.<\/p>\n
During the Clairtone years, Munk had two children, Anthony and Nina, by his first wife, Linda. Not long after Nina\u2019s birth, the couple broke up, and Munk in 1972 married Melanie and had two more kids with her: Natalie and Cheyne.<\/p>\n
Nina Munk recalls her childhood as peripatetic, marked by her father\u2019s strict rules (he forbade her to wear makeup or nail polish), his generosity and her front-row seat to his endless travels and wheeling and dealing in Europe, North America and the South Pacific.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way we grew up, everything was always driven by whatever deal my father was working on,” she said. “We had to stop in the middle of a major family cruise through the Mediteranean. We\u2019d be off the Turkish coast, and we would get grounded for hours because we were sitting by pay phones waiting for calls to come in.”<\/p>\n
After Clairtone, Munk improbably set out to develop a resort in Fiji. But Bay Street mistrusted him. \u201cWhen I went to Wood Gundy, the investment house, to raise the $4 million, they could hardly contain themselves laughing,\u201d he once recalled.<\/p>\n
Munk eventually raised the money, and his South Pacific Hotel Corp. became a huge success. Even so, \u201cmost of Bay Street treated me like a fugitive and a loser,\u201d he told Peter Newman in the book Titans.<\/p>\n
Munk persevered, and in 1983, though the Royal Bank of Canada and other banks still distrusted him, raised enough money to found Barrick Gold, which bought a struggling company with gold mines in Quebec and Nevada.<\/p>\n
The Nevada mine turned out to house North America\u2019s richest gold deposit; \u201cthe lucky break,\u201d Newman writes, \u201cwhich turned Munk into a financial powerhouse.\u201d<\/p>\n