2008
Peter Munk (Budapest, 1927 - Toronto, 2018) was an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. In June 1944, he was one of fifteen members of the Munk family to escape from Budapest to Switzerland on the Kasztner Train. In 1948, he immigrated to Canada, where he started his first company, Clairtone Sound Corp., a celebrated manufacturer of high-fidelity stereos, as documented by his daughter Nina Munk in The Art of Clairtone (2008). A founder of many companies, he is best known for Barrick, the world’s largest gold mining company, and for his philanthropy. Late in his life, as the Munk paterfamilias, he donated to the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives a trove of documents and photographs passed down from his forefathers.
Peter Munk’s student years in Canada
Peter Munk arrived to Toronto in 1948 on a student visa where he had an uncle, Nicholas Munk who had lived there with his wife, Hedy. Nicholas Munk was an engineer, who had studied at the Technical University in Charlottenburg (Berlin). Peter attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute before heading off to University of Toronto. He was dazzled by the wealth of his newly adopted country: “We were taken to a gym. And in the gym were trestles, wooden tables set with all kinds of milk, chocolate milk, regular milk, ice cream, hot dogs, hamburgers, doughnuts. … [Back home] hunger was tangible. … The whole thing became a totally unreal, surreal experience.”
In the summer, to earn money to pay for university tuition, Peter picked tobacco in Delhi, in southwest Ontario: “living in a haystack but earning $13 [a day], hard work.”
He often spoke about his love for Canada: “I arrived in this place not speaking the language, not knowing a dog... This is a country that does not ask about your origins, it only concerns itself with your destiny.”