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I think his family had to do a great deal of adapting when their whole life was turned upside down. From his Wikipedia Biography: > When he was eight, the Nazis occupied Hungary and deported nearly 500,000 Jews to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Its commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months.[9] To avoid being arrested, Grove and his mother took on false identities and were sheltered by friends.[7] His father, however, was arrested and taken to an Eastern Labor Camp to do forced labor, and was reunited with his family only after the war.[10] > During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria. Penniless and barely able to speak English, in 1957 he eventually made his way to the United States. He later changed his name to the anglicized Andrew S. Grove.[1][11] Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs: > By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.[1] |