Andrew Grove - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Grove was born András István Gróf, to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. Growing up, he was known to friends as "Andris". At the age of four he contracted scarlet fever, which was nearly fatal and caused partial hearing loss. When he was eight, the Nazis occupied Hungary and deported nearly 500,000 Jews to concentration camps. He and his mother took on false identities and were sheltered by friends. His father was taken to an Eastern Labor Camp to do forced labor, but was reunited with his family after the war. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria, where he eventually made his way to the United States in 1957. There, he changed his name to Andrew S. Grove. To this day, he speaks English with a Hungarian accent.

Grove summarizes 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. . . many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.

Arriving in the United States in 1957, with little money, Grove retained a "passion for learning." He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, and earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

Soon after arriving in New York in 1957, he met his future wife, Eva, who was a fellow refugee. They met while he held a job as a busboy and she was a waitress. They married in June 1958 and have been married since, having two daughters.