Fred Gruen - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Born Fritz Heinz Georg Grün and known as 'Heinzie' during his boyhood, he left Vienna in 1936 on the £200 legacy of an uncle to receive an English education at Herne Bay College. It was a good time for someone of Jewish descent to be leaving Austria. His father Willy, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer while he was at school in England and his mother Marianne (née Zwack) was engulfed in the Holocaust being taken first to Theresienstadt and thence to Auschwitz after which she was not seen again.

Fred Gruen was unsure of what to do with himself after leaving high school. With consequences that would ramify at the end of his life, he worked for some time for a printer. In the same speech in which he promised to "fight on the beaches" Churchill announced widespread internment. "I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do." Gruen was one such.

He was interned and shipped to Australia in the Dunera, a boat that became famous for the talent it brought to Australia and for the unpleasantness with which its human cargo was treated. They encountered a more relaxed attitude in Australia – one guard summing up the character of the 'friendly enemy aliens' and famously asking one of them to hold his rifle while he lit a cigarette. Still, they were transported to a camp in Hay, a remote town in NSW. Both on the boat trip to Australia and thence at Hay, Gruen benefited from the ubiquity of highly educated fellow inmates from musicians to philosophers of considerable standing in Europe. These people became mentors and Miss Margaret Read (later Mrs Margaret Holmes) of the Student Christian Movement assisted Gruen and others in accessing books and other University resources for study.

Gruen graduated from the University of Melbourne though, given the difficulty he experienced studying – either in the camp or in war service (on one occasion not knowing if he would receive permission to sit the exam until two months before it was held) Gruen described the results he achieved as mediocre.

After the war he married Ann Margaret Darvall in May 1947. Commencing work as a graduate at the NSW Department of Agriculture it became clear to him that he could not get adequate training in Australia. So the couple went to the United States. He studied there for two years, first at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then at the University of Chicago; five members of that university's economics department present at the time would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Though he completed the examinations for his PhD Gruen did not finish the degree as the intensity of his study led to a serious thyroid condition. Without drugs that had been developed shortly before then, the condition would have been life threatening. However it was successfully treated and its only legacy for the rest of his life was the exemplary balance Gruen kept in his life. He worked hard and productively, but not obsessively for the rest of his life.