Growing Up In Hell

Anyone who sentimentalizes childhood is, of course, an idiot. Childhood is an ordeal and a journey--dangerous, magical, sometimes humiliating and, since you are at the mercy of adults, fairly weird. Little Andris Grof's childhood was somewhat more so.

In wartime Hungary, Andris--age eight and passing as a gentile under the Slavic name Andris Malesevics--learned never to urinate in front of other children, lest his circumcised penis give him away. Sensible policy. In Budapest's City Park one day in 1943, a little girl turned to him and said, "Jesus Christ was killed by the Jews, and because of that, all the Jews will be thrown into the Danube." The child adumbrated Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who months later took charge of the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews.

Andris Grof survived Eichmann and more--including the Soviet occupation of Hungary (out of the Nazi frying pan, into the communist fire) and the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1956. That fall of '56, with thousands of his compatriots, Grof sneaked across the Austrian border in the middle of the night and then sailed to America. In New York City, he Americanized his name to Andrew S. Grove--Andy Grove. This immigrant's story has a gaudily triumphant sequel. In the fullness of the American dream, Grove became one of the founders of Intel (he's now chairman of the company, the world's largest maker of semiconductors), a pioneer of the information revolution and in 1997 TIME's Man of the Year.

Grove tells the story of his first 20 years in Swimming Across (Warner Books; 290 pages; $26.95), an astringently unsentimental memoir that may find its place on a shelf with such works as Angela's Ashes, George Orwell's autobiographical essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life. There's a touch of The Painted Bird, of a Hungarian Huckleberry Finn.

Like most good memoirs of childhood, Swimming Across has the poignant clarity of a child too young to have illusions. What is, is--and is seen with wondering ruthlessness. The son of nonreligious Jews, Andris, whose father was a partner in a dairy business, first shows himself to the reader on his third birthday, Sept. 2, 1939, scooting in a new toy car along the promenade on the banks of the Danube. Grove does not mention that one day earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland.

The air raids in Budapest started in 1943. The family was dozing in an air-raid shelter in the middle of the night when a nearby apartment house was hit: "It looked like a big knife had sliced off the front half of every floor. You could see into the apartments on all four stories, like a doll's house." In March 1944 the German army marched into Hungary: "The German soldiers...wore shiny boots and had a self-confident air about them. They reminded me of my toy soldiers...I was impressed." Soon the Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David. The Nazis took away the family's radio: forbidden. They arrested the building superintendent's wife for bringing chicken soup and mashed potatoes to Andris when he was sick: against the law to feed Jews. One day Andris looked outside his window and saw German soldiers loading the occupants of a Jewish apartment building into trucks: "The people filing out...all had their hands in the air, even the little kids, who were being carried by their parents."

Early in the war, Andris' father disappeared to the Russian front with a Jewish forced-labor battalion. When he returned, half starved, at the end of the war, he described how Hungarian guards, on a bitterly cold Russian night, forced the Jewish battalion to strip naked and climb trees, "and the guards sprayed them with water and watched and laughed as one after another fell out of the trees frozen to death."

"Ordinary life ceased to be," Grove remembers. But the cast of bad guys did change. Eventually the Russians came banging in from the East. Andris' mother was among the women they raped.

But the business of childhood proceeded, even under the dead hand of communists. Andris and his friends watched prewar American cowboy movies, stole candy and practiced various forms of juvenile delinquency. They traded the usual sexual misinformation. After Stalin's death in 1953, in a citywide funeral march, Andris and his schoolmates were seized by a fit of giggles: "We couldn't stop, perhaps exactly because it was so dangerous."

When Andris made it to Vienna in 1956, he had $20. With other refugees, he sailed for two weeks across a stormy North Atlantic, on a crowded, smelly ship whose crew included the first Asians and blacks Andris had ever seen. When the refugees got to Brooklyn, they couldn't see the Statue of Liberty. Never mind. Andy Grove began a new life on an opposite shore of history.