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What came next is the thing his daughters call "what Dad doesn't talk about." The rest of the world calls it World War II. Grove won't discuss his life in Budapest during the war. And though he travels the world, he hasn't returned to the city and swears he has "no interest in going back." He recently ran into billionaire George Soros, who was also a Jew living in Budapest in 1941. Soros has called the years the most important of his life. Grove calls Soros "totally different from me in that respect." The time, he insists, hasn't marked him. But late at night, over Scotch and sushi--Grove is partial to eel--the stories slip out.
His father disappeared in 1941--just vanished after being drafted into a work brigade. What had happened? No one knew, but they did know that Jewish men around Eastern Europe were disappearing like a morning fog. Then in March 1944, the Germans occupied Budapest and, Grove says, "they began rounding us up. Not us, actually, because my mother and I were in hiding, but Jews. Jews they were rounding up." He blinks and sips at his Scotch.
His eyes become brimful and wet. He speaks in his deliberate, still accented English: "I was eight years old, and I knew bad things were happening, but I don't remember the details. My mother took me away. She explained to me what it meant that I would have a different name, that I cannot make a mistake, that I had to forget my name and that I couldn't, if they said 'Write your name,' I couldn't write it down." He became Andras Malesevics. The Grofs, mother and son, living on stolen papers, pretended to be acquaintances of a Christian family. "They took us in at a very serious risk to themselves," he says. His wife Eva glances across the table, uncertain about this new territory Andy is wandering into. "What happened to them?" she asks. "Did you lose contact with them?" He pauses. Shakes his head. "I don't know. We didn't know them that well, you know. That's the strange thing." Quiet settles over the table again. I ask, "But they did the right thing?" Grove offers a chilling display of his pragmatism. He looks at me, dry-eyed now: "They did the right thing because it worked. If they had got killed over it, it wouldn't have been the right thing."
For Grove, the right thing after the war was to try to fulfill his parents' dream--his father, somehow, had survived the Eastern front--of his getting into college. Science was not his first passion. At 14 he joined a local youth newspaper and fell hard for the joys of journalism: writing, thinking, exploring. "I loved it," he recalls--until a relative was detained without trial and Grove became persona non grata at the paper. Nearly 40 years later he wrote, "I did not want a profession in which a totally subjective evaluation, easily colored by political considerations, could decide the merits of my work. I ran from writing to science."