Swimming Across: A Memoir Read online

  Copyright © 2001 by Andrew S. Grove

  All rights reserved.

  Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: November 2001

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55328-5

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One: My Third Birthday

  Chapter Two: Scarlet Fever

  Chapter Three: The War Arrives

  Chapter Four: Life Gets Strange

  Chapter Five: Christmas in Kobanya

  Chapter Six: After the War

  Chapter Seven: Gymnasium

  Chapter Eight: Dob Street School

  Chapter Nine: Madach Gymnasium

  Chapter Ten: Fourth Year

  Chapter Eleven: University—First Year

  Chapter Twelve: Revolution

  Chapter Thirteen: Crossing the Border

  Chapter Fourteen: Aboard Ship

  Chapter Fifteen: New York City

  Epilogue

  Also by Andrew S. Grove

  Only the Paranoid Survive

  High Output Management

  One-on-One with Andy Grove

  Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices

  TO MY MOTHER,

  WHO GAVE ME THE GIFT OF LIFE,

  MORE THAN ONCE.

  Acknowledgments

  As head of a public company, I have been in the limelight for a good number of years. I have always viewed this exposure as one due to my professional work and have maintained a separation between my work life and my personal life and background. The former was fair game, I thought, the latter, not.

  The first chink in this position, which turned out to be the first step toward this memoir, was the result of my meeting Josh Ramo. Josh was assigned to write my profile for TIME magazine's 1997 Man of the Year issue. He was keenly interested in my younger years, convinced that they had a major part in shaping who I became as an adult. At first, I resisted his efforts as I had all other such attempts before that. Josh prevailed, however. His genuine interest in my story and the trust he earned through the hours we spent together caused me to open up. My willingness to do so led to what I thought was an excellent profile—with that, the first olive was taken out of the bottle. So, thanks are due to Josh for starting the process.

  In the years after the TIME article, the thought of telling my own story, in greater detail and in a book form, has recurred time and again. My wife, Eva, who over the years has heard me talk about the events of my life before we met at age twenty-one encouraged me. She reminded me of my grandchildren, who may not get to hear these stories from me when they will be old enough to understand them. Her encouragement turned into her becoming a sounding board and an active participant in prompting my recollection of incidents and events; it continued in her becoming a critical editor of the evolving story.

  Once I had a first draft of the manuscript, Norm Pearlstine took on a key role. Norm and I have known each other professionally for twenty years or so, but when he agreed to edit my book, the relationship took on a different form. He immersed himself in my story and spotted the places where I was still holding back, perhaps because some memories were still painful. Norm systematically analyzed my manuscript for these spots and drew me out further than I was prepared to go at first. His efforts led to a more complete and more genuine story.

  Last but not least, I am grateful to Catherine Fredman who, after having helped me with Only the Paranoid Survive , a book on business strategy, readily shifted gears stylistically, adapting to the requirements of telling the personal story of a boy. She maintained her keen editorial instincts but also undertook to question me in detail about settings, scenes, and emotions. Cathy's pursuit of the fine detail caused me to dig into my memories far more than I thought I could.

  I am very fortunate to have people like these four take a deep interest in my first twenty years. Without them this book wouldn't have taken shape.

  Prologue

  I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1936. 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.

  This is the story of that time and what happened to my family and me.

  Before I tell my story, it may be helpful to provide some historical context. When I was born, Hungary was governed by the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Miklos Horthy. Horthy's government was aligned with Nazi Germany, but it was more independent than Nazi Germany's other allies. This may have had something to do with the fact that Hungary was situated between the countries under Germany's influence and the Soviet Union.

  During the early years of World War II, Hungary maintained a policy of armed neutrality. However, when Hitler's Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hungary abandoned that policy and declared war against the Allies. For all intents and purposes, this meant declaring war against the Soviet Union on the side of Nazi Germany.

  By 1943, the Soviet army had the Germans and their Hungarian allies in retreat, and the front began to work its way through Hungary from its eastern borders toward the capital, Budapest. The Germans were concerned that Horthy might try to negotiate a separate peace with the advancing Russians. To preempt that possibility, they occupied Hungary in March 1944 and, in October, installed an extreme Fascist government under the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party.

  While the Horthy regime had discriminated against Hungarian Jews, the severity of the discrimination and persecution skyrocketed with the arrival of the Germans. Gestapo official Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the implementation of the Nazis' Final Solution throughout the rest of Europe, took personal charge of the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews. The extermination process started in the countryside and the cities outside of Budapest; within four months, virtually all Hungarian Jews living outside of Budapest had been deported. The great majority of them were killed in concentration camps.

  Before the process could be extended to Budapest, the rapidly deteriorating military situation—the Soviet forces were advancing on Budapest, and the Western Allies had successfully landed in Normandy and Italy—forced a halt to the deportations. Consequently, the majority of Jews in Budapest survived. Nevertheless, before the war, there were over six hundred fifty thousand Jews living in Hungary; after the war, some one hundred fifty thousand remained.

  In January 1945, after street-to-street and house-to-house fighting, the Soviet army pushed the Germans out of Budapest and, by April, out of the rest of Hungary as well. Instead of a German occupation army, there was now a Soviet occupation army.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, despite the presence of the Soviet occupying forces, Hungary enjoyed a multiparty democracy. However, the Communist Party gained more and more influence and finally consolidated its position in 1948. Thereafter, Hungary became an unquestioned satellite of the Soviet Union.

  The Hungarian Communist Party was divided into two major branches: the native Hungarian Communist branch, which had remained in Hungary even after the Communist Party in Hungary was outlawed by the Horthy regime; and the Muscovite branch, whose members had escaped to the Soviet Union and had now returned with the Russian troops. Matyas Rakosi was the preeminent leader of the Muscovite branch. Although both branches belonged to the same political party, there was a degree of distrust between them that grew as they jockey
ed for positions of authority in the Communist regime.

  By 1949, this jockeying for position broke into the open with the arrest and public trial of native Hungarian Communists by the Muscovites. The persecution intensified during the last few years of the life of the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, with purges, arrests, imprisonment, and deportation affecting the lives of broader and broader circles of people.

  Stalin died in March 1953, and a gradual relaxation of totalitarian controls took place. Over the next few years, this process accelerated until it culminated in a rebellion against the Communist government—the Hungarian revolution of October 1956.

  The revolt lasted for thirteen days and was then put down by Soviet armed forces. Many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West.

  I was one of them.

  Right: My father and my mother, around the time I was born.

  Below: My uncle Jozsi.

  Above: That is me as a baby.

  Below: My parents and me.

  Above: The house where we lived, on Kiraly Street (above the trolley bus).

  Chapter One

  MY THIRD BIRTHDAY

  THE SEARCHLIGHTS were like white lines being drawn on the cloudy evening sky. They moved back and forth, crossing, uncrossing, and crisscrossing again. People around me had their faces turned up to the sky, their eyes anxiously following the motion of the white lines. My mother said that they were practicing looking for planes.

  I paid no attention to them. I was taking my new car out for its first drive.

  My car was a tiny version of a real sports car. I could sit in it and drive it around by pushing up and down on foot pedals and steering with a real steering wheel. It looked exactly like my uncle Jozsi's sports car, except that his was white and mine was red. Red was a lot more fun.

  Jozsi and I had taken our sports cars to a promenade on the banks of the Danube River. I drove my car up and down, weaving between the legs of the people out for a stroll. It seemed more crowded than usual. Jozsi kept encouraging me to go faster and faster, then ran after me to keep me from bumping into people. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes he didn't. But people didn't seem to mind. They barely paid any attention to me. They were mesmerized by those white lines in the sky.

  My parents had come along, too. We often walked along the promenade on summer evenings. It was a popular thing to do in Budapest. Summer was over, but it was a warm evening, so I wasn't surprised that we were celebrating my birthday by the Danube. I was now three. It was September 2, 1939.

  My parents had moved to Budapest the year before. My father, George Grof, whom everyone called by his nickname, Gyurka, was a partner in a medium-size dairy business that he owned jointly with several friends. They bought raw milk from the farmers in the area, processed the milk into cottage cheese, yogurt, and especially butter (they were particularly proud of the quality of their butter), and sold the dairy products to stores in Budapest. My father was a pragmatic, down-to-earth businessman, energetic and quick. He knew how life worked.

  My father had dropped out of school at age eleven. My mother, Maria, had finished gymnasium, the Hungarian equivalent of a college preparatory academy. It was an unusual accomplishment for a woman at that time and even more unusual for a Jewish woman. Her heart had been set on becoming a concert pianist, but because she was a Jew she was not admitted to the music academy. Instead, she went to work in her parents' small grocery store. That's how she met my father.

  The dairy business was located in Bacsalmas, a small town about one hundred miles south of Budapest, near the Yugoslav border. My father often traveled to Budapest to call on customers, the butter, milk, and cottage cheese distributors.

  One day, my father called on my mother's parents' store to peddle his dairy products. He introduced himself to my mother. When they were done with their business, they stood in the doorway and talked until it was time for my mother to close up shop. Then they went for a walk through the streets of Budapest and talked and talked and talked some more.

  They were different, but their differences complemented each other. My mother was cultured without being snobbish. My father was smart and energetic, with a quick sense of humor. My mother tended to be shy and reserved with strangers, but somehow she was not at all like that with my father. His energy and inquisitiveness brought out the best in her. They liked each other a lot.

  The fact that my father was also Jewish helped further their relationship. It gave them a common background and a common understanding. Neither of my parents was religious. They didn't attend synagogue, and although most of their friends were Jewish, they didn't consider themselves to be part of the Jewish community. Aside from the religious affiliation that identified them on official documents, there was nothing to differentiate them from other Hungarians.

  When they met, my mother was twenty-five and my father was twenty-seven, an age at which a man was expected to have found a way to make a living good enough to support a family. They married a year later and moved to Bacsalmas. It was 1932.

  My mother hated Bacsalmas. She was a city girl, well educated, a would-be concert pianist, used to going to concerts and the theater. All of a sudden, she found herself in a small town out in the provinces. Not only was she living in a house with dirt floors and an outhouse, but she had to share the house with some of my father's relatives and partners. My mother was the newcomer and the outsider. She was a loner and very uncomfortable with communal living. She couldn't wait to get out of there, but she would not have a chance to do so for a while.

  Shortly before I was born, my parents temporarily moved to Budapest so that my mother could give birth in a good hospital. My mother would have liked to stay, but she returned to Bac-salmas with my father and me.

  She finally got her wish in 1938, when I was two years old. My father decided to set up a branch of the dairy in Budapest to service his growing number of city customers. We moved into an apartment on Kiraly Street, a few blocks from the dairy.

  Budapest is a city of two parts, separated by the Danube. The Buda side was hilly and dotted with old churches and castles and ramparts and rich homes. Pest was the commercial side, with the apartment houses spreading out from the city center. The natural setting, with its combination of the hills and the river, was beautiful and the stylish apartment houses and wide avenues lined with trees made for a pleasant environment.

  Kiraly Street was a busy thoroughfare connecting the central Ring Road on the Pest side to the big City Park farther out. A streetcar line ran down the middle, making the street even busier. It wasn't particularly noisy, but something interesting was always going on.

  There was a Jewish quarter in Budapest. It was located about a mile or so from where we lived. It was a strange, foreign area, where the men wore black hats and dark coats and long side curls and smelled odd. We were Jewish, too, but they were part of a different world.

  Our world was a typical middle-class neighborhood. Ours was a nice street but nothing fancy. Our apartment house, too, was like many others: a ground floor with shops facing the street, topped with two stories of apartments surrounding a central courtyard. A small one-story building in the courtyard housed a photo studio. An older couple who lived in one of the ground-floor apartments in the back of the courtyard provided basic caretaker services. The man doubled as a shoemaker as well as superintendent of the building, while his wife, a kindly old lady, picked up packages for tenants, let in tradesmen, and performed other ordinary chores.

  In our building, most of the apartments faced inward, their doors and windows opening onto the courtyard. A narrow balcony, maybe three or four feet wide with a wrought-iron railing, ran around the courtyard to connect the apartments on each floor. There was a communal toilet near the back of the balcony on each floor. This was for the inside apartments, which did not have their own toilets. A stairway connected the floors at each end of the balcony. In front, the stairway was wide an
d respectable. The back stairway was narrow and dark.

  The apartments that faced the street were the better apartments. They were bigger and had their own bathrooms. Our apartment was one story up from the ground floor. Two rooms faced the street, the Big Room and the Little Room. Both were equally deep, but the Big Room had two windows while the Little Room had just one. The windows were tall and narrow and opened in the center, like doors; the sill was waist-high, so you wouldn't fall out. During the summer, the windows were always open. You could look out at the apartment buildings across the street and watch the traffic and the streetcars and the people coming and going on Kiraly Street. Even when the windows were closed during the winter, the rooms were bright and airy.

  My mother's parents lived in the Little Room, and my parents and I lived in the Big Room. It served as my parents' bedroom, my bedroom, and our living room. There was a sofa bed in one corner, where my parents slept, with my crib nearby. There was also a polished wood dining table and chairs and some other furniture. The hardwood floor was covered with Persian carpets and area rugs.

  A door opened from the Big Room to the hallway, a long, dark passage that led to the staircase. You could get to our bathroom from this hallway and also from the Little Room. The bathroom had a sink, a bathtub with a wood-burning stove used to heat the water for baths, and a toilet. Just before you got to the stairs, the hallway opened on one side into the kitchen and on the other side to a very small room, where our maid, a heavyset woman named Gizi, lived. Gizi cooked, cleaned the house, did the shopping, and looked after me. She eventually married a man who went only by his surname, Sinko. After they got married, Gizi and Sinko both squeezed into that little room. Sinko worked elsewhere, but when he was home, he would carve wood sticks for me and take me to the park. In her spare time, Gizi would sit down and read me the crime stories in the newspaper. I was completely fascinated.