Word: groves
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...born on Sept. 2, 1936, in Budapest, the son of George, the dairyman, and Maria, a bookkeeping clerk. His father, a gregarious, easygoing man with a strong, logical mind, left school early and taught himself business and accounting--everything he needed to know to run a small dairy service. Grove's mother, a spare, lovely woman, raised him in their two-room 19th century apartment. From an early age Grove was marked as the son of a capitalist and as a Jew. His parents hoped that with hard work he could overcome the prejudices...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...