Andrew S. Grove was born Andras Grof on Sept. 2, 1936, into a Jewish household in Budapest. His father owned a small dairy business, and his mother helped keep the books. As a child, Mr. Grove was afflicted with scarlet fever and an ear infection that left him almost deaf. His father was rounded up by German troops occupying Hungary during World War II and sent to a labor camp, where he survived typhoid and pneumonia.

Meanwhile, the young Mr. Grove and his mother were hidden by a Christian family until the war’s end. In a 1997 Time magazine interview, Mr. Grove recalled that at age 8 he was told by his mother to assume a Christian alias. “She explained to me that I cannot make a mistake, that I had to forget my name,” Mr. Grove said.

Liberation from the Nazis was followed by Communist rule in Hungary, and then by the Hungarian uprising of 1956 that was put down by Russian troops. Mr. Grove, who was studying chemistry, decided to flee the country after a number of his fellow students were arrested. He and a friend crossed the border into Austria after a night spent evading Soviet troops.

Several weeks later, he boarded a refugee ship to New York, and from there was taken to a former P.O.W. camp in New Jersey until his immigration papers were in order. “We thought that all the propaganda was true, that America was just another drab, totalitarian state,” said Mr. Grove in a 1995 interview with Fortune magazine, in which he recalled his first impressions of the United States.

Mr. Grove, who Americanized his name within weeks, moved in with an aunt and uncle living in a small Bronx apartment. He enrolled as a chemical engineering student at the City College of New York, and graduated at the top of his class despite struggling with English and impaired hearing. Mr. Grove got through lectures by learning to read lips and then deciphering his notes at home or at the library. “I had to go over each day’s work again at night with a dictionary at my side,” he told The New York Times in a 1960 article that focused on that year’s outstanding CCNY graduates.

In 1958, he married Eva, another Hungarian refugee, whom he met the previous summer at a New Hampshire resort where both worked as waiters. They moved to California, where Mr. Grove earned a doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. They had two daughters — whose names were never revealed by the media because of Mr. Grove’s insistence on protecting their privacy.