Grove was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Maria and George Gróf. Growing up, he was known to friends as "Andris". At the age of four he contracted scarlet fever, which was nearly fatal and caused partial hearing loss.[4] When he was eight, the Nazis occupied Hungary and deported nearly 500,000 Jews to concentration camps. He and his mother took on false identities and were sheltered by friends.[4] His father was taken to an Eastern Labor Camp to do forced labor, but was reunited with his family after the war. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria, where he eventually made his way to the United States in 1957. There, he changed his name to Andrew S. Grove.[1] He spoke English with a Hungarian accent.[7]

Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs:

   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. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.[1]