Founders

What I learned from reading Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove.  ---- [0:01] 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.  [3:02] Some 200,000 Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.  [8:05] A subtle and compelling commentary on the power to endure.  [10:03] He dedicates this book to his mom. He says: To my mother, who gave me the gift of life more than once.   [13:03] People avoided looking at us. Even people whom we knew wouldn’t meet our eyes. It was as if a barrier was growing between us and everyone else.  [14:01] My mother returned in a couple of hours, shaken up. She told me that the man who came for her was a policeman who arrested her along with the