4 ideas
Born in 1936 to a Jewish dairy-owning family in Budapest, András Gróf survived the 1944 Nazi occupation by hiding with his mother under a false Christian name. His father survived forced labor, only to see the family business seized by the communist state. After Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 revolution, the 20-year-old chemistry student crossed on foot into Austria and reached New York in early 1957, where he was renamed Andrew Grove.
Under a regime where your prospects depend on labels assigned to you, such as 'Jew' or 'class enemy,' the safest path is a discipline whose outcomes can be objectively verified. Grove chose chemistry because a reaction either works or it doesn't, which gave him a domain where merit could not easily be reinterpreted by political authorities.
Political upheaval briefly opens exits, like the porous Austrian border in late 1956, that disappear once order is restored. Those who wait for clarity about how things will turn out miss the window. The decision to leave has to be made while the situation still looks ambiguous and dangerous.
Across the Nazi and communist regimes, the category Grove was placed in mattered more than anything he did. It made him a target first for his ethnicity and then for his family's class. Seen this way, survival depends on reading which labels are currently dangerous and managing how you are seen: assumed names, silence about origins, careful choice of companions.