Zeev Sternhell - Biography

Biography

Zeev Sternhell was born in Przemyśl, Poland to an affluent secular Jewish family with Zionist tendencies. His grandfather and father were textile merchants. When Russia occupied eastern Poland, Russian troops took over part of his home. His father died of natural causes. A few months after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the family was sent to the ghetto. His mother and older sister, Ada, were killed by the Nazis when he was seven years old. An uncle who had a permit to work outside the ghetto smuggled him to Lwow. The uncle found a Polish officer who was willing to help them. Supplied with false Aryan papers, Sternhell lived with his aunt, uncle and cousin as a Polish Catholic. After the war, he was baptized, taking the Polish name Zbigniew Orolski. He became an altar boy in the Cathedral of Kraków. In 1946, at the age of 11, Sternhell was taken to France on a Red Cross children's train, where he lived with an aunt. He learned French and was accepted to a school in Avignon despite stiff competition.

In the winter of 1951, at the age of 16, Sternhell immigrated to Israel under the auspices of Youth Aliyah, and was sent to Magdiel youth village. In the 1950s, Sternhell served as a platoon commander in the Golani infantry brigade, including the Sinai War. He fought as a reservist in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanon War.

In 1957-1960, he studied history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating with a BA cum laude. In 1969, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris for his thesis on The Social and Political Ideas of Maurice Barrès.

Sternhell lives in Jerusalem with his wife Ziva, an art historian. They have two daughters.