Zeev Sternhell was born in Przemyśl in south-eastern Poland on 10 April 1935 to an affluent secular Jewish family with Zionist tendencies. His grandfather and father were textile merchants. At 5, this highly protected world around him suddenly collapsed. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, in which his father fought with the Polish army and died shortly after returning home when Poland was defeated. The family home was partially requisitioned by Soviet forces. After the German declaration of war on the Soviet Union, the family were sent to a ghetto. His mother and older sister, Ada, were killed by the Nazis when he was about seven years old. An uncle who had a permit to work outside the ghetto smuggled him to Lwów. The uncle found a Polish officer and a working-class family, rare examples in his experience of Poland at that time of people not only not anti-Semitic but ready to provide assistance to Jews, who were 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.