Heinz Kohut was born on May 3, 1913 in Vienna, Austria—a country whose culture, literature and music permeated his very being. He finished his medical studies in 1938, after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany, giving him little time to escape the horrors that awaited the Jews in that country. He then spent a year in England, from where he emigrated to the United State and settled in Chicago in 1939.