Sven Sonnenberg was born in Poland in 1931 to a German-Jewish family and managed to survive World War II with his sister and mother by escaping, running, and hiding from the Nazis. The rest of his extended family perished in the Holocaust. He went on to study engineering, graduating with a Masters Degree in Engineering from the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute. In 1968, he immigrated with his wife and son to the United States and worked as an engineer for companies including Kelsey-Hayes, Towler Hydraulics, and Kodak until his retirement in 1995. When his wife was diagnosed with advanced breast ca...