Goldfinger was brought up in affluence on one of the faultlines of Europe. The family lived in Budapest and summered on the family estates in the southern Carpathians – which Patrick Leigh Fermor has called ‘the most resented frontier in Europe’. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of political and racial turmoil, the Goldfinger family moved to Vienna. In 1920, Ernö went to Paris, by then as a Polish national according to the territorial adjustments made in the Trianon Treaty.