[1][2] Andrija Steigenberg was born on April 4, 1913, in a poor Jewish family in the village of Boka in Banat (at that time in Austria-Hungary), as the son of a poor merchant Alexander Steigenberg and Jelisaveta Miller.
He finished high school in Petrovgrad (today's Zrenjanin) in 1932, and the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1939.
[3][2] After completing his studies, he taught history at a private high school in Zagreb.
His parents, two younger brothers and a sister were killed in 1941 in a German concentration camp.
[1] He obtained the doctorate of historical sciences in 1956 with the dissertation "The position and struggle of the peasantry in Srem from the end of the 19th century to 1914".