Mark Shterenberg was a retired engineer who steadfastly believed in doing the right thing, getting a good education and working hard to get through life.

He instilled those values in his family, making them understand: “You can lose everything, but what they can’t take away is what’s inside your head,” Maya Amans remembers her father always saying.

Shterenberg, who was born in 1944 at the end of World War II and emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1980 with Amans’ mother, would tell his family, “If you understand how the world functions, they can’t take that away from you.”

On Jan. 8, the husband, father and grandfather lost his life trying to protect his Pacific Palisades home, a house that his family said was a testament to his hard work and success over the decades. He was 80.

The value of real estate

When the family first left Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — and moved to Chicago, Amans said they first lived in a tiny apartment while her parents learned to navigate life in America.

“Dad realized that real estate was the best way to invest,” Amans said, adding that her father quickly picked up how to get things done and who to do it with.

By 1984, Shterenberg purchased the smallest house on the tiniest street in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, she said.

“He was all about a good work ethic and didn’t waste money,” she said. “We didn’t have a snowblower; everyone else on that street had one, but not us. And by 14, I had biceps like a guy would have, shoveling snow every day.”

In 1986, Amans said, her father decided to move to a warmer climate after another brutal winter. The aerospace industry was still booming in sunny California, and with his background in engineering — once working on submarines in his home country — he saw opportunity there.

“Again, he learned where the best neighborhoods were and we moved to Santa Monica,” she said. “My parents put their heads down and made it happen. My dad slowly climbed into the aerospace industry (working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Hughes Aerospace Corp.), and we bought the condominium in 1988.”

Amans, taking a queue from her father on the importance of education, graduated with honors from Santa Monica High and went to community college.

She said her parents would have paid for her to attend a university, but she chose not to because she didn’t want to waste money. Later, though, when she was pregnant with her daughter, her parents pushed her to do more, and she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing. Her father, she said, might have hoped she would have become a doctor.

“I could function like a physician but wasn’t a physician; that was still a slight disappointment for my dad,” she said, laughing it off. “It’s interesting how all these things translate into future generations and how we think about things and how we value what we value.”

In 1993, Shterenberg and his wife, Marina, moved to the home in the Palisades.

Did it his way

Amans said she and other family will never be sure why Shterenberg didn’t heed pleas and texts to leave once the fire broke out, but Amans said likely, “he was so hung up on the house and that was all he had in this world,” that he wanted to do all he could to save it.

Raised by Jewish parents amid a climate of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, Shterenberg knew something about overcoming obstacles and challenges. She said he’d been a wrestler in his younger days and was still physically strong.

“He did his best and he did it his way,” Amans said. “We just don’t know and don’t need to know. He knew the choices he was making. This is the way it ended.”

As recently as the morning of Jan. 8, when he died, Shterenberg ran his customary three miles through his neighborhood. His daughter said he would get up at 5 a.m. and run in the dark, leading some neighbors to complain that they couldn’t see him in the roadway.

Then he’d take a cold plunge in his pool; he thought heating the water was wasteful, she said.

Shterenberg also instilled a love of running in Amans, who began running at 9 and now has run the LA Marathon four times.

Day of the fire

On the day of the fire, Amans, who lives in Santa Monica, said she and her mother saw smoke coming from the Palisades area. Her mother has been living with her for some time now, Amans said, as she recovered from severe arthritis and could be better cared for with her.

“When the fire started, we texted him and begged him to come to Santa Monica,” Amans said. “He said, ‘No, I think I’m going to stick it out and see if it will pass.’ The last text we got was that he could see white smoke, that he thought everything was getting better, and that he could see the sky and stars.”

Her mother, Amans said, also got a text from Shterenberg written in Russian that said: “Don’t think badly of me.”

The family lost contact with him. The last thing they heard was that a neighbor next door, who had evacuated his own parents from next to Shterenberg’s house, told Amans that “everything on the street was on fire.”

The neighbor told Amans that he had begged Shterenberg to leave with him, but he refused.

“He said he would keep an eye on things, and he was going to try to protect everyone’s property and make sure whatever he could do to protect them, he would do,” she said.

But, the firestorm on Glenhaven Drive, where the Shterenberg home stood, was too intense.

Amans said a fire official told her that Lachman Lane, a street next to Glenhaven, had been on fire all day. Then the fire moved downhill to Sunset Boulevard.

At 9:30, Amans said, she believed her father thought he was in the clear, but embers blew back, and all of Glenhaven was ablaze by 11:30 p.m.

“The last time any data was retrieved from the phone was midnight,” she said. “We think that’s when our house was on fire.”

The family reported Shterenberg missing and contacted all hospitals to look for a John Doe who resembled her father, Amans said.

“On Saturday, we finally had a phone call from some government official that there was a body discovered at that address,” she said. “His body wasn’t identified until I had to give my DNA.”

A grandfather’s pride

Among the things that made Shterenberg the happiest, Amans said, was the success he saw and hoped for in the next generation — Aman’s two children: Tatiana Bedi, 29, and Ryan Bedi, 22.

“My daughter is truly, truly brilliant and has gotten the same type of mind as he had,” she said. “She is in her final semester of law school at Berkeley. She was the apple of his eye. They bonded very quickly and they loved each other very much. He very much respected that she was so persistent with her education.”

And, he also had his eyes on his grandson, who Amans said is still figuring out what direction he wants to go in life.

“There was a lot of conversation and suggestions on what he needed to do,” Amans said, adding that her son told her father that he wanted to figure things out for himself.

“That’s what he loved and valued about his family,” Amans said about the children’s focus on their future. “He respected and loved my mom. They’d been married for 54 years.”

Among the things lost in the fire was an aluminum bracelet Shterenberg made for his wife many decades ago.

“It was sentimental,” Amans said. “He made it with his own hands. It was small and could travel easily.”