Justus Rosenberg

The Art of Resistance

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«Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground.” —USA Today

An American Library in Paris Book Award “Coups de Coeur” Selection
The Art of Resistance is unlike any World War II memoir before it. Its author, Justus Rosenberg, has spent the past seventy years teaching the classics of literature to American college students. Hidden within him, however, was a remarkable true story of wartime courage and romance worthy of a great novel. Here is Professor Rosenberg’s elegant and gripping chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil.

In 1937, after witnessing a violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris, heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a spy and scout.
After the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble, recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus found an ingenious way to escape. He two years during the war gathering intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the German retreat across France.
At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. For the past fifty years, he has taught literature at Bard College, shaping the inner lives of generations of students. Now he adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs: The Art of Resistance is a powerful saga of bravery and defiance, a true-life spy thriller touched throughout by a professor’s wisdom.
This book is currently unavailable
306 printed pages
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
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Impressions

  • Natanowicz Fabianshared an impression5 years ago

    Extraordinaria historia en la media noche de la humanidad!!

Quotes

  • Natanowicz Fabianhas quoted5 years ago
    We need to teach young people about the Holocaust—both the Jewish one and other “holocausts” in history and around the world—so that future generations will know where humankind’s worst instincts and political ideologies can lead
  • Natanowicz Fabianhas quoted5 years ago
    But I was also thinking of something Bertolt Brecht wrote in one of his plays: “Pity the nation that is in need of great heroes.” Senesh was a hero, and so were thousands of other people during the war. But why? Because the times required heroes. As long as there is hatred, intolerance, and hunger for power in the world, there will be heroes. We should dream of the day when they will no longer be needed
  • Natanowicz Fabianhas quoted5 years ago
    Time and time again, there was what I call “a confluence of circumstances” that presented me with a window of opportunity, or a moment to be seized
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