He could hear the hate from blocks away
The sound of a crowd, marching. Shouting in German, “Let the Jews be slaughtered!”
And then the smashing of windows.
It was 1937, and 16-year-old Justus Rosenberg ran home to hide.
He kept running and hiding even when he had no home. Then, he added fighting back. Rosenberg’s remarkable life had him smuggling out refugees, spying for the Resistance, and joining the U.S. Army.
Rosenberg is 98 now, and he recounts his astounding life in “The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground.” It’s a story of courage, luck and survival..
Also, of loving life.
Rosenberg’s childhood was quiet. His father had scandalized his wealthy Polish father by eloping with a poor girl. For years the small family lived happily in the independent city-state of Danzig.
Even after the Nazis came to power in nearby Germany, Justus’ father told him not to worry. It would pass. It was a phase.
But now Danzig’s own fascists and anti-Semites were at their door. When they couldn’t break in, they grew angrier. “We’ll be back!” they threatened. ”Vermin!”
Slowly, the Rosenbergs made plans. Justus would continue his schooling in Paris. His parents and younger sister would leave Danzig later. They said goodbye at the train station.
They hadn’t realized how quickly the world would devolve. How could they?
By the next year, the Jewish community in Danzig was desperate. They sold off everything, from synagogues to menorahs. Pooled, the money just might be enough to get everyone out.
But where could they go?
“Your mother and I have certainly decided not to return to Poland,” Justus’ father wrote. “We would prefer, although not Zionists, to go on an illegal transport to Palestine.”
They promised to keep in touch.
There were no more letters.
Had his family perished? All Rosenberg knew, once the Germans marched into France, was that this was his war, too.
His own country no longer existed. The French army wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t a citizen. The Polish army still had units in the south of France, but when Rosenberg got there, they had evacuated.
And then, in Marseille, his life changed.
A private organization, the American Rescue Committee, was working to get Europe’s intellectuals out of Europe. They needed a courier. And the blond, blue-eyed, baby-faced Rosenberg spoke German, French, and Polish.
At first, he delivered stacks of fake visas, cleverly forged by a cartoonist. He graduated to spiriting refugees over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. One group included the author Heinrich Mann and the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.
Rosenberg was too starstruck to be scared.
Back in France, he moved into a villa the committee used as refugee housing. The situation was surreal. In the dining room, the poet André Breton held court. In the garden, the artist Max Ernst stretched canvases, while his lover, heiress Peggy Guggenheim, watched.
France’s collaborationist government knew what the committee was up to, and in the summer of 1941, they broke it up – with Washington’s approval. America was still waiting out this fight. They didn""t want to antagonize Germany or its allies.
But if America was still months from entering the war, Rosenberg was ready to commit even further. He joined the anti-fascist Resistance.
Sent to Grenoble, he hung around cafes, looking for students to recruit. It went perfectly for seven months. Then, on Aug. 27, 1942, there was a knock at the door.
Until now, Jews had been moderately safe in the south of France, where the puppet Vichy government was still technically in charge. No longer. Rosenberg was locked up with 50 other frightened prisoners.
He asked a bored guard what came next. A train to a labor camp in Poland, the man explained.
“Though we were talking casually, what he was saying was alarming indeed,” Rosenberg writes. “I knew that Poland was rife with anti-Semitism and had been increasingly so even before the war. I didn’t like the sound of ‘Polish labor camp’ at all.”
Figuring it was easier to escape from a hospital than a prison, Rosenberg began doubling over and screaming in pain. Taken to the infirmary, he faked a temperature of 104 by rubbing the thermometer on the blanket when the doctor wasn""t looking.
The diagnosis was clear: Appendicitis.
Rosenberg was too good of an actor. When he awoke in the hospital, he was minus one healthy appendix. Still, he avoided the camps.
A sympathetic priest sneaked in some clothes, then left a bike outside.
Hurriedly dressed, holding a hand to his fresh stitches, Rosenberg pedaled away as fast as he dared.
His comrades welcomed him back then gave him a new job. Rosenberg now moved to a small village on the Mediterranean, where, as "Jean-Paul Guiton," he played on the local soccer team and taught Sunday school.
In his off hours, though, he traveled up and down the coast, noting German troop movements. He also explored the nearby forests, scouting safe places for campsites. The Resistance was already assembling a guerrilla army.
It was 1944, and the French knew the Allies were coming soon.
The first rescuers hit Normandy on June 6. But when 150,000 more troops arrived near Toulon two months later, Rosenberg and the Resistance were caught by surprise. One day on patrol, they nearly shot several approaching Americans, mistaking them for Germans.
The Yanks turned out to be with the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion Reconnaissance Company, and they needed local intelligence. Could Rosenberg help?
After receiving approval from the Resistance, Rosenberg was given a U.S. Army uniform and attached to the company, helping them interrogate locals and POWs. Dangers were still everywhere. At one point, his jeep set off a mine, remarkably, Rosenberg survived with just several broken ribs.
As the war finally hurtled toward a close, Rosenberg’s life slowly came back together. By Christmas, he was celebrating in liberated Paris. By February of 1945, he had a job with a relief organization and had begun the search for his family.
The news was grim. Rosenberg""s extended family had been almost completely exterminated. Yet his parents and younger sister survived.
It had not been easy. The British refused to let their ship dock in Palestine, where Jewish immigration was restricted. They were interned on Mauritius, a speck of an island off Madagascar.
It was years before they could leave. Years more before their son, who had immigrated to America, was able to visit them in Israel. Still, they had all, miraculously, survived.
As does Rosenberg, nearing 100. A professor emeritus at Bard College, he enjoyed a second life since coming to America. Naturally, vestiges of his war years linger.
“Whenever I have a document or text of special importance, I look for a place to conceal it,” he writes. “In a restaurant, I try to get a table with my back to the wall, where I can take in the whole room.”
Even stronger than those old habits is a central conviction.
“We need to teach young people about the Holocaust – both the Jewish one and other ‘holocausts’ in history,” he declares. “So that future generations will know where humankind’s worst instincts and political ideologies can lead.”