An Uncommon Friendship - Bernat Rosner

Скачать книгу

European fates. It gave them the opportunity to define who they were, with careers and families far from the traumas of their youth. Two Europeans became Americans, even as the turbulence of the past left marks on their souls.

      As adults Bernat Rosner and Fritz Tubach met by chance in the San Francisco Bay area and became friends. But it was more than a decade before they began to talk to each other about their pasts and made the decision to record their stories. In order to keep his past life as victim at a distance, Bernie preferred that his story as an Auschwitz survivor be told in the third person, as a narrative by his German friend. The daunting task of writing the story of his Jewish friend helped Fritz confront his own past in Nazi Germany along with that of his family and childhood village. Both Bernie and Fritz believed that their lives in rural Europe before the Holocaust also needed to be revisited for the sake of the dead, the living, and the innocent, and because of the guilty.

      Ultimately, both men refused to allow Hitler's agenda to define their lives and prevent their friendship. Their stories are about bridge building; they stand in opposition to the ethnic strife generated by “blood and soil” legacies. In these double memoirs Bernat Rosner attempts to come to terms with a past long suppressed; for Fritz Tubach, there is a search for redemption through narrating the story of one of Nazi Germany's victims together with his own.

      But let the two stories, joined here, speak for themselves.

      SALLY PATTERSON TUBACH

       Acknowledgments

      Many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have helped us along during the adventure of writing these double memoirs. We not only had the benefit of strongly held opinions but also expert editorial advice on how best to tell our stories. From Fred Amory, who was the first to read a tentative draft of an early chapter, to our University of California Press editor, Stan Holwitz, whose insightful and comprehensive view informed the finished manuscript, our work was encouraged and aided by many: Martin Ebel, Dr. and Mrs. Paul Erdman, Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach, Wolfgang EBbach, Gerd and Kirsten Hillen, Marty Markinson, Shelley McEwan, Susan Rosner, Johan Snapper, Christa and Gerhard Wolf, and Martha Patterson Wynegar. We are also grateful for the help and suggestions of Leonard Nathan, Julie Christensen, Eli Katz, Susanne Lowenthal and the Staatsarchiv in Wertheim. Others at the University of California Press, whose work and expertise were indispensable in turning our manuscript into a finished book include Sheila Berg, Diana Feinberg, Barbara Jellow, Steve Renick, Amy Torack, and particularly Suzanne Knott, our project editor. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Charles Merrill, Jr., and to Mark Magowan and Peter Magowan for their close and engaged reading of the manuscript.

      To German friends who helped organize our 1997 tour and provided many insights into contemporary Germany, we also owe our thanks: Manuela Bayer, Bernhard Holl, Ursula Strozynksi, Kurt Schüssler, Manfred Zink, and Alfred Ernst and Erika zu Lowenstein. We are also grateful to the Cosmos Club at the University of California at Berkeley and to the German Wirtschaftsgilde e.V. under its president, Hansjorg Weitbrecht, which provided us with forums to present preliminary excerpts of our joint enterprise in public readings and discussions.

      We would like to give special thanks to Carol Sanger for her critical and productive line-by-line reading of the manuscript. Her commentary prompted us to rethink some key aspects of the work when we had thought it near completion and became crucial in bringing this project to a successful conclusion.

      For whatever faults that remain and whatever controversies the book may engender, we alone are responsible. We have not written these memoirs to be paradigmatic of any particular political stance or to endear ourselves to a particular readership. We are motivated primarily by the desire to tell our personal stories, the stories of Bernie and Fritz. We are grateful to have had the encouragement and support of so many people in a project that turned out to be more difficult than we had initially imagined. They have enriched an experience we will never forget.

      Finally, in an endeavor in which two life stories are combined, particularly ones partially shaped by a fateful divide, an extra measure of cooperation and sensitivity is required of the authors. Each of us would like to add some individual acknowledgments.

      I, Fritz Tubach, believe that it was Bernie s extraordinary openness and flexibility that brought forth his story, allowed it to be told in my narrative voice, and set the tone of the project. It was the simple faith of one human being in another that served as the guiding principle of our work.

      Beyond my friendship with Bernat Rosner, I owe the most to two people who gave me the inner strength to live up to the confidence he placed in me: one from the past, my stepmother, Maria Tubach, nee Zink, one of the very few people I knew as a child and teenager who had the courage to oppose the Nazi hysteria; the other, from the present, my wife, Sally, who provided me with the professional distance and steady presence I needed for an endeavor so close to me. She polished my rough-hewn prose, and her collaboration was crucial in all phases of the project.

      I, Bernat Rosner, would like to give credit to the impetus provided by my friend and partner in this venture, Fritz Tubach. For most of my adult life, I prided myself on traveling with a minimum of baggage. I now realize that this was one of the mechanisms I subconsciously adopted to cope with the past. This project has helped me to see that the human experience cannot be fully lived and appreciated without fitting the past into the mosaic of the whole. The form into which the project finally evolved was originally Fritz's idea, and his and Sally's enthusiasm, dedication, and initiative gave me the needed push to overcome my inherent inertia.

      Some readers may wonder why my story is told in the third person, by a different narrator. This is in large part because the “Bernie” of the story is not the same person that I am today. Each survivor has a different way of coping with the past. My way has been to pretend that all the horror of the past happened to someone else. Having Fritz tell my story in the third person is part of this same coping mechanism.

      By training and makeup, I am passionately devoted to accuracy and truth. I wanted the story that I told to be true and accurate because, in the end, truth, accuracy, reason, and logic are the only reliable yardsticks by which any human experience, including the horrors of the Holocaust, can be judged and understood. Even though I tried to keep emotion out of this work as much as possible, I am unable to do so with respect to the following point: what has happened to me since the war and what I became could not have happened in any country other than this one. This country means more to me than I could possibly express.

      Finally, it will become clear in these memoirs what Charles Merrill, Jr., has meant to me and my life. There is no way that I could ever begin to repay him for his generosity, kindness, and, above all, courage for taking into his home and family a homeless urchin wandering the byways of postwar Europe who could have been a totally damaged human being. What he did for me and for so many others demonstrates that a single human being can make a difference.

      ONE

       The Return of the Past

      We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.

      HANNAH ARENDT

      The end of the journey came five days after the train left Kaposvar. People spilled out of crammed cattle cars onto the platform of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on a foggy morning in July 1944. The bodies of those who had died were left behind in cars whose heavy sliding doors had been barred shut the entire trip with iron and barbed wire. The only light had filtered through narrow ventilation slats, and the terrified victims now blinked in the daylight, looking for friends and family members on the platform.

Скачать книгу