An Uncommon Friendship - Bernat Rosner

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his uncertainty in the water. I told him about my own water shyness and how as a boy I used to tell my grandmother that I'd been in the Main River all the way up to my neck, when in fact I'd barely gotten my swimming trunks wet. We both had a good laugh. Wasn't communicating such intimate trivia of the past enough? Isn't it exactly the shared bons moments in life that deepen a friendship? Although we enjoyed this pleasant status quo, I wondered whether it could be sustained. Lurking just below the surface of this everyday, after all, were events that remained never more than a nightmare or a phobia away for both of us. Without our being completely aware of it, the walls we had raised around these events had already begun to crumble. As it turned out, something unexpected happened that brought the walls crashing down.

      On a business trip to the East Coast not long before his retirement in 1993, Bernie visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum was crowded, and when he received a number that would have allowed him to enter too late in the day to make his afternoon flight back to the West Coast, he informed museum personnel of his predicament and of the fact that he was a concentration camp survivor. They immediately allowed him to enter.

      In the museum Bernie looked up the Nazis' records of the arrivals at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He had been transferred from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in September 1944. His reaction to these documents took him by surprise. He told me that his heart began to pound as he started to turn the pages on the microfiche machine to the date of his own arrival. When he finally reached the relevant page and ran his finger down the entries, there it was, his name, in an old German typeface: “Rosner Bernat.” Thus he came face-to-face with his experience at Mauthausen. He told me that as he stared at his name, all the steps he had taken in his life seemed to lead nowhere but back to the horrors of that past. He was shaken, and he decided there in the museum that the time had come to confront his concentration camp experiences as directly as possible. These bureaucratic documents that stood for events that he had believed no longer would touch him convinced him to do so. Not only did he want to tell his story now, but he wanted to tell it to me. I felt moved by his decision, yet uncertain about what it would mean.

      It became clear that our suburban get-togethers with our wives, our casual poolside or dinner table conversations accompanied by good food and wine, were not the appropriate framework for the telling of his story. So we decided that just the two of us would meet, beginning in fall 1995. By then we were both retired and no longer had to focus our energy on present tasks or on long-term professional objectives. I think that this slight slackening of the will—which Thomas Mann considered crucial for gaining insights into the past—also helped us to bring our histories out of hiding.

      Our working method was simple. I took notes of Bernie's oral accounts and rendered them into narrative form. I wrote up my own story in conjunction with his. My wife, Sally, a freelance writer, then worked on organization and English style. After the draft of a section was written, we got together for a reading and discussion, and Bernie made additions and corrections. This matter-of-fact chronicling of how we proceeded, however, conveys little of the difficult path we had chosen to travel together. For one thing, even after Bernie decided to tell me his story, we drifted toward these memoirs, or rather, we backed into them gradually. We had no preconceived notion of a “final product.” That early unselfconscious, naive phase of our joint efforts, when we gathered memory fragments, wrote them down, and discussed them, was crucial for the emergence of the eventual memoirs. And at the outset, we had no idea what obstacles and limits we would encounter on our way—obstacles in Bernie, limits in myself.

      The story emerged in twists and turns. At first it seemed

      enough to listen to Bernie tell me about his concentration camp experiences in a deliberately detached and factual manner. His initial recollections emerged well thought out and usually presented without hesitation. He was an attorney, after all, accomplished in articulating conflicts and complexities. His verbal facility helped to put me at ease and allowed me to approach a life very different from my own. It helped that we had a silent agreement about the limits regarding what needed to be or should be articulated. But then, sometimes a year or more later, heartrending facts would surface when he made new “stabs into his memory bank,” as he called them. I slowly learned that “sticking to the facts” and recounting them as rationally as possible was also Bernie's way of not seeing that these facts had inflicted wounds. It took him time to admit this.

      To maintain the separation between his two lives, during our visit to Tab in 1990 Bernie had downplayed the trauma he had experienced there. And true to his American persona, it was late in our work that he admitted to me his compulsive desire during one period of his adult life to return to Tab, to revisit the places where his parents had lived. During this period, he even purchased a detailed map of the region and memorized all the train stations between Tab and nearby Siofok.

      As for me, I narrated my story believing that my good memory and grasp of details in their historical context would be a reliable guide to my own past. I learned, however, that what one puts in and leaves out—what one likes to remember or prefers to forget—also tells a story, one that is difficult and occasionally impossible to narrate. But over time, as I saw Bernie struggle with his own past, it was natural for me to look at myself, at who I am now and what made me this way. Bernie encouraged me to do so.

      Someone asked me why I wanted to know Bernie's story at all. For one thing, because the German crime of the Holocaust never lets me go. But wanting to know about Bernie's “first life” was only part of what motivated me. I also wanted to link it to my own story. To do both, to tell his story and mine—the Hungarian Jewish boy and the young German villager trapped on opposite sides of a mortal divide, who come to America where their paths cross and they can work and play together—this new undertaking came to form the crux of what was important to me: bridge building. I simply refused to accept the fact that the deadly barbed wire erected by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen half a century ago would forever mark us off from one another in a fundamental way, that Hitler would have the last word in how we could relate to each other. The murderous events had been too horrendous to ignore in our emerging friendship, but I didn't want to grant the Nazis the power to perpetuate that divide indefinitely into our present lives.

      It was Bernie's desire to have his story told in the third person, thus making it accessible to my narrative voice. I approached this role with apprehension. My narrative voice would be that of an outsider to the Holocaust, a German one at that. Would this constitute a sacrilege? Should I have maintained a discrete distance from one who had “returned from a descent into hell”? Should I have urged Bernie to tell his story in his own voice? He did not want it that way. He wanted us to look at our pasts together, because he believes that reverence for the extraordinary trauma he experienced can sometimes have an exclusionary effect; it can bar entry, define outsiders and keep them at a distance. It can create an inner circle of empowered narratives that renders the past less accessible to others. Toward the end of our work, I asked Bernie what had persuaded him to undertake this perilous journey with me. He said it was our common European cultural heritage, with its Utopian longing for a civil society and the shared experiences of great art, and as for the rest, we agreed with Peter Ustinov's dismissal of ethnic and religious identity: one should have one's roots in civilized behavior and leave it at that.

      TWO

       Two European Villages

      In this dream, summer was all year round, our land a map of child-like colors But if you held this map up to the light, you could see other lines, not roads or streams, but tiny cracks suddenly opening under shaky towns

      LEONARD NATHAN

      Tab, the village of Bernat Rosner's birth and childhood, is located in the open countryside south of the Danube River and Lake Balaton, about 120 kilometers southwest of Budapest and 90 kilometers north of what is now Croatia. To the west, about 130 kilometers

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