THE ART OF RESISTANCE
MY FOUR YEARS IN THE FRENCH UNDERGROUND
JUSTUS ROSENBERG
William Collins, 288pp, £20
‘As I write this memoir, I am almost one hundred years old – ninety-eight to be exact.’ So begins Professor Justus Rosenberg’s account of his astonishing exploits in Occupied France, which has all the attributes of a good thriller: atmosphere, intrigue, suspense, mayhem and even sex – commencing with his seduction at the age of 16 by a glamorous friend of his mother. ‘I was very lovable in those days,’ he told the New York Times.
Rosenberg’s odyssey began in 1937, when his parents sent him to Paris to escape the Nazi pogroms that had begun in Danzig, where they lived. Exploring the grands boulevards with ‘salutary aimlessness’, he fancied himself a flâneur, but still found time to develop his gift for languages, which, together with his nerve, would serve him so well in the clandestine life he later led. What he calls ‘an amazing confluence of circumstances’ began when he fetched up in Marseilles and went to work as a courier for Varian Fry, an American journalist who dedicated himself to rescuing artists and intellectuals from the Nazis. Rosenberg not only mixed with avant-gardistes like André Breton, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, but also helped some of them cross the Pyrenees to safety. Later captured in a Vichy round-up, he feigned peritonitis so convincingly to escape deportation to a labour camp that his appendix was removed. Somehow he escaped again and joined the maquis.
In the Times, Caroline Moorehead called Rosenberg ‘a natural raconteur with a pleasing conversational style’. Noting that after the war he settled in America, where he enjoyed a long and successful career as an academic, she concluded, ‘Few members of the resistance and still fewer young Jews have such happy tales ... What shines through his engaging book is his evident desire to be helpful and responsible and his acute consciousness of how extraordinarily lucky he was.’