The professor who helped artists escape the Nazis

Justus Rosenberg 1921–2021

To his students at Bard College, Justus Rosenberg was a beloved professor of literature and a dedicated mentor. Few knew that the tweed jacket–wearing academic, a faculty member at the Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., school for nearly 60 years, was also a World War II hero. In France, Rosenberg had been a key member of a U.S.backed effort to spirit some 2,000 refugees out of Nazi Europe, among them leading intellectuals, writers, and artists, including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and André Breton. Rosenberg shepherded his illustrious charges across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain, narrowly escaped deportation to a Polish concentration camp, and later joined the French Resistance and fought alongside the U.S. Army, which gave him a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Rosenberg didn’t talk about his exploits extensively until the 1990s, and when he did, he downplayed his bravery. “It was just part of my life,” he said in 2016. “There were so many people who did much more.”

Rosenberg was born to an affluent Jewish family in the semi-autonomous Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), said The Washington

Post. “Expelled from his high school” after the Nazis took control, he moved to Paris at age 16 to continue his education, but fled again when the Germans neared the French capital in 1940. At a rest stop in Toulouse, he met an American student who recruited him to a rescue mission led by the U.S. journalist Varian

Fry. Rosenberg became a courier for the operation, but his duties “soon grew considerably,” thanks to his multilingualism and boyish Teutonic looks, which helped him navigate Nazi checkpoints. Arrested in 1942, he learned that he was destined for a labor camp in Poland, said The New York Times. Knowing that meant certain death, he faked a stomach illness so convincingly that he was admitted to the hospital and had his appendix removed. With “blood leaking from his belly,” he escaped the infirmary and spent the rest of the war with a Resistance guerrilla unit, and after D-Day, a U.S. Army tank-destroyer battalion.

Rosenberg “studied literature at the Sorbonne” before moving to the U.S. in 1946, said NPR .org. In a memoir published last year, he said he wished he could have helped more refugees escape the Nazis—ordinary people as well as international cultural dignitaries. “Trekking across the Pyrenees,” he wrote, geniuses “have their weaknesses, temptations, fears, and doubts, just like any of us mortals.”