"Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground.” —USA Today
An American Library in Paris Book Award "Coups de Coeur" Selection
The Art of Resistance
is unlike any World War II memoir before it. Its author, Justus Rosenberg, has
spent the past seventy years teaching the classics of literature to American
college students. Hidden within him, however, was a remarkable true story of
wartime courage and romance worthy of a great novel. Here is Professor
Rosenberg’s elegant and gripping chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied
Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil.
In 1937, after witnessing a
violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the
Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to
Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came
again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris,
heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist
in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and
women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah
Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate
understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages,
including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a
spy and scout.
After
the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble,
recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four
years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his
wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found
himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus
found an ingenious way to escape. He two years during the war gathering
intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the
Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became
a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the
German retreat across France.
At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to
America, and built a new life. For the past fifty years, he has taught
literature at Bard College, shaping the inner lives of generations of students.
Now he adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs: The Art of Resistance is a powerful saga
of bravery and defiance, a true-life spy thriller touched throughout by a
professor’s wisdom.
JUSTUS ROSENBERG (1921-2021) was born in Danzig (present-day Gdansk, Poland), in 1921. Graduating from the Sorbonne, in Paris, he worked with the French underground for four years and then served in the United States Army. For his wartime service, Rosenberg received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. For seventy years, he taught at American universities; most recently as professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, where he was on faculty for fifty years. He is the cofounder of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, which works to combat anti-Semitism. In 2017 the French ambassador to the United States personally made Rosenberg a Commandeur in the Légion d’Honneur, among France’s highest decorations, for his heroism during World War II.
