Bernat Rosner

An Uncommon Friendship is an uncommon book: the dual memoirs of a German youth who experienced the war in a small village with his Nazi-obsessed but largely absent father, being raised by his strong anti-Nazi stepmother, and a Hungarian Jew about the same age (12-14) who lost his mother, father and brother in Auschwitz and then survived trials on other camps and forced marches. The former went on to become a professor of German literature at Berkley; the latter retired as chief counsel of the Safeway company. They met through their wives, became friends because of their shared European backgrounds and love of literature and music, and then slowly, tentatively, began to explore their parallel lives separated by the "fateful divide".

Tubach's story is one of wartime deprivations, the fear of the Nazi regime, the pervasive and self-protective silences in the face of wrongdoing, the pressures to conform (his stepmother would not let him join the Hitler Youth), and, post-war, the independence of thought and action that took him to America to begin a new life. Rosner's story is another world: a small, almost forgotten village, and Orthodox family, religious studies, and then the world collapses when the Jews are rounded up and packed into the trains to Auschwitz; Rosner never saw his mother or father after again the turmoil of the disembarkation from the trains. He survived because of a mixture of luck, timing, mental toughness, ability to roll with events and always having an eye for the smallest advantage that could be the dividing line between life and death. Post-war, his life almost became a fairy tale given the swing of extremes: he was befriended by Charles Merrill, son of the founder of the Merrill investment firm, brought to the USA, and taken into a family of great wealth and status. Rosner embraced his new life with gusto and with intelligence and hard work he rose high in the corporate world. Both men, in a sense, remade their lives, but each was fleeing from something quite different, with Rosner wanting more completely to forget and to look only forward.

The book is well written, it is warm; the basic decency of the two men comes through very clearly. And in the end, they attribute their friendship and their mutual exploration of the past to nothing more than their belief in the universal concept of a common humanity. This book reaffirms that humanity.… (lisätietoja)