ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Parfois l’hazard fait bien les choses.
Sometimes chance itself occasions good fortune.
THE STREET CLOTHES placed behind the laundry pail in an unobtrusive corner of the hospital lavatory were right where they were supposed to be. I had managed to fake my way out of the Nazi internment camp by feigning agonizing stomach pains, but the last thing I expected was to have an appendectomy actually performed on my gut. The gash in my abdomen was far from healed, but I’d walked to the bathroom at the appointed moment and now, if I could slip into the clothes the Underground operative (disguised as a priest) had left for me, and if I could sashay out of the hospital without raising suspicions, the only thing I had to worry about was riding a bicycle to the halfway house in Lyon, without my intestines spilling onto the boulevard! I made it down the broad hospital stairway and out the heavy lobby doors, and the bicycle was parked by a bench just as planned. Gingerly I mounted the saddle and coasted down the long driveway to the main road, where, standing all the while with one hand on my stomach, I would hopefully pedal my way to freedom. Automobiles whizzed by me, the late summer breeze tousled my hair, but suddenly the whining crescendo of what I thought must be a police siren loomed up behind me. Had I been betrayed? Was I after all about to be sent back to the camp and from there to Auschwitz?
AS I WRITE this memoir, I am almost one hundred years old—ninety-eight to be exact. The first two years of my life are the hardest to remember. Whenever I try, I hear my parents’ voices, see the contours of their faces, feel the softness of my crib. Everything else I know of my first years I picked up from stories my parents told friends and relatives about their smart son’s first steps and words.
The only objective evidence of my early existence are two photos of an infant sitting on a bear rug, and a birth certificate issued by the Danzig registration office stating that on January 23, 1921, a boy named Justus Rosenberg was born to nineteen-year-old Bluma Solarski, wife of businessman Jacob Rosenberg, age twenty-three, both of the Mosaic faith, as Jewish people were commonly referred to at that time.
Unless you are a stamp collector or interested in the two world wars and the period between them, you’ve probably never heard of Danzig, a seaport on the Baltic, for generations a bone of contention between Germans and Poles. At the Versailles peace conference after World War I, to reward the Poles for having supported the Allies, the League of Nations decided to grant Poland the independence it had lost in 1796, when it was partitioned between Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Per the Treaty of Versailles, Danzig was to be part of Poland, even though 75 percent of its population was ethnically and culturally German.
Then, to the dissatisfaction of both the Poles and the Germans, on November 15, 1920, the League of Nations declared the disputed territory to be a semiautonomous city-state with its own flag, national anthem, currency, and a constitution patterned after the Weimar Republic. It was to be called “the Free City of Danzig” and to consist of the seaport itself and some two hundred towns and villages in the surrounding area. The League appointed a neutral high commissioner to the infant parliamentary democracy to ensure that the rights of the 20 percent of the population who were Poles and 5 percent who were Jews would be respected. As the name suggested, the Free City had no entrance restrictions. Between 1920 and 1925, in the midst of continuing European political unrest, ninety thousand Jews from Poland and Russia passed through Danzig en route to Canada and the United States. Another six thousand, satisfied with the city-state’s parliamentary democracy and liberal economic policies, or who identified with German culture, chose to remain. My parents, who had no intention of emigrating to America, were among these.
They had come from Mlawa, a Polish shtetl only a few miles from East Prussia, so they spoke German fluently and were familiar with German literature and music. Like most young people of their generation they knew hardly anything of Yiddish culture besides the language itself. My mother, the daughter of a tailor, and my father, born into one of the wealthiest and most learned Jewish families in Mlawa, fell in love when they were very young, and my father had just begun to work in his father’s business. Marriage was out of the question because they belonged to different social classes, so they eloped—to Danzig—and sought to become assimilated into German culture as quickly as possible. Immediately after my birth—which came not long after their elopement—they hired a nanny named Grete, who taught me traditional German children’s ditties, German fairy tales, and the rhymed verses of Struwwelpeter and Max and Moritz. At age six I entered the Volksschule (primary school). I already knew how to read and write both German and Gothic script.
For all practical purposes, I was educated like a typical German child—as was my sister, Lilian, six years my junior. Our parents rarely spoke Yiddish in our presence except when they were discussing something not meant for our ears. Somehow, I picked it up anyway. They celebrated Jewish holidays irregularly and only occasionally attended services at a “reformed” synagogue. Like most Jews in Germany, my parents considered themselves Germans “of the Mosaic persuasion.” They rejected political Zionism, which regarded Judaism as a nation. When I was ten years old, my mother enrolled me at the most prestigious gymnasium in Danzig, the Staatliche Oberrealschule. As was true of many young people in those years, the world of politics fascinated me. At the age of nine, I already dreamed of becoming a diplomat.
In the Danzig elections of 1932, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazis, for short) won the largest number of
