The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 10 December 2001
by Bernat Rosner and Frederic C. Tubach, with Sally Patterson Tubach
There's World War Two, comemorated these days with vivid heroic movies, soft-focus and reverent memorials, and all kinds of books on the "greatest generation". More recent events, of course, turn our thoughts to how we survived and prevailed during tough times in the past. The War was a momentous event in modern history, and in it are countless personal stories. Our parents and grandparents tell their tales, a few write them down, and still fewer are published. Many questions still remain, and stories untold, on all sides of the conflict. This book is a remarkable double-memoir of two men who experienced the rise of Nazism in Germany and the European Holocaust that followed. Frederic Tubach was born in San Francisco, but raised in Kleinheubach, Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. In a quiet village life, he watched some of the political upheavals in his country and within his family that attended the disaster. Tubach's father was an officer in the German army, and Frederic himself was a member of the pre-Nazi Youth. Bernat Rosner was born in the village of Tab, Hungary. Son of an Orthodox Jewish family, he was deported to Auschwitz with hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews. While his family was exterminated, he managed to survive three other concentration camps. Both of these young men survived, moved to America, and somehow formed a frienship that spans history and a great social divide. Tubach, despite, or because of, the facism in his youth, grew to be a socially conscious professor of German at Berkeley. Rosner adopted the opportunities offered by his wealthy American sponsors and grew to become a successful corporate lawyer. Both their tales are told in Tubach's voice. Rosner formed a massive personal wall around his childhood experiences, preferring to refer to them as if they happened to someone else. He abandoned the religion of his youth as a survival mechanism in a tolerant America, but not one entirely free of anti-Semitic sentiment. What results is almost an experiment in Tubach's own cultural guilt. He must try to understand Rosner's experiences while relating his own as well. The story is compelling, from a first-hand German account of Kristallnacht, to a third-person retelling of the horrors at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Tubach and Rosner found freedom and opportunity in an America they've come to love. And in visits to the scenes of their youth, they explore the mechanism of remembrance. While Tubach struggles with how we can remember such horrors, Rosner recognizes the need while also acknowledging that life must go on. This is an intriguing and immediate point of view on the horrors of the Holocaust. It has a non-academic feeling to it that is revealing, personal, and invites much consideration of how the culture can remember while not being irrevocably scarred by past events. Highly recommended.