Bernat Rosner - An Uncommon Friendship. From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust [2002][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 4, 2001
In 1944, 13-year-old Fritz Tubach was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village of Kleinheubach. That same year in Tab, Hungary, 12-year-old Bernie Rosner was loaded onto a train with the rest of the village’s Jewish inhabitants and taken to Auschwitz, where his whole family was murdered. Many years later, after enjoying successful lives in California, they met, became friends, and decided to share their intimate story—that of two boys trapped in evil and destructive times, who became men with the freedom to construct their own future, with each other and the world. In a new epilogue, the authors share how the publication of the book changed their lives and the lives of the countless people they have met as a result of publishing their story.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
More a pair of parallel memoirs than the anatomy of a friendship, this unusual book recounts the stories of two friends: Rosner, a Hungarian Jew, was uprooted from his life and sent at age 12 to Auschwitz, where he lost his entire family; Tubach, the son of a German soldier, at nearly the same time was sent to a Nazi training camp (though, afterward, his stepmother, defying the local Nazi youth group, steered him away from joining the Adolf Hitler school). The book's structure is unusual: not only do both authors contribute to each chapter in alternating sections, but Tubach's sections are written in the first person, while Rosner's are written (at his request) in the third person. This approach underscores how Rosner reinvented himself after his privations, while Tubach's path was more direct. Intriguingly, Rosner who came to the United States thanks to a GI who generously invited him into his family became a corporate counsel for Safeway, while Tubach who also emigrated to the U.S. after the war found himself wary of power and sympathetic toward student radicals during his tenure as a professor of German at Berkeley. Their friendship, initiated in 1983 by their wives, is undergirded by a "common belief in Euro-American cultural traditions," such as classical music and faith in a common humanity. Still, the friendship grew only gradually, with Rosner slowly revealing heartrending bits of his story of endurance and survival when the two couples took several trips to his childhood village. (Apr.)

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-"We are more than our histories" is the message of this shared memoir. Two grown American men meet in California in 1983 and slowly exchange stories of childhoods in their respective European villages. With time and trust they are able to divulge the particulars of a deeper and more troubling kinship. As teenagers during World War II, they struggled on opposite sides of the Holocaust, Rosner as his Jewish Hungarian family's only survivor at Auschwitz and Tubach as the son of a German Army intelligence officer and a member of the Jungvolk, a pre-Hitler youth organization. Tubach serves as the straightforward and almost dispassionate narrator of these alternating stories of the unimaginable horror of a concentration camp and the confusion and suspicion within a German village on the periphery of Nazi madness. As with other accounts of survival, readers are compelled to consider to what extent who we are is determined by experiences and forces beyond our control, whether a random act of individual kindness or a movement of mass hysteria. While there is inherent drama in these disparate stories, it is the trajectory that each one takes to converge many years later that makes these remembrances powerful and distinct. Ultimately, this is a book about the importance of our common humanity, about resilience and redemption, and about not letting symbols such as a yellow star or a swastika define or confine us.Margaret Brown, Arlington County Public Library, VA

From Booklist
Rosner and Tubach met in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983. Tubach's wife, Sally, was a high-school friend of Rosner's wife; Tubach was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Rosner was a lawyer. Rosner, a Jew, was born and raised in the Hungarian village of Tab. In July 1944, when he was 12, Rosner was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He was sent to Mauthausen in September 1944 and was freed in May 1945 when that camp was liberated. Tubach was the son of a German army officer and a member of the Jungvolk, the boy's division of the Nazi Youth Movement. While Rosner endured the degradation and inhumanity of the camps, Tubach suffered only a scarcity of food and air raids that disturbed the family's sleep. Rosner and Tubach recount their early lives in the U.S., including their struggle to get an education. What began as a pleasant, if superficial, friendship between the two men, became in time one of respect and understanding. George Cohen

"A fine book [and] a significant contribution to the massive literature of the Holocaust." -- Washington Post Book World

"Here is an authentic, poignant account of two very different lives during the Nazi regime." -- the Washington Times

"Original and ambitious." -- Jonathan Yardley's top 10 books of the year, Washington Post Book World

"[T]he trajectory that each one takes to converge many years later . . . makes these remembrances powerful and distinct." -- School Library Journal

From the Back Cover
"I was very touched by the story beautifully told in An Uncommon Friendship. The pain and suffering brought on by the Holocaust is described in a riveting way. The book shows how a chance meeting followed by a deep friendship can lead to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding on a deeply personal level."-Barbara Boxer, United States Senator "Fritz Tubach and Bernat Rosner perfectly link the abstract horror of the Nazi death machine with the harmless-seeming, rural somnolence of European village life in the '30s. An Uncommon Friendship is tangible, real, heart-breaking, awesome. This double memoir of a German youth and the Hungarian-Jewish youth he befriended in later life is absolutely unique and stunningly beautiful."-Carolyn See, author of The Handyman "I read, admired and was gripped by the counterpoint memoirs of Bernie Rosner, a Hungarian-born survivor of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and Fritz Tubach, the son of a Nazi German army officer. Factual, measured, unemphatic, sharply evocative, their linked stories prove extraordinarily moving. An original document not to be missed and an absorbing read."-Eugen Weber, author of The Hollow Years

About the Author
Bernat Rosner retired in 1993 from his position as General Counsel of the Safeway Corporation in Oakland, California. Frederic C. Tubach is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Germany, 2000 Years, Volume III (with Gerhart Hoffmeister, second edition, 1992). Sally Patterson Tubach is author of Memoirs of a Terrorist (1996).