The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir

"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.