Justus Rosenberg
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Justus Rosenberg (January 23, 1921 – October 30, 2021) was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi[1] intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.[2][3][4]
Rosenberg was born in the Free City of Danzig on January 23, 1921.[5] He came from a Jewish home where his Polish-born parents[5] also spoke both German and Yiddish. After witnessing violent antisemitism in Danzig along with the Nazi expulsion of Jewish students from local schools, his parents sent him to study in Paris.[6] He was 16 when he left his father, Jacob, a successful businessman, and his mother, Bluma (née Solarsky), a homemaker;[5] he was reunited with them and his sister[4] only in the 1950s. In 1997 he married Karin Kraft, whom he had known since the 1980s.[2]
With his wife he founded the Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation to fight hate in general and antisemitism in particular.[4]
He did not talk about his wartime experiences until the Shoah Foundation interviewed him in 1998 as a witness to and survivor of the Holocaust.[2][7] In 2020 he published his autobiography, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir.
He turned 100 on January 23, 2021, and died on October 30.[8][2]
