BootsnAll Travel Network



“An Uncommon Friendship”

After getting through Phil & Adri’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal that arrive on our stoop every day it is difficult to find time for other reading.

However, Amy’s mom gave me a book I couldn’t refuse. It is a double memoir of the retired general counsel of the Safeway Corporation, Bernat Rosner, whom Debbie worked with before his retirement in 1993, and his friend, Frederic Tubach who is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Bernat Rosner, an Hungarian Jew, and his German friend, discovered after 10 years of friendship that the former was an Auschwitz survivor and the other was the son of a Nazi German Army officer. The memoir is told in his friend’s voice at Mr Rosner’s request.

How to bridge the gulf and remove the power of the past to separate them becomes the focus of their friendship and together they begin the project of remembering. The stories begin with their similar village childhoods before the holocaust and their very different paths to America where they become men with the freedom to construct their own futures.

Poignant, honest, sincere…and proof of what good will can accomplish in the cause of reconciliation.

“An Uncommon Friendship”
Bernat Rosner & Frederic C. Tubach
with Sally Patterson Tubach
University of California Press



Tags: , ,

Comments are closed.