California Story Fund
This Daunting Task -- Conflict, Consequence and Reconciliation
Villa Aurora Foundation for European-American Relations
Project Director: Mariel L. McEwan
The stories of California's Jewish and German/Austrian emigres
After World War II, many Jewish and German/Austrian émigrés settled in urban California, attracted by California's tolerance and openness. This project documented--on audio and video--10 stories from this immigrant California community. Included were the stories of Bernie Rosner and Fritz Tubach, whose lives are also recounted in the award-winning memoir "An Uncommon Friendship, From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust" (UC Press, 2001). Rosner, a Hungarian-born survivor of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and Fritz Tubach, the son a Nazi German army officer, became good friends after moving to Northern California, where Tubach taught German at UC Berkeley and Rosner was a successful corporate lawyer.
The stories were presented at the Los Angeles Public Library and the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum. "We hope that the stories demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation, even after terrible trauma, and add to the growing body of multiethnic California cultural narratives," said Project Director Mariel L. McEwan.