"I looked very blond, very Germanic and younger than my own age, so I wouldn’t be stopped often to be asked for papers because I looked so innocent and angelic. I was really unaware of the danger. To me, it was something that was adventurous in many ways, somewhat romantic too."

Said Justus Rosenberg, quoted in "Justus Rosenberg, Beloved Professor With a Heroic Past, Dies at 100/As a teenager, he helped provide safe passage to artists and intellectuals out of Vichy France. He went on to teach literature at Bard College for six decades" (NYT). 

He was explaining why he was chosen as a courier by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of New York intellectuals who worked to save "cultural figures stranded in Vichy France." His parents had sent him from Danzig to Paris in 1937, when he was 16, and he had fled Paris in 1939 — alongside "thousands of others on roads filled with people pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows."

When he ended up in Toulouse, fate was waiting for him. He found refuge there in a cinema that had been converted into a rest stop, with straw bags laid across its floors. 

Settling in for the night, he met an American student named Miriam Davenport, who took a keen interest in him. She encouraged him to follow her to Marseille, and when he did, she offered him an unexpected assignment.  

“Gussie,” she told him, “I’ve got a job for you.”...

Eventually, he was caught and he learned that his group would be transferred to a labor camp in Poland and that he needed to find a way out: 

A fellow internee was a medical student. He asked her what illness might necessitate admission into a hospital, and she said peritonitis. He interrogated her about the symptoms. Biding his time until enough guards were nearby, Mr. Rosenberg commenced a performance of writhing and moaning. He was taken to the infirmary, where he rubbed a thermometer until it registered a fever. When he next awoke, he was missing his appendix. He also learned that he was going to Poland anyway. He pleaded with a nurse to let him mail a letter. Mr. Rosenberg’s message, as he had hoped, found its way to a secret network of priests connected to the Resistance. A rebel priest soon visited the hospital, concealed a parcel of clothes for him behind a toilet and parked a bicycle beneath a window. Mr. Rosenberg then darted off on it, blood leaking from his belly. After he healed, Mr. Rosenberg joined the Resistance.... 

He helped retrieve airdrops of weapons from the British and spied on Nazi troops to collect military intelligence. He also joined a guerrilla unit, ambushing and firing on German convoys. After D-Day, he fought alongside Americans, and he was assigned to the Army’s 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion. He aided them as a guide and interrogated prisoners in German. When the war ended, he became an officer at a displaced persons camp operated by the United Nations.

After the war, he immigrated to the United States and studied literature at the University of Cincinnati and then became a literature professor and taught for more than 50 years. We're told one of his courses was "10 Plays that Shook the World" (and I looked, unsuccessfully, to see what the 10 plays were).

After settling in America, Mr. Rosenberg wrote Miriam Davenport a letter to tell her that he was alive. She quickly wrote him back. “You were a symbol of sorts, to me, in those days,” she wrote. “Everyone was moving heaven and earth to save famous men, anti-fascist intellectuals, etc. And there were you, a nice, intelligent youngster with no family, no money, no influence, no hope, no fascinating past.”

Here's video of Rosenberg from 1998 (made by the Shoah Foundation):

And here's his memoir, "The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground." 

We're told he refrained — for a while — from telling his story to the woman he married because "I just didn’t want to brag about it." 

What a life! 

Here's a list of cultural figures who were helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee. To name a few: Hannah Arendt, Jean Arp, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arthur Koestler, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Max Ophüls.