His Life’s Work

Starting today, we can call Saul Friedlander a genius with total confidence. The 66-year-old historian and UCLA professor is now officially a “genius award” winner. The prize, which Friedlander didn’t even know he was in the running for, is a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It is presented each year to as many as 40 new fellows (there are 32 this year) whose creative work is supported by a five-year grant.

The highest award is $375,000, based on the winner’s age. Friedlander will receive the full amount.

“They told me the award is for the young and the youngish,” he says. “I am the oldest of the youngish winners.”

Genius “talent scouts” make nominations but remain anonymous, so he doesn’t even know who recommended him. The fellows are drawn from the sciences, arts and humanities. There are no stipulations on how the money is spent.

Friedlander says he plans to continue his life’s work researching the Holocaust. He will finish the second volume of a two-part history he is writing on Jewish life under Adolf Hitler, an era that, for him, has personal resonance. By mixing historical evidence with the stories of those who lived through it, he re-creates an intricate picture that avoids easy answers and stereotypes. It also goes beyond the more typical approach, which is to look only at either the aggressors or the victims.

The first volume, “Nazi Germany and the Jews, the Years of Persecution, 1933-1939” (HarperCollins, 1997), was widely praised for the analytical and evocative way that Friedlander layered German policies, Jewish responses and the role of the wider community into a three-dimensional world. He’s written a dozen books on related subjects.

The second volume, Friedlander says, will integrate the same strands--political policies and human reactions--to rebuild the period from 1940 to 1945, when Jews were deported, sent to death camps and finally released at the end of the war.

In his UCLA office that overlooks blooming jacaranda trees, with books casually stacked in shelves and a scattering of chairs for visitors, Friedlander could easily be mistaken for an ivory tower academic. Actually, he is more like an excavator, starting with his own history.

“I am asked, ‘How can you deal with this horrifying material for so many years?’ ” he says. “My work helps me keep a distance and at the same time keep a constant involvement. For 40 years I have carried it. I don’t think I could have carried it otherwise.”

Friedlander was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1932. His father, Hans, a lawyer, took him and his mother, Elli, to live in Paris when Hitler came to power. In 1942, when foreign Jews were deported back to Germany, his parents gave him a French name, Paul Henri Marie Ferrland, and placed him in the care of the Mother Superior at a French Catholic monastery. As part of the agreement, he was baptized. His parents then fled to neutral Switzerland.

“They were caught at the Swiss border and turned back to France,” Friedlander says. “The French sent them to Auschwitz.” He never saw them again.

It is a personal example of what he refers to as the “gray zones” that he carefully works into his account of history.

“Mine was conversion under duress, but at tremendous risk to the Mother Superior,” he says. “Both she and I would have been taken away if I was found out. I was taken care of, and my life was saved. I became a fervent Catholic. I wanted to be a Jesuit.”

He was 15 years old when he began looking into religious life. At the time he did not know that he had been born Jewish.

“A Jesuit told me about my past,” he says. “He took it upon himself to tell me the real situation. He said, ‘make your choice, but you should know the facts.’ It was a jolt.”

Not long after that he joined the Zionist movement and in 1948, when Israel was declared a state, he forged his age on his ID card to qualify as a soldier. When he reached Israel, an uncle took him in. He is still an Israeli citizen and with his wife, Hagith Friedlander, he keeps a home in Jerusalem. He is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and worked as an activist in the Middle East peace movement, Peace Now, through the 1980s.

It is not surprising that Friedlander starts his mornings with a long walk, good for clearing the mind. From his house in Bel Air (“It is a tiny house on top of a hill”) he hikes the nearby canyons by morning’s first light.

“I am a very early riser,” he says. “And I love nature.”

His grown children, two sons and a daughter, are showering him with e-mail congratulations these days from their homes in New York, Paris and Tel Aviv. There will be a reunion this summer to celebrate the prize and a wedding anniversary. Friedlander and his wife will have been married 40 years in August.

Looking back at the choice he made as a teenager, he now says, “I cannot imagine, once you know who you are, that you would not want to retrieve your identity.” As a father and grandfather of three boys, he wonders about Holocaust survivors who decided never to tell their children that they are Jewish, so they would never be threatened by anti-Semitism. “If they do not wish at least to say, ‘Yes, we are Jewish,’ . . . many Jews find that difficult to understand.”

Facing the truth and telling it seem to direct his work as a historian.

“We now know that the killing machine was more than the fanatical SS,” he says of Hitler’s military. “All kinds of people in all kinds of countries were involved. That makes it, in a sense, even darker.

“We also see the extraordinary complexity of reactions by the victims, which turned them from a passive mass into a world of their own.” Some hoped the Nazi regime would not last, some hoped a separate Jewish culture might flourish. Few realized immediately that they were like mice in a trap, with no way out, Friedlander says.

“I’ll use my five-year fellowship to reconstruct this decisively more complex image.”

He already has snapshots from history to include. Neighboring farmers in France watched passively as their friends were deported, Jews who sensed extermination and wrote diaries or memoirs they buried in the ground as a record. German intellectuals on university campuses allowed their colleagues to be dismissed simply because they were Jewish.

“Not one protested, nobody said a word,” Friedlander says. Religious leaders spoke out and were sent to Dachau. Others did not, even when Jews were being marched past them on the way to deportation, he says.

“The most famous debate is over the Jewish councils who were local people the Nazis appointed everywhere they went,” he says. At the start of deportation these Jewish council members were asked to choose which Jews should be taken away. “When the head of the council in Warsaw received this news, he took his own life. In Lodz, Poland, the head of the council chose the old, the sick and the weak, not knowing the Germans would eventually take them all.

“So few had the inner steel to stand by what they believed to be right. That is what you learn, studying this material. It comes down to the core of a person.”

As the subject grows more complex at his hands, Friedlander says he finds himself in a dark landscape.

“The intellectual world, supposedly a moral guide, collapsed,” he says. The same trauma later marked the Communist era. As a college professor of 34 years, he wants to explore that part of the story too.

“I am almost 67 years old now. Pointing such things out is my job.”