I turned eighteen in a lifeboat off the coast of Portugal, watching the ship that was supposed to carry my family to New York burn down to its waterline. That was 1939. Five years later I walked onto a beach in Normandy under a name that wasn't mine, because the real one belonged to a family the Germans had already marked for extermination. This is how a boy from a movie producer's mansion in Vienna became a soldier who helped liberate Buchenwald, and later, without ever planning it, helped put James Bond and the Pink Panther on movie screens.
My name is Julius Bergmann. I was born November 4, 1922, in Vienna, but by the time I was two my father had moved us to Prague, where he built something close to an empire out of film. He and his brother ran two production and distribution companies — Elekta Film and Slavia Film — and by the mid-1930s he'd had a modernist villa built for us on a hill above the city, all poured concrete and glass, the kind of house architects wrote about in magazines. My father was not a man who sat on the floor with his children. He ran our household the way he ran his studios — from a distance, through instructions, through people he'd hired to carry them out. I really only came to know him as a person after the war.
We had governesses. We took the train to the mountains in winter and to the Adriatic coast in summer. I swam competitively for Hagibor, the Jewish athletic club — my strongest event was the 400-meter freestyle, and I still remember the smell of the chlorine and wet wool from the changing room benches. My family didn't hide that we were Jewish, but we weren't observant beyond the major holidays. My father, though, believed strongly in the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — he talked about it at dinner the way other men talked about business.
When Hitler took power in Germany, my father read the newspapers more carefully than the rest of us did, and he started making arrangements. He and my older sister left for the United States in 1936, three years before anyone else believed it was necessary. My mother, my twin sister Rosa, and I stayed behind in Prague until just weeks before the German occupation in March 1939. I remember the morning we left the villa — my mother had a canary in a cage that she'd raised from a chick, and she made the housekeeper promise to keep it, because there was no way to take it. I still think about that bird sometimes, more than I think about most of what came after.
We went to Paris first, trying to get American visas through the consulate there. The waiting stretched from weeks into months, the kind of bureaucratic limbo where you wake up every morning wondering if today is the day the door closes. Eventually we gave up on waiting and booked passage on a ship bound for New York by way of Brazil — a longer, cheaper route, on an old vessel that should have been retired a decade earlier.
Two days out, a fire broke out belowdecks. I remember the smell before I understood what it meant — something acrid working its way up through the floor grates while my mother was still buttoning her coat. We were put into lifeboats in the dark, and I remember Rosa gripping my sleeve so hard it left marks, not saying anything, just gripping. The crew got the fire under control enough to limp us into Lisbon, where we sat for another stretch of days in a boardinghouse that smelled of fish and diesel before transferring to a second ship for the crossing.
We reached New York in the spring of 1939. My father met us at the pier in a coat that looked too expensive for a man who'd once run two film companies out of a country that no longer wanted him, and for a moment none of us said anything — we just stood there on the dock while the other passengers streamed past. He'd rented an apartment on the Upper West Side and gotten work reading scripts for a distributor, a step down from what he'd built in Prague, though none of us said that out loud either.
I finished high school in New York, worked briefly for a shipping clerk in Hoboken, and in early 1943, three months before my twenty-first birthday, I enlisted in the U.S. Army. On my enlistment papers, I used the name Allen — not my father's real surname, Auerbach, which by then was sitting on German deportation lists back in occupied Czechoslovakia, attached to relatives who hadn't gotten out. An intake officer at the induction center in New Jersey suggested it himself, matter-of-fact, the way you'd suggest a man change a flat tire. "If you're captured with papers reading Auerbach," he said, "it's worse for you than for most GIs." I signed the new name without much ceremony and became Julius Allen for the next two years.
I landed on Omaha Beach in the second wave, June 7, 1944, carrying a radio pack that weighed more than I did some mornings. I won't pretend I remember it in complete sentences — mostly I remember the sound, which wasn't really a sound anymore after the first hour, just pressure against the ears, and a sergeant named Pruitt from Alabama who kept repeating map coordinates to himself like a rosary. We fought east through Normandy, through the hedgerow country where you couldn't see fifty feet in any direction, across France and into Germany, all the way to the Elbe by the spring of 1945.
Along that route I went into two camps that the army had just reached — Buchenwald first, then Dachau. I'd read the newspaper accounts of persecution back in New York, the kind of stories that made you angry for an afternoon and then faded. Nothing prepared me for the actual geometry of the place: the barracks laid out in exact rows, the ovens still warm, the prisoners who came to the fence too weak to speak but strong enough to reach through the wire. I was twenty-two years old and I remember doing math in my head without meaning to — how many years my cousins in Prague had been unaccounted for, how many of the men behind that fence might have known them. I never got an answer. My grandmother and an aunt who'd stayed behind in Czechoslovakia did not survive the war; I learned that months later, in a two-line telegram my father forwarded to my unit.
I came home in late 1945 and didn't talk about the camps for years — not evasively, just because there wasn't a sentence that fit in ordinary conversation between a chapter like that and asking someone to pass the coffee. I went back to what I understood, which was film, working my way from a production assistant to a distribution executive over the following two decades. By the early 1960s I was in a position, at a company handling international pickups for United Artists, to argue for backing a British spy picture nobody in the American office wanted — a film called Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. A few years after that I championed a comedy about a bumbling French inspector that the studio nearly shelved before release — The Pink Panther. Neither picture needed me to succeed in the long run, but I was in the room when the decisions got made, and I made sure of it.
I'm ninety-three years old now, living outside Sarasota, Florida, in a condominium two floors up with a lanai that looks at a retention pond where an egret shows up most mornings around seven. Rosa passed in 2019; we spoke every Sunday until the last one. Two months ago my granddaughter, Nora, a documentary researcher in Chicago, called and asked if she could bring a camera crew down for three days to record what she called "the whole thing, start to finish, on the record" — because the archive at the Holocaust museum in Washington had reached out asking for testimony, and because, as she put it on the phone, "Grandpa, there are maybe eleven guys left who did what you did at Omaha and then walked into a camp four months later. Eleven. In the whole country."
She came down on a Tuesday in June with a cameraman named Diego and a folding table full of equipment that didn't fit anywhere in my living room, so we ended up doing most of the filming on the lanai, with the box fan turned off so it wouldn't hum on the audio. I told her about the villa, about the canary, about Sergeant Pruitt's coordinates, about the smell at Buchenwald that I still can't fully describe to people who weren't there. On the second day she asked me, camera running, whether I ever went back to Prague.
I told her yes — once, in 1994, for the fiftieth anniversary of the landing, a trip organized through a veterans' association. The villa on Barrandov was still standing, repurposed decades earlier into government offices, its glass replaced, its garden paved into a parking lot. I stood outside the gate for maybe ten minutes. A groundskeeper came out to ask if I needed something, and I said no, thank you, I used to live here, and he nodded and went back inside, and that was the whole conversation.
What I didn't tell Nora until the third day, on camera, was about the enlistment papers. I still have them — the actual carbon copy, yellowed at the folds, kept in a fireproof box in my closet along with my discharge papers and a photograph of my mother holding the canary cage the week before we left. I had Nora film it directly: my hand opening the box, pulling out the folder, laying the paper flat on the table where you could read the name typed in the box for "surname" — Allen, not Auerbach. Underneath it I keep a single sheet I had notarized last year at a bank branch on Tamiami Trail, a formal statement restoring my birth name to my military record, filed with the National Archives' Freedom of Information division so that anyone who searches for Auerbach in the future finds the connection instead of a dead end.
"Why now," Nora asked, and I said because my father built two studios and a house made of glass, and none of it outlived a signature on a deportation list, and the only thing that did outlive it was a name typed onto a piece of paper by a stranger in New Jersey who was trying to keep a scared kid alive. I paid to have that name corrected, in writing, with my own signature under it, because a name is the one thing a person actually gets to hand down, and I wasn't going to let the version some clerk in 1943 chose for me be the last word on who I was.
Diego kept the camera running another few seconds after I finished talking. Out past the lanai, the egret had come back to the pond, standing on one leg the way it does most mornings, and nobody said anything else. Nora just reached over and turned the recorder off herself, and that was the end of the interview.
