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Aug 15, 2005
Professor Albert Einstein - My Family's Savior
This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Einstein. (True Story)

Peter Cross is a singer/songwriter/producer who was among the first to put music on the internet in downloadable format in 1996. To this day, he is one of the only musicians who has created and designed his own music web site in html, and at 104 pages filled with entertaining content, it's one of the largest. Check it out at: http://www.starcrost.com

The majority of information here was related to me by my father and mother when I was growing up:

My grandfather, Otto Juliusburger, was one of the very first psychiatrists. He and his wife Elisa, his son Arnold (my father), and his daughter Erica (my aunt) lived in Berlin, Germany, and my grandfather was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Albert Einstein originally brought his nephew to my grandfather for treatment of schizophrenia, and over the course of several years, the treatment was apparently successful. Einstein was impressed with my grandfather's abilities, and they became close personal friends.

When Einstein emigrated to the USA in the early 1930's, my family stayed on just like millions of other Jews who hoped that things would get better - but they got infinitely worse. In about 1937, my family had to go into hiding from the Gestapo because my grandfather had been targeted as an intellectual Jew, as well as for being a psychiatrist. They had no way of getting out of there until Einstein offered to pay their boat passage to the USA, and they jumped at his offer. In those days, it was necessary for somebody inside the USA to sponsor an immigrant, which means that legal papers had to be signed guaranteeing that the person would not go on welfare. Einstein did that for both my grandparents. Soon thereafter, he did the same thing for my father and his sister.

My family moved into an apartment in New York City, and Einstein was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Because of their horrible experience in Nazi Germany, my entire family renounced God and became practicing athiests, and that's the environment in which I was raised. My grandparents visited with Einstein quite often, and they wrote many personal letters back and forth to each other. My grandmother used to bake him cookies because he had a habit of obsessing over work and not eating. Einstein attended my parents wedding, and they told me that he bounced me on his knee when I was a baby (although quite obviously, I have no memory of it).

My father died from his third heart attack when I was 17, and my mother gave me the letter of recommendation that you see here. After my aunt died many years later, when they read her will in her lawyer's office, I found out that there was an entire cardboard box full of letters from Einstein that Erica had donated to the NYC Public Library. I was stunned, because nobody had ever mentioned these letters to me. I went down to the library immediately to try to retrieve the letters, but it was like that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant disappears into the endless room filled with wood crated boxes. The ONLY thing left to prove my family's history is this letter of recommendation. Tragicly, it's all I have left.

When my atomic ex-wife kidnapped my two young boys in 1994, she also took every last thing I had, including the Einstein letter and the photograph, which I had preserved in a gold and black frame. The only thing she didn't take was my body. All my valuables ended up in her hot, filthy, cramped, insect ridden attic - ignored and forgotten.

In June, 2004, I went back east where they all live to attend my younger son Alex's high school graduation. All the women in the world better watch out for Alex now, and a whole bunch of them have found that out to their great satisfaction already. He is my son, indeed ! When my opportunity presented itself to go up into my ex-wife's attic and rummage through the many cardboard boxes, I jumped at the opportunity, and I spent from about midnight to 3 AM sorting through the mess. I got absolutely EVERYTHING I lost, plus some :) and I shipped back the entire lot of stuff the very next morning, with the sole exception of the framed Einstein letter and photograph, which I swore would NEVER leave my grubby little mits again. I hand carried it back on the plane to California with me, and it was certainly a conversation piece among the passengers.

I would not be alive at all and here writing this if it weren't for Professor Einstein, who I believe is the premier genius of the entire human race. Maybe Leonardo da Vinci comes close, but not really, because only Einstein figured out the true nature of our universe. To this day, very few people really understand what he understood and expressed so succinctly in his famous Theory of Relativity. As a bi-product of his theory, he gave us his famous formula, E=MC2. Most people think it's a formula for the atomic bomb, but it really wasn't intended to be that. If you would like to read what I think Einstein's Theory of Relativity means and what his formula implies, please read The Interview with Peter Cross, Part 2.

The major disappointment of Einstein's entire life, and the thing that bothered him the most, was the fact that people took his life's work and made a bomb out of it. During the late 1930's, he wrote many letters to President Roosevelt begging him to drop the whole idea because he knew what would happen - that there would be a proliferation of atomic bombs that could threaten the very existence of the planet Earth. I feel like I do understand the man, and I feel incredibly close to him. I also feel like very few people truly understand where I'm coming from, and just like my dear family friend, I also have sad eyes. But my sad eyes also became happy eyes when my resurrection from the dead occurred in 2003. Now I have decided that the time has come to publish my family's history with The Genius.

Contributed by:
Starcrost
©2004, Peter Cross
Website: Rock and Roll with an Immortal Soul