CESSO RIES .. THE C ULTIMATE iN OMEN'S AC q Wage • 2.9555 Noftt-MesteffN1kNy . pro - 6 SoutOie0,1411 48034 Saturday • 013) 10 356-8870 La Hours.. Volida.1- tItIrsaa`i e BARRY'S LETS RENT IT PARTY RENTALS OUR NEW LOCATION 4393 ORCHARD LAKE RD..N. OF LONE PINE IN CROSSWINDS (FORMER PINE LAKE MALL) I 855-0480 We Want to Belong to Your Family. fir 1 Here's what's waiting for you. Michigan's oldest congregation—getting younger every day. A vibrant, growing membership keeps Temple Beth El young, with strong ideals and new ideas. An excellent religious school—for students of all ages. No matter how young or how old, our students enrich themselves by studying their spiritual and cultural identity ■ Nursery School and Extended ■ Confirmation Care ■ High School ■ Kindergarten ■ Adult Bar/Bat Mitzvah ■ Complete Special Education ■ College of Jewish Studies ■ Bar/Bat Mitzvah ■ Weekly Torah Study A friendly place to pray and grow—a family of families. Temple Beth El appeals to many groups for social and spiritual fulfillment. ■ Middle Years Group ■ Young People's Society ■ Beth Elders ■ Singles ■ Mixed-faith families ■ Sisterhood and Brotherhood ■ Single-parent families ■ Married Group Rabbi Daniel Polish—a national leader in Reform Judaism. Rabbi Polish comes to us from Temple Israel in Los Angeles, where he was a respected leader in the Reform Jewish community. We'd Like to Meet You Open House for Prospective Members Monday, August 29, 7 pm-9 pm at Temple Beth El. Come see how easy it is to belong. For more information, call 851-1100, or stop by during office hours. Temple Beth El 7400 Telegraph Road Birmingham, Michigan 48010 50 FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 1988 - How I Came To Cover The Second World War ROBERT ST. JOHN Temple Beth El 1 I LOOKING BACK I Special to The Jewish News N V Tr ext year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of World War II, with almost endless reminiscences, recollections and reflections on the effects of what began on September 1, 1939. My own World War II ex- perience actually started 50 years ago this week, when, in the summer of 1938, a friend and colleague, Frank Gervasi, home on leave from his post as a foreign correspondent in Rome, came to New Hamp- shire to visit me on the farm. For six years I had been in semi-retirement, trying (not very successfully) to raise chickens and write books. He suggested that I cover one more story before I retired permanently, the war which he figured would break out in Europe "about the first of September, next year." Having read no newspapers for six years, and owning no radio, I was in such ignorance about the world beyond the road up to my farm that I ask- ed Gervasi to explain who the belligerents would be. He replied that the best way to prepare myself would be to read just two books: Hitler's "Mein Kampf' and Machiavelli's "The Prince." When I applied to my former employer, the Asso- ciated Press, for a job as a war correspondent I was told (a) the New York office of the AP didn't think there was going to be a war, and (b) even if so, I was much too old (I was then 36) to become a war correspondent. During the next few months I saved enough money for steamship tickets to Europe (plus a few hundred dollars) and arrived on August 28, 1939, in Paris, which I found to be overrun with foreign correspondents, about half of whom agreed with the AP that no war was imminent. So I took what remained of the nest egg and bought railroad tickets to Bucharest, Romania, with the idea that if the Gervasi prediction came true there would be less com- petition for a job as a war cor- respondent in Bucharest than in Paris, and if the prediction was wrong, I could gather material for a biography of King Carol and his red-haired Jewish mistress, Mme. Magda Lupescu, which might possibly become a best-seller. While changing trains in Budapest I learned that precisely on the day Gervasi had named, September 1, while we were asleep in a railroad train between Paris and Budapest, the Nazis had attacked. Poland. The AP of- fice in Budapest was in desperate need of experienced professional help. And so, aged 37 though I now was, I became a war correspondent. First for AP and then for NBC, by written then spoken word, I reported on World War II. Eventually I did get to Bucharest, not to write a Carol-Lupescu biography, but to report on how Carol, under pressure from Berlin, invited two divisions of Nazi troops into his country for the osten- sible purpose of "training the Romanian army in methods of modern warfare" — the cheapest of all the Nazis' takeover of a country. Before moving from Buda- pest to Bucharest, I helped fish out of the Danube River the dead body of a colleague- friend, Walter Bertram, a British-Jewish newspaper- man, who had been picked up by Gestapo agents, bound hand and foot with copper wire, and then dumped into the Danube. But it was in Bucharest that I saw savage anti- Semitism at its vilest and it was there and then I became what David Ben-Gurion later called me, "a goyisher Zionist." Reporting World War II and the subsequent five Arab- Israeli wars, I have often smelled the odor of burning human flesh, but my in- troduction to this sickly-sweet scent was during the 1941 pogrom in Bucharest. It happened on a street cor- ner in the Romanian capital, when a hundred or more members of the Brotherhood of the Archangel Michael, commonly called the Iron Guard, set fire to one of their Jewish prisoners — then danced in a circle around the burning body as they chanted the Christian hymn they habitually used as their bat- tle cry. There were other never-to- be-forgotten experiences before the Romanian Fascist pogrom finally ended, the worst taking place at the Bucharest abattoir, where the Brotherhood slaughtered several hundred Jewish men and women as if they were animals. That all happened almost half a century ago but the memories are still as poi- gnant as is that smell.