COMMENT YES! You can be the winner of FREE S K ET Dr. John Mames: Personal Recollection SIDNEY BOLKOSKY Special to The Jewish News W Just come into Summit Place Mall to enter before December 21. We will be giving away to 5 lucky winners a set of 4-tickets to a Pistons' game at The Palace. There's no purchase necessary to enter, just pick up an entry blank at any of the three entry cubes in the mall. The drawing will be on Friday, December 22...wouldn't a call telling you that you're a winner make your holidays happier?! Come in and register today! See official entry for rules. L Telegraph & Elizabeth Lake Roads in Waterford Township Hudson's, JCPenney, Kohl's, Montgomery Ward, Sears and 135 stores Store hours extended for your holiday shopping convenience OVER 60 "Your No. 1 Financial Fear Should Be The Cost of Long Term Nursing And Home Care Expenses "Medicare & Catastrophic Insurance Plans Won't Pay!" 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With the death of Dr. John - Mames on Dec. 1, tha extra gentle man determined that survivor testimonies would be told, and set out to ac- complish it — somehow. When, in 1981, we met and agreed to work together on the oral histories, both of us probably entered into our pact somewhat naively, but with boundless energy and determination he resolved to overcome any obstacle. So we spent long nights reviewing names, discussing techniques, talking of the im- portance of collecting the nar- ratives and, usually well past 1 a.m., shared a few warm l'chaims. He would then retire to listent to some of the tapes:' I would drive home puzzling over such strength. Time and again I asked him to tape his own story; no — there was no time for that, get the others first. So he would throw more Latin phrases in- to the conversation, laced with Hebrew aphorisms and some Polish and he would plan his strategy for breaking down the defenses of reluc- tant survivors. Those were exhausting and extremely painful times. They changed our lives and the lives of some survivors. For all the anguish, I treasure those long nights because of the privilege of working with such a mentsh as John Mames. John vociferously objected to my referring to the perpetrators as "civilized" men. He adamantly rejected that proposition: to him, they epitomized barbarism. It did not matter that they came from cultured backgrounds and had university educa- tions. They adapted high technology and bureaucratic, civilized tecniques for mass murder. And I now understand why John became so irritated. He embodied civilization. He Dr. Sidney Bolkosky of the University of Michigan- Dearborn worked with Dr. John Mames on the Oral History Project of the Holocaust Memorial Center. breathed it, lived a civilized life full of compassion, caring, education; blending science and - humanity. Part of the tragedy of the Holocaust, perhaps, rests in this: that such insouciant misanthropes shared the same civilization with John, indeed, with all Jews. He did not give his story. Few, if any, then, know of his past during the Holocaust (he spoke occasionally about his life just after the-war in Ger- He vociferously objected to referring to the perpetrators as civilized men. many). But we all know of his life in Detroit. How much the war years haunted him, or how much the tapes he listen- ed to tormented him I cannot say. This place will mourn his absence. But how fortunate we were to have him among us, to rescue lost stories, to motivate and inspire and even ennoble us all, a human being, a survivor whose nature far transcended civilization's boundaries. ❑ NEWS Ex-Spy Claims Israel Neglectful Jerusalem (JTA) — An Egyptian woman who once spied for Israel with her hus- band has broken her decade- long silence on the affair with a complaint that the Israeli authorities are neglecting her. The woman, who now lives in Israel, claims her husband, who was later hanged by the Egyptians, gave Israel ad- vance warning of the Yom Kippur War. Her story has revived the controversy over why Israel was unprepared when the Egyptian and Syrian armies struck suddenly on Yom Kip- pur 1973. Israel suffered nearly 3,000 dead or missing. Inshrah Shahin, 45, who converted to Judaism and changed her name to Dina Ben-David, has no regrets about spying. But she is bitter over her poor economic condition, con- sidering that she and her late husband, Ibrahim Shahin, worked for Israeli intelligence from 1967 until they were caught in 1974.