Have your party at In The Hands Of Heroes • , Detroit Public Television airs a documentary on the only all-Jewish fighting unit ofWorld War II. The Perfect Place for }Bridal Showers }.Baby Showers a-Retirement }Office Parties la-All Special Occasions Customized Menus Southfield; 248-351-2925 29244 Northwestern Hwy. St. Clair Shores: 810-498-3000 23722 Jefferson at Nine Mile Detroit 313-965-4600 400 Monroe in Greektown 11111111111111111111111411111111 4/21 2000 100 372 Oullette Avenue • Windsor, Canada SUZANNE CHESSLER Special to the Jewish News lc Members of the Jewish Brigade in World War IL The soldiers' uniforms bore a yellow Star of David. Flanked by stripes of blue and white, the symbol of shame became a badge of hope. hamutal Eitam turns 21 this month, but col- lege, career and dates are not her priorities. Already a veteran of the Israeli army, she serves as a volunteer medic in Kosovo. Eitam, living a very nontraditional life for a young sophisticate, actually is following a family tradition. Her grandfather, retired journalist Hanoch Bartov, was a mem- ber of the Jewish Brigade in World War II, fighting in Italy before he turned 17 with 5,000 other Jewish soldiers from Palestine who comprised the only all-Jewish fighting unit in World War II. While Eitam has not decided what she will do after Kosovo, Bartov knew what he would do as a brigade mem- ber after the war — serve as a medic helping survivors. Others from Palestine formed secret vengeance squads to assassinate Nazi officers in hiding, engineered the rescue and illegal movement of Holocaust survivors to Palestine and engaged in widespread arms thefts for Israel's future War of Independence. Their story, told in the documentary In Our Own Hands: The Jewish Brigade in World War II, will be shown at 10 p.m. Wednesday, April 26, on Detroit Public Television. Bartov appears in the 90-minute film, which gathers the testimony of more than 40 surviving Jewish Brigade volun- teers and historical footage, as well as interviews with Holocaust survivors who were influenced by the brigade. "In World War II, because the Jews of Europe were unarmed, the Jews from Palestine fought to say we are still here and we're going to fight the Germans as much as we can," says Bartov, who wrote a novel, The Brigade, based on his experiences. "That is one message of the film, and the other message is that the State of Israel came to be, to a great extent, thanks to those survivors who lost hope and then found new hope of being their own masters in their own country "If not for those hundreds of thousands of people who said they wanted to go to Israel, the United Nations would not have adopted the historic resolution that established the Jewish state." The Palestine Jews, living under British rule during the war, sought permission to take an all-Jewish force into bat- tle for five years. The British War Office, fearful of offend- ing the Arabs, had refused them, but Winston Churchill overrode the objections in 1944. After two months of fight- ing and taking heavy casualties in Italy, they emerged among the victorious. "I was born in Palestine, but my parents came from Poland," Bartov recalls about his motivation. "Both my father and mother were the only children of their parents who went to Palestine, so we were closely connected emo- tionally to what was going an in Europe. We were not a different people; we were the same people. I wanted to reach anybody left alive, and I wanted to fight the Nazis. I think it's a young man's natural response." Bartov, whose only hesitation about going into battle was leaving behind his girlfriend, says he was most deeply affected by burying friends and meeting survivors in horri- ble condition. After three years of intense operations among the 5,000-member brigade, he started his university studies only to go back into service for two years in the War of Independence. In Our Own Hands tells about many heroes in addition to Bartov: Shlomo Shamir, senior officer of all Haganah personnel in the brigade; Meir "Zarro" Zorea, a Nazi hunter who later found Adolph Eichmann; Johanan Peltz, a fighter who captured the brigade's first German prisoners; Chanan Greenwald, a leader of search parties tracking sur- vivors; Israel Carmy, a leader in the vengeance squad; and Netanel Lorch, author of many books on the history of Israel's defense forces. "Soldiers usually kill or get killed, but we found [near] dead people and helped them come back to life," Bartov