Guggenheim loved architecture and expressly admired men who knew how to work with their hands. Putting the pieces together, the DVD shows that it took the creator of a great documentary about the Gateway Arch (MONUMENT TO THE DREAM) to reveal the secrets of the Berga tunnels. From the heights of idealism to the depths of degradation, Charles Guggenheim captured it all.
 

© Jan Lisa Huttner (7/1/05)

FF2 ADDENDUM

A much better book on this general topic is Deborah Dash Moore’s GI JEWS, released last August. Although she only devotes one page explicitly to Berga, Moore’s book provides both a context for understanding the situation of Jewish-American GI’s in World War II, as well as acute observations on the consequences of their service, not only for them as individuals, but also for the nation they served (the United States) as well as the nation they helped to create through their advocacy and financial support (Israel).

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In his 6/12/05 review of GI JEWS in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Columbia University journalism professor Samuel G. Freedman wrote:

…One of the most distinguished historians of contemporary American Jewry, Moore can hardly be accused of sentimentalizing war. She teaches at Vassar College, which shares nothing with West Point except the Hudson River Valley, and she made her name with TO THE GOLDEN CITIES, a fine book about Jews in the postwar promised lands of Miami and Los Angeles. But she is also her father's daughter, and her father, Martin Dash, was a Brooklyn boy who served as an officer on the destroyer USS McCormick. Moore has built her trenchant and fluent book largely around the testimonies of Dash and 14 contemporaries. Some were Zionists, some were yeshiva students, some were Popular Front radicals, and virtually all had spent their prewar lives in insular, urban, Jewish neighborhoods. So when they went to war, they met gentiles and gentiles met them with an unprecedented intensity and mutual dependence.

As Moore deftly weaves a narrative from the varied experiences of her informants--tracking them from Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 to battlefield victory and the liberation of the death camps in 1945--she refuses to merely celebrate. Her book includes instances of anti-Semitism in boot camp here and on the fronts overseas. In one especially searing moment, a Jewish chaplain is excluded from an ecumenical memorial service after the battle for Iwo Jima because he is an outspoken foe of racial segregation in the American military.

Such unclouded vision makes Moore all the more credible in describing the more-common process of Jews proving their mettle to gentiles and securing their place in a more-tolerant postwar America. The very concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition, Moore points out, was a creation of World War II. This "civil religion for American democracy," as she aptly calls it, had its genesis in the widely reported deaths of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant chaplains when their transport ship was sunk by German U-boats in early 1943. With the revelation of the Final Solution, America could no longer morally sustain its own brand of anti-Jewish discrimination--the bias in housing, social clubs, higher education and so forth that were routine in the prewar decades. Impediments fell, and American Jews advanced.

Returning Jewish veterans became "agents of a shift in the legitimization of American Jewish identity, one that would deepen the sense that Jews were at home in America," Moores writes of the GIs. "Belief in American exceptionalism was apparently being rewarded; things were different over here." She continues several pages later: "Standing up for oneself as a Jew turned out to be the American thing to do. Military service strengthened Jewishness in part by changing its meaning."

Beyond the historical importance of Dash’s book, it has profound implications for the future. In Freedman’s words:

…[GI JEWS] implicitly raises a sobering question for American Jews… Like other highly educated and highly affluent groups, Jews began detaching from the military thanks to draft deferments for college students in the Vietnam War era, and today they enlist in the all-volunteer Army at less than half their proportion in the population. Something precious is being taken for granted, and potentially lost, in that disconnection…

In his WASHINGTON POST survey of recent books on World War II (published on 6/5/05), Kenneth M. Pollack is also full of praise:

The great surprise of the season in World War II books is Deborah Dash Moore's wonderful GI JEWS: HOW WORLD WAR II CHANGED A GENERATION. Moore is a professor, the book is an academic study of how one small segment of the American population dealt with the war, it was published by an academic press and the endnotes are nearly a fifth as long as the story itself -- none of which promises an enjoyable read. But it is an enjoyable read. Moore, a Vassar professor, writes well and knows how to tell a story -- sins that some faculty committee will no doubt punish her for someday. She has an eye for interesting characters and for what makes them interesting. One of those characters, in fact, is her father, and others are old friends of his; yet she keeps her own feelings about him and them out of it, which allows them to live again in her pages as the young men gone for soldiers they once were. She keeps up a lively pace and intersperses evocative vignettes with insightful analysis of what these Jewish troops' experiences meant to them, their families, their communities and the nation as a whole.

The book's biggest draw, however, is the larger themes that Moore gracefully weaves throughout. The most important of these are echoed in her apt subtitle, "How World War II Changed a Generation." GI JEWS is a vital corollary to the work of Tom Brokaw and others who have justifiably lauded America's "Greatest Generation." Moore's most important theme is that the greatest generation was not born that way but forged -- something that, to be fair, Brokaw himself has acknowledged. Its members did not win World War II because they were the greatest generation, but they became the greatest generation because of what they went through during the war.

Although Moore focuses on American Jews, the experiences she describes were similar, if not identical, for virtually every other ethnic group in the country, and indeed for most Americans. For postwar generations, her book reveals how the experience of the war changed the generation that fought it and why it helped launch the civil rights movement, the Great Society and America's rise to global predominance. GI Jews should not be missed by anyone with an interest in World War II or the history of the American people.

FINAL FF2 NOTE:
This article is a slightly expanded version
of the reviews originally published
in the July 2005 edition of the
WORLD JEWISH DIGEST
(Volume 2 Number 10) 
& is posted here with their permission.