My name is Jerry Berk and I was born on September 1st 1922 in Manhattan on the Lower East Side. I grew up in Brooklyn though, and I went to high school there too. I then went to Brooklyn College and spent three years plus before joining the Army. I asked for an early deployment because in those days if you chose to extend the draft date you were not able to choose the type of service to go into. So I chose the Army Air Corps because I wanted to become a meteorologist; I had studied some of that in school. I was inducted into the Army Air Corps on Dec 23rd 1942, and I reported for active duty on January 1st, 1943.
I was in Kearns, Utah for my basic training when the meteorology program was closed before I could join. Instead of being discharged and then possibly drafted into the regular Army I chose to stay in the Air Corps. I became a medical technologist and from that point on I was in various station hospitals throughout the United States. There was a great need for personnel back then because the Army was expending a great number of troops in Europe. Because I spoke a little French I was put into advanced infantry training, and then they sent me with an evacuation hospital unit headed for France.
So we went overseas and were the first ship to go directly from the United States into Le Havre, France, bypassing England. From there were traveled to a place in Germany called Bad Kreuznach where we occupied an Army hospital. We stayed there for quite a time until we were deployed into the south pacific through Marseille. Our unit was then shipped to Reims in France where we stayed for awhile.
In Reims my cousin was in a nearby camp, as a major, and we took advantage of the proximately to Paris by going there quite often. We visited the Louvre one day and I saw something so amazing, a coincidence that was unbelievable. When I was a sergeant in Bad Kreuznach, and the war was winding down a lot of French slave laborers, holocaust victims, etc were being released. I was asked to go aboard the trains and pick out those who were in poor health for commitment to the hospital in Bad Kreuznach. All of these people were housed in forty- and- eights destined for Paris. A forty-and-eight is a boxcar; filled with straw to accommodate either forty men or eight horses. The train stopped in Bad Kreuznach for our surveying. On one occasion, one of the squad members came to me and said there's a woman who doesn't want to be sent to the hospital but is obviously sick. She was crouched to the corner, sitting on hay and trying not to be recognized. She was tremendously emaciated and looked like she was on her last leg. I went over to her and I said in French, "We'll have to put you in the hospital because you're quite ill." She said to me, "Sergeant, I don't want to go. If I'm to die I want to die in France and not Germany. I couldn't refuse that plea so I let her go back with the rest to Paris. When we were in Reims and visiting the Louvre that day I spoke about, my eye caught something that was unbelievable. There sitting was this woman, who had refused to be put into the hospital, painting a copy of the Mona Lisa. She was no longer emaciated but recognizable and I looked at her and she looked at me and we smiled. But I never spoke to her because I didn't want to renew old hatreds.
After that we were deployed to Marseille and awaiting deployment to the south pacific when the war ended. That was May 8th 1945. We were all excited about it of course. Our hopes were that we would not be shipped to the south pacific and sure enough we were not. It was a great excitement, great joy. But the war in Japan was still going on. So we were on one hand thrilled that the war in Europe had ended, but on the other hand people were still dying. It was mixed feelings.
I was young going into the war. I was twenty, I was pretty immature, hadn't been around much, hadn't been overseas and to me it was a big adventure. I never thought of any danger involved because you always feel that you're not going to be the one that gets it. So I was looking forward to the experience and to the different people I would meet. It was never a question of getting hurt or getting worse than that, killed.
We landed in Newport News, Virginia when we came home. I was struck by the fact that in the camp, well fed Germans with well-pressed uniforms was serving us. This seemed a little odd to me because here was a group of guys who had suffered under terrible conditions being met by these prisoners of war who were sleek and well fed. It was a little frustrating for us to see this.
After I was discharged inFort Devens Massachusetts I got a job in a small pharmaceutical plant in Manhattan for forty bucks a week as a chemist. Shortly thereafter I married my high school sweetheart, Jean. She had waited for me while I was away. I continued to work at the plant until I became part of a small pharmaceutical factory in Mt. Vernon. Once retired Jean and I joined a group called the IESC, the International Executive Service Corps. It sends executives with a certain expertise aboard to help companies in developing countries grow and prosper. We went to various parts of the world, maybe 30-40 countries. We were the first IESC people to go to China. It was right after the Cultural Revolution, and we made some good friends there.
I was an immature kid when I went into the Army and it changed me. Some of those things I saw and heard and smelled made an impression that was lasting. You can't get rid of it. Every once in awhile I think of it. The pictures have dimmed over the years but we've changed; every one of us has changed.
