From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Asked to find and interview people who lived through the Nazi invasion of Poland 50 years ago, Jerusalem reporter Marlin Levin contacted dozens of sources before he was finally steered to Rafael Loc, 79, a Tel Aviv lawyer who emigrated to Israel from Poland in 1956. Loc had not only been a lieutenant on the front lines but had also survived five years in a German POW camp. "As his wife served homemade Polish cake, Loc spent two hours telling me about his adventures," says Levin. "The fact that he lived through the war when nearly every Polish Jew had been killed is remarkable."

Loc's recollections are part of our look back at one of the 20th century's watershed events -- the beginning of World War II. (A second installment next week will trace the war up to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.) Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski spoke to John Borrell about his family's flight to Lithuania three weeks after the invasion, while Otto von Habsburg, son of Austria-Hungary's last Emperor, detailed for Gertraud Lessing the incongruously lavish meal he ate at the Ritz in Paris the night the government fled the city. Franz Spelman, who visited filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's famous propagandist, at her villa near Munich, discovered a well-coiffed blond who had just returned from scuba diving in the Caribbean and looked 20 years . younger than her age (87). Leonora Dodsworth tracked down Edda Ciano, Mussolini's eldest daughter, at her elegant apartment in Rome. "She has Il Duce's baleful glare and obviously still adores her father."

The main narrative was written by Otto Friedrich, who remembers the day of the invasion clearly. "I was ten years old and sat glued to the shortwave radio in the living room of my father's farm in Vermont, trying to get news of the air raids," he recalls. Assembling the pictures for the report, which was designed by Arthur Hochstein, Mary Dunn found a set of stills taken of Hitler that showed him honing his speech gestures; a picture from that extraordinary series illustrates the profile of Hitler in this issue.