The obituary columns provide some of the most interesting reporting in our daily newspapers. The most moving summarise the lives of Second World War veterans, chronicling astonishing feats of valour by young men and women who after the war returned to pick up the threads of civilian life and lay the foundations for the country we live in today. The last of them are leaving the scene now but their stories, of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, can still astound subsequent generations who have led more comfortable lives.
Manfred Gans in 1945 Photo: Gans family[Missing Credit]
Manfred's army pay book[Missing Credit]
One such was certainly that of Manfred Gans, a young German-Jewish man who managed to escape to England just before the war while his parents and other relatives were trapped. His subsequent dramatic story makes for more than an obituary column: it is told in this compelling book by German author Daniel Huhn.
After suffering under Britain’s short-sighted policy of internment on the Isle of Man, Gans was released to serve in the backwater of the Pioneer Corps. When the authorities belatedly realised that fiercely anti-Nazi native German speakers like him would be invaluable on mainland Europe after D-Day, he was transferred to a new Commando unit, Three Troop, training in Wales in preparation for the invasion. No trace of his German past could be risked, so he became Frederick Gray. His fellow recruits, all foreign and mostly Jewish, were given new names too.
Stories, of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, can still astound subsequent generations who have led more comfortable lives
Meanwhile, his parents, Moritz and Else, who had just missed the chance to escape via Holland, had ended up in Theresienstadt concentration camp, near Prague, after spending two years in hiding on a Dutch farm before being betrayed to the Nazis.
On D-Day, Gans landed on Sword Beach and was soon debriefing captured German soldiers. From then until the end of the war nearly a year later he was in constant action, storming radar stations, capturing and interrogating more German prisoners, even spending Rosh Hashanah of 1944 in the sewers beneath the German stronghold of Dunkirk after an abortive mission. As he moved across Europe, he was involved in another seaborne invasion, of the Dutch port of Walcheren, a week-long battle that culminated in the surrender of 3,000 Germans at the cost of 500 Allied lives. There is, believe it or not, a romantic sub-plot to all this: the long-distance love affair between Gans/Gray and Anita Lamm, the vivacious daughter of Jewish friends of his parents whom he had met before the war and who had fled to New York in 1938. They wrote to each other constantly and it is their 1,000 letters that provide much of the material from which Huhn has been able to reconstruct Gans’s amazing story. And it didn’t end with the fighting. As the war wound down, Gans was desperate to know if his parents were still alive and learnt via a letter from family friends that they had last been heard of in Theresienstadt.
Manfred, his brother Theo and Anita in 1935 Photo: Gans family[Missing Credit]
After the German surrender he was given permission to see if he could find them, so commandeering a jeep and a driver he set off.
That was another adventure in itself, driving across the shattered continent on what might turn out to be a fool’s errand. Confusion reigned: in one German village which no occupying power had yet located they found themselves surrounded by thousands of armed German troops but got out unscathed. Spoiler alert: they reached Theresienstadt and Manfred, incredibly, was reunited with his parents, in the most moving scene imaginable.
Shoah survivors Moritz and Else with their three sons Photo: Gans family[Missing Credit]
I won’t reveal what happened to Manfred and Anita, but suffice to say that his story would make a marvellous TV series, with no need for the nonsensical fictionalisation of programmes such as SAS: Rogue Heroes that take true war stories and ruin them.
I Will Come Back For You: The Undercover Jewish Commando who helped defeat the Nazis
By Daniel Huhn, translated by Rachel Stanyon
Ithaka Press, £20
