When British commando Fred Gray departed from his landing craft at Sword Beach on D-Day, he could never have imagined the mixed emotions that he would encounter in the days and weeks ahead. First, there was shock and horror of the wounded and dying. Then, the intensity of interrogating German prisoners of war with his knowledge of the German language. But the ultimate emotions he would encounter would be finding his Jewish parents alive in a concentration camp nearly a year later after the war ended.
Fred Gray, the British commando with the X Troop of elite intelligence soldiers, was actually Manfred Gans, a Jewish man born in 1922 in Borgen, Germany. At 16, he had been sent to England when Hitler was rising to power. But when war broke out, he was considered an “alien” since he was German and sent in 1938 to a barbed-wire enclosed camp on the Isle of Man.
His father’s best friend had a daughter, Anita Lamm, whom Gans corresponded for years. His father, a successful textile manufacturer, helped get the Lamm family out of Germany to New York City in 1938. The couple continued to write for years.
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