My name is Judith Cohen, and I'm the Director of the Photo Archive of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Manfred Gans collection is an incredibly important collection
on several levels. I think that the story of the contributions of Jewish refugees to
the war effort has been underdocumented. Jews after arriving to safety didn't just sit back
and say, "Ok, I made it out. End of story," but rather, they said, "How can I come and
help other people. Manfred Gans was a German Jew who grew up on the border of the Netherlands
in a small town called Borken. My favorite set of photographs in the collection is of
Manfred and his two brothers that were done when they were still living in Borken showing
the day from the boys waking up in the morning, marching off to school, coming back for lunch,
doing homework, playing. Just a very, very precious little photo album that really captures
the joy of a family life before anything bad happened. Manfred came to England as a teenager
in 1938. He was originally just going for the summer. When the situation became more
and more hazardous in Germany, his parents said, "Don't come home." He's studying in
England. Everything is going fine until the outbreak of World War II. All of a sudden
he was sent to the Isle of Man, which was used to intern enemy aliens, primary German
Jews. Manfred was staying specifically in a kosher hotel with other Orthodox Jews, and
he was able to continue his education, but there was still the humiliation of people
who were looking for freedom to be all of a sudden classified as an alien and being
behind barbed wire. The last item that was donated came during the Museum's 20th anniversary
road show, when Manfred's son Danny donated the jacket that Manfred wore as a member of
3 Troop. A call came out for military-aged men to join a special forces unit of native
speakers in German to perform different types of infiltration behind enemy lines. Manfred
applied. He was accepted. He fought on D-Day. He came as an enlisted man. He was part of
the landing. He was then part of the Hedgerow Campaign through German lines. During this
extremely heavy fighting, Manfred was wounded five times. As a result of his bravery, he
got a battlefield promotion to officer. At that point he wrote a letter home to his friends
saying that he can't believe how in four short years he went from being an enemy alien in
an internment camp to an officer in elite units without having gone to officers' training
camp. At the end of the war, Manfred heard from several sources that prominent Jews from
Germany and the Netherlands had been deported to Theresienstadt and that there was a very
good likelihood that his family was still there. He received permission to enter the
camp, and he went first to the registrar at the camp, who looked through the camp's records.
To the registrar's incredible astonishment, his parents had been there for almost a full
year, and they had survived and were still in the camp. Manfred's father, Moritz Gans,
kept a diary from his deportation from Westerbork, the Dutch internment camp, to Theresienstadt.
A lot of the writing is very faded. It's hard to read the whole thing, but we get a sense
of what the Jews in Theresienstadt knew. He heard that the San Francisco Conference was
happening, the conference that founded the UN. He knew about the siege of Berlin, but
for them, obviously the highlight of the war was knowing that their son had come to get
them. He mentions in the diary, "Manfred arrives." Manfred Gans kept this incredible collection
with him his entire life, and his children appreciated the significance of both the collection
and what their father had done during the war. For them, the importance was that the
collection be preserved, not just for five years, ten years, but for decades, and hopefully
for eternity.