While Allied forces pressed toward Berlin during the final days of World War II, one Jewish soldier turned his jeep east into Nazi territory on a daring mission to save his family.

Manfred Gans grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Borken, a town in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border. His father Moritz, a decorated WWI veteran who had lost a leg and lung in combat, ran a successful textile wholesale business with his wife Else. Their comfortable life began to fracture as Hitler rose to power, bringing waves of anti-Semitism that saw Jewish businesses boycotted and Jewish children subjected to lectures on “Nordic superiority” in schools.

In 1938, 16-year-old Manfred was sent to England to continue his studies. The family’s foresight proved prescient as just four months later, during Kristallnacht, Nazi Brownshirts rampaged through Borken, terrorizing Jews and seizing the town synagogue. Manfred’s parents fled to the Netherlands after the Gestapo seized their home.

When war broke out, Manfred, like other Germans in Britain, was classified as an “enemy alien” and interned. But in 1941, following Churchill’s call to recruit “friendly Germans,” he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps. By 1943, he joined an elite unit called X Troop, composed largely of European refugees. Under the alias Private Freddy Gray, he became part of No. 41 Royal Marine Commando.

Meanwhile, his parents’ situation grew dire. In June 1943, they were arrested and sent to Westerbork transit camp, then transported to Bergen-Belsen and eventually transferred to Theresienstadt, a ghetto camp where fewer than 20% of prisoners survived.

Manfred landed on D-Day with his unit and fought across France, once crawling across minefields to gather intelligence that led to capturing 150 German soldiers. By March 1945, he had crossed into Germany, even revisiting his occupied hometown of Borken, now devastated by war.

In May 1945, upon learning his parents were alive in Theresienstadt, Manfred embarked on a harrowing three-day, 600-mile journey across war-torn Europe in a failing jeep. Navigating through streams of refugees and Russian military convoys, he finally reached the typhus-quarantined camp on May 14. Miraculously, he found his parents alive.

“I suddenly find myself in their arms,” Manfred wrote in his diary. “They are both crying wildly, it nearly sounds like the crying of despair.”

After the war, Manfred settled in New Jersey, becoming a chemical engineer and raising a family, rarely speaking of his wartime experiences.

Drawing on Manfred’s wartime diaries and letters to his childhood sweetheart Anita Lamm, whom he later married, historian Daniel Huhn pieces together this remarkable story of courage through humanity’s darkest hour in his new book “I Will Come Back for You,” set for release on January 2nd.