My Father, The Inglourious Basterd

For a time all was silent. Then a German soldier popped up from behind a parapet and fired. My father dropped to his knee and fired back. Each missed the other. My father’s gun jammed. The German dove for cover. My father went flat on his stomach to clear his gun. As he prepared to shoot again he heard a noise and there, behind him, his entire troop was charging, bayonets fixed. The soldier in the lead shot two enemy soldiers concealed in a ditch to the left of the road, each with a belt-fed German machine gun.

When my father approached, he saw that both looked “appallingly young.” One was severely wounded; my father interrogated the other, who said they were 17 and 15 years old. The English soldier who had shot them asked my father how to say, “I’m sorry” in German.

In 1997, when he was 75, my father published his memoir: Striking Back: A Jewish Commando’s War Against the Nazis. He did a great deal of public speaking and contributed to historian Stephen Ambrose’s books on the war. He very much wanted the world to know about X Troop, the Jewish commandos who fought heroically and took exceptionally high casualties, to counter the image of Jews being herded to slaughter. (He is also visible in a documentary titled About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II. But that film has languished for several years without finding distribution.)

Four years ago, my 83-year-old father’s heart finally gave out in the midst of a tennis match. That was certainly the ending that he had envisioned for himself. I can’t ask him what he thinks of Inglourious Basterds but I have talked to some of his comrades. Of course they haven’t seen the film, which opens later this month, but what they hate is the premise that Jewish soldiers would hunt for scalps or bludgeon prisoners with a baseball bat.

“We killed people elegantly, without that sort of thing,” said Tony Firth, now 90.

“Shocking!” said my father’s friend, Peter Terry, now 85. “I mean—really!”

Like my father, Terry landed in Normandy on D-Day. A day later, he was shot in the leg by a sniper. He recuperated fast enough to be back in action three weeks later. He didn’t stay long. “I was on a terrible patrol and we ran into an ambush,” he says. “I got shot... Then I spent seven months in hospital in England.”

Terry is still haunted by the memory of flushing out a German pillbox. Another soldier tossed in a grenade from the rear while Terry waited on the other side. As a German soldier emerged, Terry fired. “He had his hands up,” Terry says. “I wouldn’t shoot anyone with his hands up. It’s bothered me ever since then.”

He never saw anyone abuse prisoners, whom he describes as a dispirited lot for the most part. “One was on the whole very decent,” he says, adding, “If you saw a dead German, you passed him and you didn’t laugh.”

My father’s book recounts one tale in which a commando confided to him that a colonel had ordered him to use his Tommy gun to shoot three SS prisoners because no one could be spared to guard them. When my father’s friend hesitated, the colonel put a pistol to his head and ordered him to shoot. “I hate the bastard because of what he made me do,” he told my father. My father wrote that this story stayed with him as he asked himself what he would have done. “I like to think that I would have shot the colonel,” he concluded.

Manfred Ganz, who called himself Freddy Gray during the war, has one of the most dramatic stories of all. He was wounded during the Normandy invasion, hit five times, but avoided being evacuated. In the last days of the war, he heard a rumor that his parents might still be alive in the Terezin concentration camp. On May 7, 1945, Manfred set out with a jeep and driver. He had to cross 450 miles through territory held in some places by the Germans and in other by Soviets.