In 1939 Harry Kennedy, 69, of Foster City, Calif., was a 15-year-old German Jew named Hans Kahn living in a land of increasingly ominous Nazi anti-Semitism. That year he said goodbye to his parents in Mannheim and used the only visa the family could get to sail off alone for the safety of America.
Five years later his mother and grandmother were concentration-camp statistics his father was in hiding in Switzerland and Kahn, now Kennedy, was a member of a US Army intelligence unit in Normandy creeping behind German fines to scout the enemy and take prisoners for questioning.
He speaks of those times with unabashed pleasure from the moment he first put on his American uniform. “I was the proudest guy in the world ” he says "I couldn’t wait to go outside and see some officers to salute ”
His English wasn’t the best but his German was and by the time D-Day arrived Kennedy was an invaluable member of a small airborne intelligence team.
He proved his worth almost immediately when Germans detected his squad amid the hedgerows and opened fire.
“In a lull in the fighting I got up on my knees and said in German, ‘Dammit don’t you realize you’re firing at a German officer!?”’
His imitation worked. From the German side he heard the soldiers ordered to cease fire and turn their guns around.
“The next morning ” Kennedy says “one of the guys came over shook my hand and said ‘I want to thank you for saving my fife’
“How I felt must be how it feels to get the Congressional Medal of Honor ”
[Sun Herald, Biloxi, Ms, 05 Jun 1994, Sun, Page 22] |
