What I knew at the outset was this: In 1945, my father, Eddie Willner, and his best friend, Mike, both German-Jewish teenagers, had just escaped from a death march heading from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Days later, they were found in the woods by a band of Allied frontline fighters—American tankers not much older than teenagers themselves. Although under strict orders not to jeopardize the battle momentum by stopping to aid refugees, the 23-year-old company commander looked over the two dying boys in blue-and-white striped uniforms and, recognizing that they were no ordinary refugees, said, “They’re with us now.”
And so, I embarked on a journey to uncover the rest of the story, which eventually became my book The Boys in the Light. It was a long and arduous research process that necessitated deep dives into archives in the U.S., Germany, Belgium, and Poland and a step-by-step retracing of key events. I visited the hometowns of all the central figures, walked through the death camps and the battlefields, and stood on the bridge that overlooked the river where my father and Mike had made their escape.
