Posted on 11/11/2014 10:08:34 AM PST by Impala64ssa
He survived the savagery of the Holocaust, made it to America with barely a penny and became a world-famous tailor in Brooklyn, dressing celebrities and presidents. In his new memoir, Measure of a Man, Martin Greenfield tells the story of his extraordinary life. In this excerpt, he explains how the concentration camps nearly stripped him of his humanity at age 16 and the day he got it back. While at Buchenwald, the SS assigned me to work in the munitions factory. But early one morning after roll call, a soldier placed me on a 12-prisoner team to perform repairs outside the camp in nearby Weimar. Working in the city was a welcome distraction from camp life. Sometimes you got lucky and spotted a potato in a field or smuggled a trinket to trade for food. Either way, it was a chance to see the sky, escape the stench of rotting corpses, and confirm that there was still a world beyond the barbed wire. We loaded our gear and marched the few miles to Weimar. The soldiers stopped us in front of a bombed-out mansion, home to the mayor of Weimar. A big black Mercedes sat out front. The soldiers commanded us to sift the rubble, clear the debris, and begin repairs on the mansion. I walked alone to the back of the estate to assess the damage. Dusty piles of broken bricks lay scattered across the yard. Seeing the cellar door ajar, I slowly opened it. A shaft of sunlight filled the dank cellar. On one side of the space sat a wooden cage wrapped in chicken wire. I walked closer and noticed two quivering rabbits inside the cage.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Interesting
“I kinda wish they did off themselves because it seems like this man, Mr. Greenfield, has peace because he believed it was so.”
Isn’t that something of a sad statement in itself? I would rather have peace in Christ than have peace because a woman had killed herself.
There are many, many examples of our people also acting outside the rule of law and harming noncombatant german civilians after hostilities ended.
The one that springs to mind is the Morganthau-driven policy that German civilians were to be kicked out of their homes, in winter, so that jews could live in them.
Also, the story of Eli Weisel comes to mind wherein he and friends, postwar, would roam the countryside at night looking for German females to rape. The Allies knew all about that kind of activity and allowed it to continue in order to cow the citizenry into submission.
I do not affix a moral value to those events, I am just throwing them out there.
IKE had the locals walk through the camps so they could no longer deny what was going on there.
“...the Morganthau-driven policy that German civilians were to be kicked out of their homes, in winter, so that Jews could live in them.”
WHAT Jews? In Germany in 1945!?
Do you mean evicting Germans inside Germany, or Germans in formerly Nazi-occupied countries being evicted & sent back to the Fatherland?
Bad stuff happens long after the big guns fall silent, got it.
American G.I.s in the liberation of Buchenwald & Dachau summarily executed hundreds of SS-men; some of the latter donned prison garb but were fingered by their former victims. These the Yanks shot as `spies’.
“War is hell, but actual combat is a son-of-a-b*tch”
They literally almost beat Rudolf Hoess, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, to death when they caught him.
Rudolf Hoess’ wiki bio is sickening. But we must not forget the horrors of human cruelty. The truth must be faced even if the reading is painful.
He was hanged by the Poles in 1947, but seemed to have expressed remorse & a spiritual conversion before being executed.
On the other hand, Ilsa Koch the Bitch of Buchenwald hanged herself in prison in 1967, unrepentant to the end.
You find typically with all the Nazi bigwigs that they joined the party in the 1920s and were already committing murders and other crimes back then.
Given the circumstances of slowly, painfully dying in Buchenwald, I think God was pretty hard to find for some at one point or another. I’ve seen the interviews, it’s a subject that I have made myself learn because it is so very important history. In the end, those who have survived, do find God again.
You and I will never know such Hell. Let’s hope we won’t, anyway.
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