Posted on 11/09/2014 10:51:41 AM PST by lowbridge
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.
-snip
I whipped my head around toward the door. A gorgeous, smartly dressed blond woman holding a baby stood silhouetted in the door frame. It was the mayor of Weimar’s wife.
“I . . . I found your rabbits!” I stammered with a cheerful nervousness. “They’re alive and safe!”
“Why in the hell are you stealing my rabbits’ food?” barked the woman. “Animals!” I stood silent and stared at the floor.
“I’m reporting this immediately!” she said, stomping away. My heart pounded in my emaciated chest. A few minutes later, an SS soldier ordered me to come out of the cellar. I knew what was coming, and the knowing made it all the worse.
“Down on the ground, you dog! Fast!” yelled the German. He gripped his baton and bludgeoned my back. I do not know whether the mayor’s wife watched the beating. Given her cruelty, why would she want to miss it? On the hike back to Buchenwald, I replayed the scene over and over in my mind.
How could a woman carrying her own child find a walking skeleton saving her pets and have him beaten for nibbling on rotten animal food? I thought.
In that moment, my numbness to death melted. In its place rose an alien blood lust, a hunger for vengeance unlike any I had ever known. The surge of adrenaline and rush of rage felt good inside my withered frame.
Then and there I made a vow to myself: If I survived Buchenwald, I would return and kill the mayor’s wife.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“There’s your Big Lie, which you have repeated ad nauseum.”
It’s not a lie. The article clearly says that the woman said she would report the boy for stealing the rabbit food. It says NOTHING about her doing anything else in regard to his beating. She didn’t beat him, and there’s no evidence in the article that she even requested it let alone demanded it. She also, as a wife of a mayor, had no official standing with the SS at all. She couldn’t order the SS man to do anything.
“The Nazis were very fond of your technique. What a coincidence.”
The Nazis were fond of murdering women and children - which is exactly what you wanted here. What a coincidence.
That’s a great story with a good moral lesson. THanks for posting.
Your hypocrisy is obscene - and your comfort with its brazenness is even worse. There's no point having a discussion with you, you have no conscience. Go grieve for your innocent, "murdered" Nazis, I won't stop you. Especially today, Veteran's Day. Grieve for all the innocent Nazis our vets killed. ::spit::
“Your hypocrisy is obscene - and your comfort with its brazenness is even worse.”
You were openly calling for the murder of a woman. Even if I were a hypocrite - and no one can truthfully claim that here - that hypocrisy would pale in comparison for your outright approval of murder.
“There’s no point having a discussion with you, you have no conscience.”
Hypocrite. First you call for the woman to be murdered - a clear showing of having no conscience. Then you attack me for being a hypocrite when I displayed no hypocrisy at all. Then you claim I have no conscience. My God, man, are you really that twisted that you can post so many contradictory things in just one post?
“Go grieve for your innocent, “murdered” Nazis, I won’t stop you. Especially today, Veteran’s Day. Grieve for all the innocent Nazis our vets killed. ::spit::”
It was a woman. You were calling for her murder. Wear it because you own it.
Yes, a female Nazi Mayor's wife working with the SS and turning in Jewish prisoners to sadistic guards could technically be called a woman. I wouldn't do so, but you obviously enjoy it.
No, the execution of such an enemy during wartime conditions by a released prisoner who's life was threatened by that same Nazi is not murder. That is a moral issue completely ruled by circumstances and actions, not merely what is between the creature's legs. Your inability to parse between those different aspects is something I can't help you with.
In short, call my support for killing Nazis anything you want - murder, atrocity, whatever. Weep tenderly for the loss of their precious lives. Turn morality inside out, claim that my position against nazis living is murderous and conscienceless - fine.
But for my part, I won't be replying anymore. You see, it's Veteran's Day, and I'm going to spend the rest of it giving thanks to God for the millions of men who chose to reject your moral perversity, and who went over to Europe and found people EXACTLY like your precious Nazi bitch, and shot their asses dead.
“Yes, a female Nazi Mayor’s wife...”
The woman had a wife? Do you even know how to write a paragraph that makes sense?
Well those Nazis were very sexually liberated, don’cha know?
I find this comment troubling. I don't understand why you wrote it. What is your position on the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six million Jews by Germans and their allies ?
The witch apparently killed herself upon seeing the atrocities at Buchenwald some time after the confrontation.
it's complicated and we need not generalize as we have an actual case where the Jewish victim/survivor testified he returned for revenge and changed his mind so as not to be like his persecutors. He wrote "God pricked my conscience."
A good thing to be sure. But I have to wonder if it was because she couldn’t live with herself because of her part in it or because she was no longer able to live as royalty.
And it was his call, of course. I just think he made the wrong one. I understand his reasoning, but I think his circumstances (and really, could they be any more traumatic?) led him to choose avoidance rather than justice. He calls it God's influence, and perhaps it was. However I believe it was the result of the effects of a cynical ploy by a Nazi enemy to try to save her own life by holding a baby and hiding behind per presumption that he would hold a belief in the sanctity of motherhood. So he saw what he wanted to see - a mother. I see a wolf in sheep's clothing who escaped not revenge, but justice.
“Well those Nazis were very sexually liberated, don’cha know?”
Apparently do!
“I find this comment troubling.”
Why?
“I don’t understand why you wrote it.”
As I explained in a later post, there have been a number of phony holocaust memoirs published in recent years. I am wary of them now.
“What is your position on the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six million Jews by Germans and their allies ?”
I’ll answer that in just a moment, but let me say something else first. What I believe about the holocaust or not has nothing to do with my wariness about this story. And I resent the implication that your question contains - intended or otherwise - that I might have some sort of “position” on the holocaust which doesn’t meet whatever standard you hold. Now, having said that, I will tell you my exact “position” on the holocaust:
1) After seizing control of Germany, Hitler and the Nazis drummed up anti-semitic sentiment (which already was a latent part of the culture in some ways) to a great extent.
2) Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis passed laws through the German parliament (the Reichstag) which curtailed the rights of minorities, especially Jews, and created an obscene system of racial classification on the one hand and institutionalized the “superiority” of “Aryans” on the other. Jews were hounded, harassed, and humiliated in their own country. Until that time, Jews had succeeded in Germany more than in any nation in Europe - perhaps more than in any nation on earth because only the U.S. could compete with Germany on that score.
3) Using the cover of the Second World War, the Nazis and some allies in the countries they conquered rounded up, abused, enslaved, and murdered millions of people whom they believed were racially inferior or politically or culturally a threat to them or their mostly mythological Aryans: Jews, Gypsies (Roma), Slavs, Africans, some Asians, Catholic priests and nuns, communists of various stripes, democrats, and criminals and others.
4) The Nazis murdered - both through their abuse (starvation, humiliation, over work, etc) and outright direct methods (shootings, bayonetings, live burials, gassings, beatings, etc) - over 12 million people. Almost six million of those were Jews.
5) The Nazis were evil. They supported an evil philosophy of the “superman”. They carried out actions of unspeakable evil. ‘Crimes against humanity’ is simply too gentle a term to sum up what they did.
Have I made my position on the holocaust perfectly clear?
I don't think she escaped, and she certainly won't escape justice after her death. What is tragic is the senselessness of all the evil, and how easily it spreads. This is always a challenge for those who are persecuted, that they not become like their persecutors. I had a debate with someone who I think is no longer posting, not a regular. His view was that Nuremberg trials were victor's justice and no justice at all. I, of course, vehemently disagreed.
I wonder how often this actually happens. Evil people are a breed apart. Good people harmed by evil people, and enraged by that wrongful harm, are not the same as the hatred held by those evil people. We live in a world where a LOT of evil people have tried to normalize the two, and guilt their victims, and claim all "violence" is equal. But it's not. There actually is good violence and bad violence. And good people who are harmed will usually harm themselves before they harm anyone else, no matter how hurt they are.
On the other hand, evil people look for any excuse to harm others, and any excue to claim normalcy and that "everybody does it." That's the root of my disagreement with the person telling this particular story - he feared becoming something he actually could never become, but he didn't know that. he compared himself to Mengele without any understanding that it is utterly impossible for such an equality to exist, starting with the fact that Mengele never once in his life worried about becoming something or someone evil.
As well, the idea that Mengele murdering his mother and sister was somehow the same as his killing an avowed female Nazi who had years of activity and support of the SS in a town next to a death camp is to turn innocence and guilt, let alone common sense, on its head.
But I do indeed believe that he may have actually feared he might become Mengele, no matter how confused and wrong that fear actually is. The Mengele's of the world have spent thousands of years making good people afraid of such impossibilities, so that they might hide among us, and escape justice.
I had a friend who was a Vietnam Vet who was very confused over this very thing. He got the guilts and became an alcoholic and lost sight of the simple fact that why we do things actually matters. he also, unfortunately, was a liberal, and it was through exposure to years of their "moral equivalency" and hypocritical "non-violence" mantras that - I believe - his own faith in himself eroded, until it collapsed. It's a terrible thing, a mind poison, and the extremity of the dualities this particular posted story makes me wonder if it's not largely made up, in order to invoke wrongful compassion for Nazi murderers.
After all, there are an enormous number of baby-carrying Muslim women actually in our country who firmly believe that every one of us non-Muslims should be killed, right down to our children, right now, today, if we don't abandon our freedoms and submit to their slavery. And they are proving their beliefs by doing just that to thousands of people around the world right now. So a comparison of that reality with this story about Nazis is hardly difficult, nor frivolous. Rather, I'd call it pretty damn dangerous.
Yes.
I was troubled by the dismissive assertion that the entire story was false. I did not see you post any evidence of that while the NY Post story had lots of details, including a photo of the survivor. I do know survivors. I'm troubled by previous comments by Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson, so sometimes I have to ask to avoid making assumptions. I saw post 8 but no reference to its assertion. Did I miss something ? Why would Mr. Martin Greenfield's entire story be false ? He is in Wikipedia and other articles were written about him, as far back as 2010.
“I was troubled by the dismissive assertion that the entire story was false.”
I made no such assertion. I said, “This whole story may be BS.”
May be. As in might. As in could be. Possibly. It suggests possibility. It is not an “assertion that the entire story was false.”
“I did not see you post any evidence of that while the NY Post story had lots of details, including a photo of the survivor. I do know survivors. I’m troubled by previous comments by Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson, so sometimes I have to ask to avoid making assumptions.”
I think you were making them by asking the question in the first. Also, any assumption you had in that regard would be irrelevant as to the veracity of what I said.
“I saw post 8 but no reference to its assertion. Did I miss something ?”
Again, there was no “assertion” as you are using it. Did you miss something? Yes. Will you find it in this thread? No.
“Why would Mr. Martin Greenfield’s entire story be false ?”
Did I say the WHOLE story is false? No. I said it might be false and that does not mean the whole story is false either. If it is false in any details it is so for the same reasons that some others are false. I posted links to examples of those.
“He is in Wikipedia and other articles were written about him, as far back as 2010.”
Irrelevant. Some stories have taken decades to be exposed as lies. His might be true. It might be a lie. I’m wary of these stories for a reason.
It seems to me you have no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Martin Greenfield’s published story is false but have written of it “This whole story may be BS.” That strikes me as irresponsible and provocative, given the nature of the story and this thread, and wholly unnecessary. It is certainly not what I expect from your obvious abilities to post edifying comments. I suppose I look up to you for a high standard. I hope I’ve not troubled you by my minor criticisms.
A good example is the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), perhaps the most ethical and humane military in the world. Yet the vast majority of the world is blinded and takes the side of the terrorists, as if the violence were equal in nature.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.