In a rhapsodic radio performance on Monday that was at times operatic in its tone, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin delivered an on-air reading of the new Holocaust memoir by Martin Greenfield, Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor, and urged listeners to reflect on the murderous consequences of past and present acts of tyranny.
“History will judge us, just as history has judged other generations of free people,” said Levin. “When the nature of the genocide is so extensive, so inhumane… good people act.”
Levin then turned to “a piece in Breitbart” that ran Monday afternoon excerpting Greenfield’s new memoir, Measure of a Man. The book first caused a stir when the New York Post ran a Sunday excerpt that went viral and resulted in Amazon selling out of the book in its opening day of release Monday.
“It’s a remarkable book,” said Levin. “And it sort of encapsulates everything that I’m trying to communicate, but better than I can. And [Greenfield] recounts the Nazi brutality he endured inside Auschwitz. Just indulge me.”
Levin then began reading Greenfield’s description of life inside the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“Day and night the ovens burned. The smoke spewed up from the soaring brick chimney and belched the vaporous remnants of corpses into the air. At night you could see the flames spitting against the blackened sky,” Levin said, reading from Greenfield’s book.
Levin continued reading Greenfield’s recounting:
The dehumanizing randomness of the murders suffocated my sense of hope, just as Hitler and his henchmen had intended. What appeared random was, in fact, not random at all. It was a systematic psychological lynching, a strangling of the human heart’s need to believe in the rewards of goodness, a snapping of the moral hinge on which humanity swings. Soon, and much to my shame, I became anesthetized to death, numb to depravity. Some primal survival switch inside me had been temporarily flicked on that allowed me to submerge the emotions generated by the evil scorching my eyes.
Levin then concluded with a final passage from Greenfield:
I witnessed dozens of shootings and helped carry scores of corpses. Sometimes a dead body would be intact and appear to be sleeping. Other times a bullet would rip through a prisoner spilling out organs. Or shatter a skull, exposing chunks of brain. But as the days passed, no matter its condition, a body soon became just a body, a sallow, bloodless, gangling object that must be lugged, heaved atop a pile, or dropped in a hole.
At fifteen, I had become an undertaker.
After finishing the reading of Greenfield’s words, Levin turned to the present-day atrocities being promulgated in Iraq and Syria by radical Islamic terrorists:
Much the same. Much the same. An inhumanity, a genocidal evil is taking place today. And it’s taking place in the Islamo-Nazi Iraqi and Syria area. And it is just hard to stomach and it’s hard to imagine and it’s hard to discuss. But I cannot let many days go by without reminding ourselves of what’s taking place. You can imagine the screams of young boys and men, as they’re held with their hands tied behind their backs and somebody starts slitting their throats. You can imagine the screams of men and women having their eyes gouged out, their hands lopped off. Or being tied up on crosses and crucified. You can imagine the screams as men and women are being disemboweled—alive. You can imagine the screams of the 12-year-old, 13-year-old, 15-year-old little girls—Christian girls—who are being raped by dozens of men every week, if not every day, and sold into slavery, never to see their families ever again.
Breitbart News presents Levin’s stirring radio segment in its entirety below.
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