Friday, August 12, 2005

In 1944, Jerome McMenamy arrived in a small Tuscan village. He would never forget the site of a massacre.

Haunted by History

By AUDREY PARENTE | News-Journal Staff Writer

DAYTONA BEACH — The image of a young mother clutching a baby and throwing herself on the body of her young son, shattered by a hand grenade, haunts Jerome McMenamy.

The memory resurfaced when a recent newspaper article reminded the 82-year-old about a Nazi massacre at Sant´Anna di Stazzema that happened 61 years ago today.

The Associated Press reported 10 former SS members were sentenced to life in prison in June after a yearlong trial for the slaughter of 560 Tuscan villagers on Aug. 12, 1944. The convicted men, now in their 80s, remain free in Germany, where extradition is not permitted.

McMenamy, a father of eight and grandfather of 30, was a young Army medic back then, marching through Italy during World War II.

For many years, he said he could not speak without crying about his experiences in the 91st Infantry Division with 15,000 men attached to the 5th Army. Nearly 6,800 fellow soldiers were wounded, he said. He thought it was all behind him until the recent news story renewed his old memory.

“We were going into villages to find places to set up so they could bring wounded in. I remember Sant´Anna. It stuck in my mind because all the women were dressed in black and crying,” McMenamy said.

The tiny Tuscan village was nearly destroyed, he said. At the time, he learned that only a few days earlier the black-uniformed corps of the Nazi party -- known as the Schutzstaffel, abbreviated SS -- came through and killed hundreds of men, women and children. The remaining residents wandered helplessly, weeping and suffering from injuries and diarrhea.

“We could only help them in a medical way,” McMenamy recalled. “We gave them food and medicine and patched up anyone who was hurt.”

One of his harshest memories is seeing a 7-year-old walking down the street with his mother and baby brother. The child picked up a hand grenade and pulled the pin.

“The mother threw herself on him. Everyone was standing around and nobody did anything.”

McMenamy took action.

“I told somebody to pull her off. The boy was dead, but he had wounded his 6-month-old brother, and we had to get the baby to the hospital,” said McMenamy, a St. Louis native drafted at age 20. “I got her a driver and Jeep and sent her off with the baby.”

Over the past year, Italian judges accepted survivors´ stories that 300 SS troops surrounded the town -- which had been flooded with refugees -- supposedly to hunt for partisans. What the Nazis really did was herd villagers into basements and other enclosed places and explode them with hand grenades.

“When I saw that little article in the paper, all I thought was, ‘Good Lord, I was there,’ ” said McMenamy, who, after basic training had spent six months training in engineering at Stanford University in California during 1943. Later, he was assigned to the 91st Division and sent to North Africa for more military training until being shipped to Naples.

After the war he was released from the military and moved to Daytona Beach. He commuted to work for 25 years for the Environmental Protection Agency in the space program at Cape Canaveral before retiring in 1983.

McMenamy recently shared his war memories in an interview with a local dentist and now author, Dr. Frank Reynolds of Ormond Beach.

Reynolds said he knew McMenamy from social meetings of the Sons of the American Revolution.

“I was so intrigued with his (World War II) stories and called Military History, which I read every month,” Reynolds said. He suggested that someone be sent to record McMenamy´s stories.

“They said, ‘You do it,’ but I said, ‘I´m a dentist,’ ” Reynolds said. “But I did it.”

Reynolds´ interview with McMenamy about the casualties he encountered behind the lines is scheduled to appear in the November issue of Military History magazine, according to Jon Guttman, editor.

A court in Stuttgart is researching the Sant´Anna di Stazzema case for a possible future trial in Germany.

Sixty-one years later, McMenamy´s feelings are still strong about the killers: “They should be brought to justice and jailed.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

What Became of Sant´Anna di Stazzema?

On Aug. 12, 1944, the Nazi 16.SS Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsfuhrer rounded up 560 villagers and refugees, including men, women and children -- then killed and burned them. The village was never rebuilt, but stands as a memorial.

In Italy, the massacre was not publicly known until 1994, when nearly 700 reports about it were accidentally found in a metal cabinet in the basement of the Rome military court.

SOURCE: en.wikipedia.org

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