What's The Craziest Thing A Guy Ever Did To Be With His Girlfriend?

Talk about grist for the mill!!!

O.K., i think we can all agree on one thing - when a man and woman fall in love, they will often do some pretty crazy things to be together. Something about being star-crossed lovers adds to the fun and romance of a couple. So, let's get back to our original question: "What's the craziest thing a guy ever did to be with his girlfriend?"

Horace Greasley was one of twins born on Christmas Day, 1918, in Leicestershire, England. Nicknamed "Jim" (you try and think up a nickname for "Horace"), as a 20-year-old, he was working as a young hairdresser in 1939.

It was then that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi buddies invaded Czechoslovakia. Jim was now eligible, by the "Military Training Act", to be called up for military service. Both Jim and his twin brother were conscripted in the first draft.

It turned out that cutting hair well doesn't translate into fighting Nazis because young Jim was almost immediately taken prisoner and sent to a p.o.w. camp in Poland.

Jim was soon transferred to a p.o.w. camp called Freiwaldau, an annex of the notorious Aushwitz. Most people in this situation would be too distracted by the abject horror of being a Nazi prisoner of war to be on the lookout for ladies.

But most people weren't Jim Greasley.

It was at Freiwaldau that Jim got to know the attractive, female 17-year-old camp translator. Her name was Rosa Rauchbach.

To make our little story even stranger, Rosa was actually a "closet Jew", keeping her identity a secret from all Nazis concerned. (if Rosa's secret Jewish identity had been discovered, she would almost certainly have faced death).

Rosa's father was the quarry director at Jim's labor camp. Rosa was assigned to various camps in the vicinity.  Jim and Rosa met and quickly fell in love with each other.

I guess the next part of this story may seem "romantic" to most women. To guys, it might appear that crazy Jim just said "screw it!", if he's going out, he's going out in style. He started engaging in clandestine "prisoner sex" with his beloved Rosa.

Jim Greasley wasn't going to let a  couple of little things like the Nazi army and the Second World War get in the way of him consummating his love.

O.K., so Jim and Rosa were intimate in his p.o.w. camp, under the Nazi guards noses. That's pretty cool in itself, but wait, the wildest is yet to come.

Jim wanted to see more of his beloved Rosa, so when she was gone from the camp, he tunneled under the camp's wire fence and escaped. (He must have tasted freedom, but his mind was only on Rosa.)

Jim could easily have slipped out and made a break, but Freiwaldau was 420 miles from the nearest neutral country - Sweden.

So, instead of trying a full-out escape, Jim decided to satisfy his romantic (and carnal) urges. Incredibly, he snuck in to Rosa's camp, where she was translating, they met, had a sexual rendezvous, and he snuck out again. Then he snuck back in to his own camp.

Incredible? Jim Greasley did this 200 times during the war (!!!!!!!!)

Jim and Rosa soon developed a pat routine.  Jim was the camp barber, so Rosa would slip a note to one of Jim's fellow prisoners, who would pass it on to Jim. The note would tell Jim where and when to sneak in and meet her.

Jim would grab the note, get as spruced up as a Nazi camp p.o.w. could get, sneak out of Freiwaldau, meet Rosa, have sex, and sneak back in - as if nothing had happened.

Jim and Rosa (incredibly) kept up this routine for almost five years, sometimes as much as three times a week. Rosa would often reward jim with small packages of food or spare machine parts. Rosa finally slipped Jim enough radio parts so that he and his fellow prisoners could actually complete a full radio and listen to the B.B.C.

So the question remains: "How did he do it?"

Well, either Jim Greasley was incredibly stealthy or the Nazi guards were terrible at their job.  (One has to assume that the Nazi guards were a bit lax because of the camp's location, buried 420 miles from the nearest neutral country. They probably assumed no one would be crazy enough to try an escape, as such an act would be tantamount to suicide.)

Jim Greasley continued the most dangerous sex regimen in history until the war ended in 1945 and he was set free.

Interestingly, Jim and Rosa never married.  After the war, the two ex-lovers did keep in touch, faithfully, by letter. Jim received several letters from his beloved Rosa, until one day the letters stopped. Then he received a letter from a friend of hers, informing him that Rosa had died in childbirth. Jim never found out if the child in question was his or not.

Jim spent the next few decades wistfully remembering his beloved Rosa, until one day in 1970, when he met a lady named Brenda. The two fell in love and eventually married in 1975.

They had a long and happy marriage, had two children, three grandchildren and three adopted grandchildren. In 1988, Jim and Brenda retired to the Costa Bianca in Spain.

Jim wrote his memoirs "Do The Birds Still Sing in Hell?" in 2008, with the help of a ghost writer named Ken Scott.  (By this time, Jim had severe arthritis in his hands and could not write himself.)

Horace "Jim" Greasley, the guy who did the craziest thing ever to be with his girlfriend, passed on at the age of 91 (peacefully, in his sleep) in February of 2010.

A writer and World War II expert named Guy Walters was to dispute many claims in Jim Greasley's book. He especially found dubious a photo Jim claimed was him, facing a parading Heinrich Himmler. Walters disputed Jim's claim, asserting that the man in the photo was actually a russian p.o.w.

Brenda, Jim's widow, angrily dismisses Walters' claims. In an angry letter to the Daily Mail, her fiery response stated that she would "like to meet this supposed historian Guy Walters face to face and we'll see who's telling the truth".

In 2014, rumors of a movie detailing Jim Greasley's memoirs, supposedly to be directed by Ron Howard, started cropping up. The rumor said that Robert Pattinson, of "Twilight" fame, was going to play the lead. To date, no film of the unbelievable story of Horace "Jim" Greasley has ever been undertaken.

Too bad.

Some stories are crazier than any Hollywood writer could ever dream up.

The post above was a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.


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Oswiecim, Poland (Auschwitz) and Jesenik, Czechia (Freiwaldau) are 225 km apart, and Jesenik was part of the annexed Sudetenland while Auschwitz located in Poland under the "General Government". The closest "Annex" to Auschwitz was Blechhammer, Poland 90km away from Jesenik.
Freiwaldau is not considered an "annex" of the Auschwitz complex, as they were two entirely different systems - concentration camps by the Schutzstaffel (Himmler and the SS) and Stalag camps by the appropriate military branch.
Even in this very post there are contradictory claims. I'd view this entire thing with a healthy does of skepticism.
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Thank you for the interesting analysis, Schill! I haven't read Greasley's book, but am curious to learn if there are any other survivor from Freiwaldau that could corroborate Greasley's claim that Himmler had visited it.
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The above Himmler photo is pretty well-known, and I've always seen it identified as depicting Himmler observing Soviet prisoners soon after the Barbarossa invasion. The shabby, temporary-looking barbed wire fence stapled to a tree would make sense in that context, as the Germans took huge numbers of prisoners -- well-beyond what they'd made any provision for -- and enormous numbers of them died of starvation and exposure in shelterless temporary holding pens.
And yet -- looking at the picture closely, I see that there are buildings in the background, and the prisoners seem to be in an odd variety of outfits, including several civilian hats. I'm not sure what to make of that, as civilian and military prisoners were generally not mixed, and I'm not sure why any military prisoners would be wearing such garb. The determined young man facing down Himmler is wearing a military hat, but one that a number of nations wore variations of (a German is wearing a similar one behind and to the left of Himmler). It's similar enough to the one Greasley is wearing in his picture, that I can't rule out it being the same.
So the question would be whether Himmler ever visited Freiwaldau -- apparently with an entourage including not only SS officers, but regular army (to Himmler's left - I believe a lieutenant or captain, based on his insignia) and Luftwaffe (the officer in the back, near the fence, can't make out his rank) as well. The SS officer behind Himmler to his right wears the collar emblems of a Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General), so he may well be identifiable to help further pin down the location of the photo.
So I'm uncertain whether it might be Greasley. I do think it's possible that even if it wasn't, Greasley might conceivably have latched onto the idea that it was, and even sincerely believed it by the time he was 89.
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