New York woman arrested over strangling death of Holocaust survivor
By The Associated Press
A New York City woman has been accused of strangling an 89-year-old man who survived the Holocaust after being sent to Auschwitz.
Guido Felix Brinkmann, who used to run a nightclub in New York, was found in his bed with his hands bound Thursday. He had been asphyxiated.
Investigators said he regularly invited younger women to his apartment for sex. Brinkmann's doorman told police a man and a woman went to the home the night before his body was found. The two were later seen in Brinkmann's car.
Brinkmann was the former owner of a nightclub called Adam's Apple.
Angela Murray, 30, of New York, was arraigned Sunday on murder and robbery charges. Her male companion was being sought.
From another article:
The story of Felix Brinkmann is a long one, full of trials and triumphs, and one far more worthy of telling. Originally from Latvia, Guido Felix Brinkmann spent time in the World War II Nazi concentration camps of Mauthausen, Ebensee and Auschwitz. Scheduled to die in the gas chamber five separate times, Felix Brinkman was fluent in German, using his verbal prowess to talk his way out of a death sentence.
When the war ended, Felix Brinkmann was crossing a bridge in Germany when he was stopped by a Russian guard. Speaking Russian, Brinkmann explained that his entire family had been killed in the concentration camps. Another man attempted to cross the bridge and was found to have been an SS soldier, one of Hitler's elite. The Russian guard handed his machine gun to Brinkmann and told him to kill the man, but Brinkmann refused, handing the gun back. The Russian killed the German soldier.
After the war, he was shocked to find that his wife had also survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. According to Rick Brinkman, the Holocaust survivor amazingly found his wife alive in Poland. Reunited, they immigrated to America. Felix Brinkmann would then begin years of service in the New York bar and nightclub business. At one time he co-owned the popular Adam's Apple disco, where, according to the New York Post, he was pistol-whipped by three men after closing when they attempted to rob him. The thieves got nothing.
Rick Brinkman said that his father told him the last time he visited him: "I feel I had a fortunate life. Even going through the three concentration camps, I somehow was able to make the best out of the worst. I never would have thought growing up as a boy in Riga, Latvia that I would end up in the greatest city, in the greatest country in the world."
