80 years ago, Soviet forces liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. World leaders will join some of the last survivors on Monday to commemorate the 1.1 million people killed there.
Most of the remaining survivors are now in their nineties and this may be the last year any of them can attend.
In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, built in occupied southern Poland near the town of Oświęcim.
Auschwitz was at the heart of the Nazi campaign to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population, and nearly a million of those who died there were Jews.
Others who lost their lives included Polish, Roma and Russian prisoners of war.
By the time the Red Army cautiously entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, there were only about 7,000 prisoners. Tens of thousands more people had already been forced to leave on foot on “death marches” as the Nazis retreated west.
Italian prisoner Primo Levi was lying in the camp hospital with scarlet fever when Soviet liberators arrived.
The men cast “strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling corpses, at the ruined huts, and at the few still alive,” he later wrote in his Holocaust memoir The Armistice.
“They did not welcome us or smile; they seemed oppressed not only by sympathy but by…guilt that such a crime had occurred.”
“We saw emaciated, tortured and poor people.” Soldier Ivan Martinushkin said about the liberation of the death camp, external. “We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell.”
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