80 years ago, the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenaau, and some of the last survivors will be joined by world leaders on January 27.
The remaining survivors are mostly in the 90s, and this could be the last year that any of them can attend.
In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically killed at least 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, built in the south of occupied Poland near the town of Oswiecim.
Auschwitz was at the center of the Nazi campaign to eradicate the European Jewish population, and nearly one million those who died there were Jews.
Among others who lost their lives were Poles, Roma and Russian prisoners of war.
By the time the Red Army entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, there were only about 7,000 prisoners left. Tens of thousands of others were already forced to go on foot to “marches of death” as the Nazis retreated to the west.
The Italian prisoner Primo Levi lay at a camp hospital with a purple fever when Soviet liberators arrived.
The men played “an unusually shameful view of the widespread bodies, the torn huts and a few of us still alive,” later in their Holocaust Memour would write a truce.
“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed to be oppressed not only by compassion, but also … a sense of guilt that such a crime should exist.”
“We saw torn, tortured, impoverished people,” Soldier Ivan Martynushkin said about the liberation of the death camp,, external. “We could say from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell.”
