80 years ago, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi Death Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the last survivors will join the world leaders on Monday to pay tribute to 1.1 million people killed there.
The rest of the survivors are now mostly 90, and it may be the last year if any of them may be present.
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 Poland near Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was in the center of the Nazi campaign for the destruction of the Jewish population of Europe, and almost a million those who died there were Jews.
Others killed Poles, Gypsies and Russian POWs.
By the time the Red Army cautiously entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, there were only about 7,000 prisoners left. Tens of thousands of others were already forced to walk on the “death march” when the Nazis retreated to the West.
The Italian Prisoner Prima Levi was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the Soviet liberators came.
The men threw “the strangely embarrassed glances on the spreading bodies, the broken huts and the few still alive,” he would later write in his memoirs about the Holocaust “Truce”.
“They did not greet us or smile; They seemed to be oppressed not only by compassion, but also by … a sense of guilt for having such a crime. “
“We’ve seen lost weight, tortured, impoverished people,” Soldier Ivan Martynushkin told about the release of the death camp. outer. “We could understand in their eyes that they were happy to escape from this hell.”
