The last surviving soldier of the liberation of Auschwitz is dead

As a young soldier in the Red Army, Dushman smashed the electrified fence of the infamous Nazi concentration camp with his T-34 tank on January 27, 1945. He admitted that neither he nor his comrades immediately realized the magnitude of what had happened at Auschwitz.

“Skeletons everywhere,” he recalled in a 2015 interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich daily. “They would stumble out of the barracks, sit and lie down among the dead. Horrible. We threw all our cans at them and immediately went to hunt the fascists.”

Over a million people, mostly Jews deported to this place from different parts of Europe, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945.

Previously, Dushman fought in some of the bloodiest battles of WWII, including those at Stalingrad and Kursk. He was seriously wounded three times, but he almost miraculously survived the war: in his division there were 12,000 soldiers, but only 69 returned.

At the end of the war, Dushman helped form the Soviet Union’s Women’s National Fencing Team for four decades and witnessed the attack by eight Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympics in 1972, which resulted in his death. of 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman.

Years later, he visited schools to teach students about the horrors of war and the Holocaust. At veterans’ meetings, he wore his military medals.

“Dushman was a legendary fencing trainer and the last of those who liberated the still surviving Auschwitz concentration camp,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement. IOC President Thomas Bach paid tribute to him by recalling the time when Bach was a young fencer from West Germany and the veteran coach offered him “friendship and advice” in 1970 “despite the experience. Mr.’s personal he had Jewish origins. “

“It was such a deeply human gesture that I will never forget it,” Bach said in a statement.