The day the hell was open and the world was confronted with the horror: how did the liberation of Auschwitz?

The smell was unbearable. It was a physical presence. It was solid, a punch in the middle of the face. Like an icy sea, it did not allow anyone to stay more than five minutes in it. A stench of corpses, excrement, spoiled food and soil. The smell of death. On January 27, 1945, a patrol of Soviet soldiers commanded by Anatoly Shapiro, Ukrainian, entered Auschwitz. With irrelevant solemnity, Shapiro told the first survivors that he met: "We are the Soviet army, they are released from German rule".

These beings have preserved the small aspect of people. They were specters wrapped in rags, skeletal, with lifeless looks, wandering in the snow and fierce famine. The few who spoke in too many languages ​​contributed to the terror: the survivors of the infamous Tower of Babel. Several Russian soldiers wanted to escape. The war had hardened them, had prolonged their thresholds of pain and disgust, but what they saw, this inhuman landscape they were crossing, exceeded the limits of the imaginable and the bearable. The horror, the horror.

Shapiro had to remind them that they had a duty to fulfill. Some of the survivors approached the soldiers and managed to touch the red star of their uniform: they needed to make sure they were not hallucinating, to feel that it was a reality that someone had come to save them from hell..

In January 1945, Soviet troops took a high speed on the eastern front. They progressed almost unopposed German. The advance was faster than expected. On January 17, the Nazis decided to evacuate Auschwitz.the largest and most brutal complex of concentration and extermination camps of all those conceived by the Nazis. It is estimated that there, more than a million hundred thousand people were murdered, mostly Polish Jews.

Already in the previous months, During the second half of 1944, they had dismantled their most effective death plant, Birkenau, an extermination camp located in the Auschwitz complex. They did not want that to happen as in Majdanek where the allies found the gas chambers intact. Despite this, Auschwitz continued to function for several months with its usual efficiency. That defeat in the war is imminent and unstoppable did not prevent the Nazis from continuing to kill. It seems that the less hope they had, the greater the morbidity of the murder.

Tellingly, the more the Germans were lost, the sooner the defeat was imminent, the more prisoners they had. While several camps were closed and others were being evacuated, the German authorities, on January 15, 1945, three days before the abandonment of Auschwitz, They recorded 714,211 detainees in their concentration camp system. An unprecedented number. With the aggravating circumstance, if it were possible, those who were still working were in the worst state of overcrowding possible since they had received those from the fields that were closed and destroyed.

On January 17, they enlisted their officers and their soldiers and pursued all the captives who were not seriously ill. The evacuation was going to be done on foot. They were told that it was a road not exceeding 3 kilometers and that in the trains they would be transferred to new fields. The march of death has begun. This exodus, this escape has become a new occasion of horror. Of mbadacre.

On icy roads, in the worst physical conditions, without food, barefoot or just wrapped in cloth or covered with shoes with holes, the forced pilgrims fell on the road. Those who were delayed were shot dead by the soldiers; others fell dead only by stress and weakness and were left in the middle of the road. It is estimated that about one-third of the 60,000 people who started the march died during this famous ten-day tour..

Many others would lose their lives on trains that would drop them into other concentration camps located further inside German territory, further away from Allied troops. The survivor Thomas Buergenthal reflected on the reasons that allowed him to avoid death: "There is only one word I repeat again and again, this is no other than luck".

during in Auschwitz there were 7,000 people left. They were expelled, those who were too sick to start walking. The first few days, nothing changed for them. The fear was further heightened by the presence of a German guard who still guarded the premises. But with time, they left the barracks to roam the countryside in search of food, medicine and shelter. Those who died were left in the same place where they fell. There was an open grave but the corpses overflowed. In addition, wearing a body required an effort that almost no one could cope with. Much less trying to dig a pit on the frozen ground.

The dead were so numerous that it seemed impossible to bury them all; better to leave them where they were and try to enjoy their clothes and shoes. The intense cold was a problem, but it brought some relief. At the beginning of the thaw, the corpses would decompose, they would be deprived of the water of the melting snow, the stench would be unbearable and the infections would spread even more easily.

In Buna-Monowitz, one of the sub-camps of Auschwitz, fewer than eight hundred patients remained, or nearly 10% of the total. One of them was Primo Levi, the author of an exceptional trilogy on his experience in the extermination camps: If it's a man, The truce and The cast and the saved.

If it's a man tells his days at Auschwitz. It's a hard and honest book. Touching But that does not move from adjective or low shot. He detailed life and feelings of a Häftling, held without privileges in a Lager, or extermination camp. His most intimate sufferings and thoughts (when there were any, in a fragment he describes a man as "emaciated … in front of which face and with which eyes there is no sign of thought"). The style of the book is dry and simple. There is no hate in which he writes. There is a huge desire to tell what has happened, to tell the ineffable. Pbad it on. Without judging. It makes clear who the victim is and who the aggressor is. It is tempting to define the book as the work of a chemist who badyzes the composition of this sinister organism that made up the fields.

In Levi, the man, the chemist, the survivor and the writer are inseparable. At the end of If it's a man He tells these days in which they try to survive, these days of limbo after the departure of the Germans. Sick with scarlet fever, fever and extreme weakness preventing him from leaving the field. With him, there were people suffering from typhus, distortions and other ailments that seriously threatened his life. Some had to share a litter.

Levi and two Frenchmen went out as they could in the country. They found two sacks of potatoes, wood to cover a broken window, and a working stove. Upon their return, they shared their discoveries with their convalescent companions.. One of the prostrates suggested to others in the cabin to hand over a portion of his ration of bread to the three people who had obtained these benefits so that they would recover their strength.

Primo Levi wrote: "A day before, such an event would have been inconceivable: Lager's law said:" Eat your bread and, if you can, that of your neighbor ", without leaving room for gratitude. It was the first human gesture that occurred between us. "In this minimal gesture, in the reappearance of gratitude, Levi finds the founding moment. They, those who were not dead, but had been dehumanized, from that moment they were still men.

The arrival of the Russians on January 27 in Auschwitz it was different from the discovery of the other concentration camps of the previous months. These were empty, without prisoners; there were only vestiges of horror. To see the barbarism incarnated in these soulless beings, in subhuman conditions, in the corpses dispersed everywhere, to disarm the defenses of the hard-tanned Soviets. Even they were impressed. The existence of the camps was known and their cruelty was suspected. But what they discovered is beyond anything they've planned: no one has ever witnessed this terrifying scenario.

Meyer LevinA journalist who accompanied the American troops wrote, a few months later, after entering Dachau: "We knew it. The world had heard about it. But until now, none of us have seen it. It was like finally entering the dark side of the heartin the most despicable interior of the diabolical heart ".

The arrival of allies in the concentration camps did not stop the dead. The sanitary conditions were far from good and the work was huge. The number of patients was disproportionate, many of them incurable. The doctors could not cope. The state of deterioration was so advanced that many could not bear the first (or only normal) hearty meal offered. His stomach was not prepared after months of starvation.

On January 27, in commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz by the arrival of Soviet troops, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated. However, the situation was far from over that day. Many other areas continued to work. The Germans insisted until the end. The transfer of prisoners from one prison to another, from one country to another, under the cold polar, in open trains, shows that they wanted to continue to beat, that they did not resign themselves to losing all that strength. (anemic, given the conditions of captivity to which they subjected their victims) of forced labor.

On the Western Front, Americans and English arrived in other areas several months later. The photo was the same. The documentary Nazi concentration campsof George Stevens, save these terrible pictures and can be seen on Netflix.

The liberation of the fields has confronted the world with an unexpected situation. With a brutal, industrial, mbadive and anonymous death system. A system that dehumanized the victims and took everything they could. Until you can stay with your life without killing them. A system that caused eleven million deaths.

The beings who had been hurt forever, the few survivors had lost their entire family. They have been deprived of dignity and humane treatment for years. They showed in their extreme emaciation, in their nakedness, in dead eyes, in their absence of reaction, the product of horror. They were the exception, the few who remained. The rest was in the ashes, in ditches, piled naked in piles in every corner of the fields or in the mountains of clothes and shoes that lay in huge deposits.