To liberate Auschwitz, David Dushman sent a Soviet tank through its barbed wire: horrors expected inside

David Dushman he had no idea of ​​the horrors he was about to discover. He was a man over 21 in the Red Army in January 1945, when his tank passed through Krakow, Poland, heading west, pushing back the Nazis. At 3 p.m. on January 27, they approached a fence near a camp. Was Auschwitz.

Dushman did not enter the death camp through the notorious gate adorned with the words “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free). His tank went through the electrified barbed wire fence, a fence that many prisoners had voluntarily crossed to end their torture.

Dushman, who was Jewish, died in Munich on Saturday at the age of 98; he was the last surviving liberator of Auschwitz, the last eyewitness to speak of his inhumanity, according to Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish community in Munich.

His stay at Auschwitz was brief; he only drove his tank over the fence to clear a path for the ground troops of the 322nd Rifle Division, and then continued to “hunt down the fascists,” he told the Sueddeutsche newspaper in 2015. But still, what he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Skeletons everywhere. From the barracks they staggered, among the dead they sat down and lay down, ”he recalls. “Terrible”.

When the Soviets arrived, Auschwitz and its satellite camps were almost empty. The Germans had cleared it earlier this month as the Red Army approached, forcing 60,000 prisoners to move, during a “death march”, to other concentration camps, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nazis intended to kill prisoners who were too weak or sick to walk, but their time was up and they left about 7000 of them. These are the “skeletons” that Dushman found.

Ivan Martynushkin was among the Soviet ground troops who marched on the ground. In 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation, he spoke to various media about what he saw.

“We have seen emaciated, tortured and impoverished people,” he said. CNN. “It was difficult to watch them. I remember their faces, especially their eyes that betrayed their ordeal, “he said. France Media Agency.

Most of them were children or middle-aged; many children were twins and had participated in the experiments of the so-called “Angel of Death”, Josef Mengele. At first, prisoners and soldiers distrusted each other, Martynushkin said Radio Europe Libre, “[pero] then they apparently found out who we were and started welcoming us, to indicate that they knew who we were and that there was no need to worry, that there were no guards or Germans behind the barbed wire . Only prisoners. “

The look in her eyes started to change, he said. “We could tell in their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell. Glad they weren’t threatened with death in a crematorium now. Happy to be released. And we felt that we had done a good deed: to free these people from this hell, ”he said.

Some of the prisoners realized more suddenly that they had been released. In Dan Stone’s book, “The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath,” Officer Vasily Gromadsky is described shouting “You are free!

“They started running towards us, in a big crowd. They were crying, hugging and kissing us, ”he said.

But other prisoners took longer to be convinced of their release. In 1980, Soviet Colonel Georgii Elisavetskii said he entered a barracks full of “living skeletons”.

“I have the impression that no [nos] they understand and they start to speak to them in russian, polish, german … then i use yiddish. Your reaction is unpredictable. They think I’m provoking them. They are starting to hide, ”Elisavetskii said.

He told them he was a colonel in the Soviet and Jewish army, and they finally realized they were free. They fell at his feet and those of his companions, kissing their coats and hugging the men’s legs. “And we couldn’t move, we froze as unexpected tears rolled down our cheeks,” he said.

Even three days after the release, some women were still afraid to leave their bunk beds, a Soviet doctor said.

Soviet doctors began to provide medical assistance to the sick and quickly built two field hospitals on the outskirts of the camp. The Polish Red Cross has built another. According to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum, bedridden patients were transferred from barracks covered with excrement to clean rooms.

At least 4,500 survivors needed serious medical attention and 1,500 died before they could recover..

The patients had to be gradually reintroduced to the food, since giving a person suffering from long-term starvation immediately normal portions can be fatal. At first it was just a tablespoon of potato soup three times a day. Later, when meals got bigger, nurses said they found bread hidden under patients’ mattresses as they got used to hoarding all possible leftovers.

As soon as the former prisoners were well enough to leave, most did so, either on foot or by organized transport to their home countries, according to the Auschwitz Museum. Many required three or four months of medical attention. As of June, there were only 300 left, according to a Jewish aid unit cited in Stone’s book, but “the Russians are taking good care of it, providing them with white bread, sausages and sugar.”

Prior to their evacuation, the Nazis also attempted to destroy evidence of so-called war crimes in which 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the gas chambers. But again, their time is up. The Red Army reported finding the disgusting evidence of the Nazis’ “final solution”: 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s clothes, 7.7 tons of human hair, all put together in massive piles.

Six hundred bodies, the last people shot by the Nazis, lay on the ground without burial.

Aleksander Vorontsov was part of a Soviet film crew who captured these horrors. “My memories of there have stayed with me all my life. It was all the most moving and horrible thing I filmed during the war, ”he said.

Most of these soldiers went on to receive medals for the liberation of Auschwitz and have been invited to commemorations and ceremonies over the years. But not Dushman; he never received a medal, probably because his contribution was so short.

He said it was good for him; he didn’t want to be invited again, he said. He had visited Auschwitz again in the 1970s and, he said, “I couldn’t stop crying.”

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