Holocaust > What the Red Army found when they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau

 

The liberation of Auschwitz: What the Soviets discovered on January 27, 1945

Europe

Eighty years ago on January 27, 1945, soldiers from Russia's Red Army entered the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and were the first to discover the horrors of the concentration camp where more than a million people, most of them Jews, had been murdered. They found just a few thousand survivors in a sprawling complex where the SS had tried to erase all traces of their crimes.

In his Holocaust memoir, "The Truce", Italian prisoner Primo Levi recounted his first contact with the Red Army soldiers when Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated.

“The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945,” he wrote. “They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive."

Imprisoned since February 1944 in Monowitz, one of the three camps located in the sprawling concentration camp grounds, Levi witnessed the men's unease as they caught sight of a place that has since become a symbol of Nazi brutality.

“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”

Facing the ‘unimaginable’

On January 27, 1945, these Soviet soldiers witnessed the unimaginable.

“They were contingents from the first Ukrainian front. The Red Army stumbled upon this site by chance. Going into Auschwitz wasn’t a war goal. You can imagine these people's astonishment as they discovered one concentration camp after another,” said historian Alexandre Bande, a Holocaust specialist.

A photo taken in January 1945 showing the entrance to the Birkenau camp and its railroad line, after its liberation by Soviet troops. AFP - -

In his latest book, Auschwitz 1945, Bande has tried to shed light on what happened that historic day and in the weeks that followed.

While many books have focused on the workings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its selections and extermination process, Bande chose to look at the gaps in the story of its liberation.

“What happened on this site has left such a profound imprint on people's minds that historians, the general public and eye witnesses have been more interested in what occurred during (the liberation) rather than what happened afterwards.”

On the morning of the liberation at the end of January, the Soviet soldiers encountered fierce resistance from German troops. Intense fighting took place on the outskirts of the camp. Once they had overpowered these enemy soldiers, the Red Army discovered a handful of survivors: some 7,000 to 8,000 people. “They were mainly men, women and children who were deemed too incapacitated to be moved,” Bande said.

‘The snow was red with blood’

Just a few days earlier, on January 17, the Germans had begun evacuating Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hitler had ordered that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands alive. Nearly 60,000 people were dragged off in rags onto the roads in the middle of winter, heading west in what became known as the notorious death marches.

“We left in columns of 500. We walked for practically three days and three nights,” Raphaël Esrail, who was deported by convoy no. 67, told FRANCE 24 in 2020.

“What I remember most, and can't forget, are those men and women on the side of the road who had died. They'd been shot in the head by an SS man, or had to walk barefoot for hours. They had fallen as if in prayer, their legs frozen,” he said, recounting the transfer to the Gross-Rosen camp.

“I never expected this. The death marches were harrowing. The snow was red with blood. We were surrounded every 50 metres by the SS,” Léa Schwartzmann, a prisoner on the same convoy who was evacuated to the Ravensbrück camp, said in an interview in 2016.

Before dragging prisoners onto death marches, the SS tried to destroy as much evidence of their crimes as possible. As early as autumn 1944, Nazi authorities were making preparations to abandon Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pits containing the ashes of victims were liquidated, while the crematoria and gas chambers were demolished. When the Soviets entered the camp, however, much of the physical evidence remained.

“When they arrived at the barracks where the bags full of hair were stored, they understood that these were human remains. But it took them some time to understand the reality of the murders of hundreds of thousands of people,” Bande said.

Reconstructing the past

Evidence of the atrocities was captured in pictures by photographers attached to the Red Army. They photographed or filmed the dying in the barracks, the piled-up corpses and the 40,000 pairs of spectacles and 50,000 hairbrushes in storage.

Women prisoners are pictured in their barracks after the liberation in January 1945 of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops. AFP - -

“The first series of images taken in the immediate aftermath were of poor quality, due to the lighting conditions and the equipment used,” Bande explained.

“The second set of images is more recognisable. You can see, for example, prisoners falling into the arms of soldiers, but these are reconstructions. They were made by the Soviets in the weeks that followed. The idea was not to dwell on the suffering of the prisoners, but to highlight the heroism of the soldiers of the glorious Red Army.”

For some survivors, liberation did not end the suffering. As Albert Grinholtz, deported on convoy no. 4, recalled in 1991: “The soldiers, shocked by our starvation and skeletal bodies, immediately prepared soup in a wheelbarrow. (...) Closing my eyes, I remember this scene, the first bit of nourishment after so much deprivation and suffering. It caused many casualties among our comrades, who were unable to resist so much food, it was too rich.”

A photograph showing the entrance to the Auschwitz I camp. This scene may have been reconstructed several days after the camp's liberation. © Wikimedia

Symbolic of the Holocaust

Survivors took weeks, sometimes months, to return to their home town or country. Of the almost 69,000 people transported from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau, only 3% ever returned home. In the aftermath of the liberation, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was repurposed. The Soviets interned German prisoners of war and Poles suspected of collaboration there, while locals scoured the many barracks that were torn down salvaging scraps of timber. Trials and executions were also held at Auschwitz, including that of former camp commander Rudolf Höss.

In 1947, a memorial museum was finally opened to “protect the site and ensure knowledge is passed down of the crimes committed there”. Eighty years on, Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an important place of remembrance, symbolic of the Holocaust. Last year, it welcomed 1.83 million visitors.

“It's a symbol, especially in France, because the majority of Jewish deportees died there, but also because it's one of the best-preserved sites. It's more difficult attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists to a simple monument or memorial,” Bande explained.

“Auschwitz allows us to show the magnitude of the atrocities.”

And in spite of that, the world is gearing up for another holocaust at the hands of Islam - The New Nazi!

International Holocaust Remembrance Day > One of the Darkest Days in History, soon to be outdone

 

Thousands mark Holocaust Remembrance Day

amid marches in Germany, Italy

By Simon Druker

   

Mourners stand before the Wall of Death during a ceremony at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on Saturday, marking the 79th anniversary of its liberation. Photo by Jarek Praszkiewicz/EPA-EFE

Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Ceremonies were held across the world Saturday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day against the backdrop of continued anti-far right rallies in Germany and pro-Palestinian marches in Italy.

"Today, and every day, we mourn the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as the Roma, Sinti, political opponents, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ individuals, and others persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime," the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued Saturday.

"The United States stands with Holocaust victims, their families, and their descendants. We remember and we carry forward the legacy of survivors and their families when we apply the lessons of the Holocaust to combat antisemitism and other forms of intolerance."

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday condemned the global rise of anti-Semitism in a statement issued to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Biden called the Holocaust "one of the darkest chapters in human history."

And the world is rapidly closing in on a new darkest chapter in history, and, unbelievably, it's the same old story!

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site in Oswiecim, Poland, 20 Holocaust survivors laid wreaths and lit candles at the Wall of Death in the yard of Block 11, where German guards slaughtered thousands of Jewish prisoners during World War II.

In Potočari, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint Muslim-Jewish commemorative event was held to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, attended by Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović.

She called the occasion "a beacon of hope at a time when divisions often seem insurmountable," adding, "We must remember our duty to act decisively against hate speech, incitement to religious violence and discrimination."

Thousands of Holocaust Remembrance Day observers in Germany also attended scheduled events, while at the same time approximately 100,000 people in the western German city of Dusseldorf took to the streets to protest the country's far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Several smaller rallies were held in around 30 different nearby cities. Flags in Germany were at half-staff to mark the day.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday publicly urged people to stand up to anti-Semitism and racism.

"'Never again' is every day," Scholz said during his weekly video address, in reference to the Holocaust.

In Italy, demonstrators defied police bans on marches during Remembrance Day, gathering in Rome, Milan and elsewhere in support of Palestinian civilians who have been killed in Gaza amid Israel's war on Hamas militants.

"We are not here to say we are against the Jews. We are here to say 'no' to genocide in Gaza," one activist outside Rome's Piazza Vittorio told the Italian ANSA agency Saturday.

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Historian Unearths Evidence that Istanbul Directed Armenian Genocide

New documents suggest the Armenian genocide was both sanctioned and assisted by leaders of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul

By Brooks Hays

Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched to a nearby prison.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

(UPI) -- Between 1914 and 1923, during and after World War I, hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Turkey were systematically rounded up and murdered. Thousands more were forced to flee their homes. Some estimates put the death toll at more than 1.5 million.

Now, researchers say newly discovered documents suggest the Armenian genocide was both sanctioned and assisted by leaders of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul.

The fact that the Armenian genocide happened is well-accepted within academic circles. However, the Turkish government has continued to deny the culpability of their predecessors.

"The Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a worldwide campaign on genocide claims ahead of the centennial anniversary of 1915," Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, said in 2015. "If we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find far more suffering than what the Armenians went through."

Erdogan's sentiments aren't without the support of the vast majority of the Turkish population. As the New York Times reported in 2015, a poll conducted by the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul research organization, fewer than one in ten Turks believe the government should label the atrocities genocide and apologize.

"Turkish government officials continue to use the same argument, the argument that the Ottoman government never had the intent," Taner Akçam, an Armenian genocide expert and history professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, told UPI. "They accept that there were casualties and some massacres, but they claim the Ottoman government was not able to control the remote areas and that some Kurdish tribes or bandits or some other group, they committed these kinds of crimes."

What was missing, Akçam said, was a "smoking gun" linking the atrocities to the Ottoman government. That's exactly what Akçam found.

"This new evidence is a major blow against Turkish denialist arguments," Akçam said.

His discovery suggests the genocide was indeed carried out on periphery, not by rogue agents and bandits, but by provincial governors. These governors were in communication with and assisted by leaders in Istanbul.

"This shows the radicalization process started in the provinces," Akçam told UPI.

The evidence, a series of telegrams transcribed, decoded and signed by Turkish officials, was discovered among a slate of new documents released into the Ottoman archive, a collection of historical documents in Istanbul, organized by the government and made available to researchers.

The newly discovered letters feature the first unambiguous use of the terms "extermination" and "annihilation" by Ottoman officials, both among the provinces and in Istanbul. Analysis of the signatures confirmed several of the transcribed telegrams were authored by Bahaettin Şakir, head of the para-military Special Organization and one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide.

Though the plan to exterminate all of the Armenians living in Turkey began as a provincial idea, the new evidence suggests Istanbul was eventually convinced to back the genocidal approach.

In addition to the documents retrieved from the Ottoman archive in Istanbul, Akçam also discovered similar letters -- transcribed telegrams -- that were used as evidence in tribunals organized by the postwar Ottoman government.

"There were 63 different trials and more than 200 defendants," Akçam said. "The materials from these court procedures went missing. Government officials never made these court proceedings available to researchers."

Researchers only knew about these tribunals from reports written by daily newspapers in Istanbul. A few of the verdicts were also published by the Ottoman government. But some of the documents from these tribunals ended up in the private archive of a Catholic priest in Armenia.

Among the tribunal documents, Akçam found transcribed telegrams using the same coding system -- a series of Arabic letters and numerals to represent words and suffixes -- found among the letters unearthed from the Ottoman archive.

"I went to the Ottoman archive, I discovered that this four digit coding system was the same for both sets of telegrams," he said. "The authenticity cannot be disputed, this was the major discovery."

The transcribed telegrams provided further evidence of communication between those carrying out the genocide in the provinces and military and political officials in Istanbul, including messages that Akçam characterized as "killing orders."

As to why these revealing documents were publicly released by a government intent on denying its predecessors culpability, Akçam guesses officials simply didn't read them thoroughly. The documents in the archives were summarized by officials before being released, and the summaries of the newly discovered telegraphs mention nothing of the details relating the Armenian genocide.

Akçam said his discoveries, summarized in the Journal of Genocide Research, will further solidify the truth of the Armenian genocide. It's a truth he hopes will soon be accepted by the Turkish government.

According to Akçam, the genocide has implications for the political situation in modern Turkey.

"Turks and the Turkish government has the same problems today with Kurds as the Ottomans had with Armenians in the past," he said. "Armenians were making demands for legal and social equality. The Kurds are making similar demands today."

As a result, Akçam said, the Kurds have been labeled as a security threat and the Turkish government has attempted to suppress these democratic demands.

"Without acknowledging historical wrongdoings, Turkey cannot establish a democratic future," Akçam said.

According to the historian, reconciling with the record of the Armenian genocide is essential for improved relations between Turkey and its neighbors.

"Speaking regionally, if you continue this policy of denialism, this means you have the potential to repeat the same policy against your neighbors," Akçam said. "This is why many of Turkey's neighbors consider the Turkish government a security threat. Without reconciling history, peace will not be achievable in the region."

Hero Who Hid Jewish Children in Laundry Baskets from Nazis Dies at 107

By Gabrielle Okun 

A heroic man who hid Jewish children in laundry baskets in Amsterdam from Nazis has died at age 107.

Johan van Hulst, a Dutch seminary leader and later a politician, died March 22, the Daily Mail reported.

Hulst was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1972, an award that is given to non-Jews who heroically rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

The former Protestant seminary leader rescued at least 600 Jewish children from being deported to Nazi death camps.

Hulst used an “ingenious system” to hide young Jews, most under the age of 12, in laundry baskets and sacks across the city.

Nazis kept Jewish families in a nursery school across the street before being deporting them to death camps. If there were too many children, Nazis would separate them from their parents and put them in Hulst’s school prior to deportation.

The brave Hulst resisted the Nazis by writing down fewer children than SS Guards originally believed were at the school. He would use his system to save the Jewish children by having his helpers smuggle them to different houses and pretending that they were their own children, The Times of Israel reported.

Hulst successfully skirted the Nazis until one of his collaborators revealed the scheme and he was forced to go into hiding in 1945.

After the war, Hulst became a politician, serving as a senator for the Christian Democratic Party from 1956 to 1981.

“We say, those who save one life save a universe. You saved hundreds of universes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Hulst during a trip to the Netherlands in 2012. “I want to thank you in the name of the Jewish people, but also in the name of humanity.”

Hulst said he felt that he didn’t do enough to deter the Nazis and rescue Jews.

“I actually only think about what I have not been able to do — to those few thousand children that I could not have saved,” he said in 2015.

Heroes are like that!

The Netherlands is second to only Poland in the number of heroic people honored as Righteous Among the Nations, with more than 5,000.

Rest in Peace good brother; you have earned it.

Austrian Diplomat Recalled from Israel for Wearing 'Nazi' Shirt

Rising AntiSemitism in Europe - Austria

FILE PHOTO. © Grigoris Siamidis / Reuters

Austria’s Foreign Ministry has recalled an employee from its embassy in Israel after he posted a photo of himself on Facebook wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a Nazi tank division.

Weekly news magazine Falter published screengrabs of Jürgen-Michael Kleppich wearing a green shirt bearing the words “Stand your ground” and “Frundsberg”. Frundsberg is a reference to the 10th SS Panzer Division during World War II. The division was named after the 16th century German commander Georg von Frundsberg. Kleppich’s Facebook account has since been deleted.

The controversial shirt is by a clothing brand that specializes in “patriotic” apparel and markets itself as an online store for the identitarian, white nationalist, movement. Falter also reported that Kleppich previously posted a photo of his grandfather in a Nazi uniform.

Kleppich has been summoned to Vienna to “clarify all circumstances” surrounding his wearing of the shirt, Austria’s foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, told the ORF radio station. "If there is a disciplinary cause, a disciplinary procedure will be initiated,” she said.

The attaché is also reportedly a member of the right wing Freedom Party which is a junior partner in Austria’s coalition government. The party has been at the center of several Nazi-related allegations in recent years. Earlier this year a party official was forced to resign after it emerged that his fraternity published a songbook praising the Holocaust.

The state of Israel has said it will not have any direct contact with politicians from the party, which controls Austria’s foreign, interior and defense ministries as part of its government formation pact with the larger People’s Party.

What kind of stupid to you have to be to wear a Nazi shirt in Israel? And why would Austria allow right-wing nut-cases to go to Israel to represent their country? And why do right-wing nut-cases want to glorify Nazis in the first place - they were losers you know? Inhuman, lunatics, and losers! What kind of pathetic excuses for human beings would find them heroic?

Jews Moved to Warsaw Ghetto During WWII To Avoid non-Jews & ‘Nasty Poles’ – Father of Polish PM

© United States Holocaust Memorial Museum / Wikipedia

Jews moved to the ghetto during WWII to avoid non-Jews, including “nasty Poles,” an ex-senator and father of the current Polish PM said. The claim comes amid the ongoing spat between Israel and Poland over Warsaw’s Holocaust bill.

“Do you know who chased the Jews away to the Warsaw Ghetto?” Kornel Morawiecki asked while speaking to Polish Kultura Liberalna magazine on Tuesday.

“The Germans, you think? No. The Jews themselves went because they were told that there would be an enclave, that they would not have to deal with those nasty Poles.”

The eyebrow-raising statement was made by the father of current Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who assumed office in December 2017. 

The ex-politician went further, touching upon another hot topic – the alleged complicity of Jews in the Nazi-led genocide against the Jewish population.

Polish authorities tried to distance themselves from the controversial remark by the prime minister’s father. According to Deputy Foreign Minister Bartosz Cichocki, Morawiecki’s comment “does not reflect the position of the government.” 

Relations between Poland and Israel started to sour after Warsaw passed controversial legislation in February outlawing use of the phrase “Polish death camp.” It also blamed Poles for complicity in Holocaust crimes during the World War II. The bill attracted harsh criticism from Israeli authorities and Jewish groups worldwide.

The spat reached new levels after Morawiecki Jr referred to “Jewish perpetrators” during the Nazi era. “There were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian and German perpetrators,” the newly-appointed PM said, responding to an Israeli journalist.

The remark immediately drew fire from his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, who criticized Morawiecki’s “inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy” of Israeli people. Jewish groups immediately responded that the Polish prime minister definitely ‘crossed line of common sense.’ 

Poland’s Holocaust-Revisionism Law Triggers Backlash from Israel

The "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate at the former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz, in Oswiecim, Poland,

January 27, 2018. © Kacper Pempel / Reuters

Israeli leaders are up in arms over pending legislation in Poland that would officially outlaw blaming Poles for the heinous Holocaust crimes committed on Polish soil during World War II.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the proposed law, passed by the lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday, “baseless.” The new legislation prescribes prison time for using phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to the notorious mass concentration camps Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

“One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” Netanyahu wrote on Facebook late on Saturday, adding that he had asked the Israeli embassy in Poland to “meet tonight with the Polish prime minister to relay my firm stance against this bill.”

The bill, which still needs approval from Poland’s Senate and president, is perceived by critics as an attempt by the country’s nationalist government to target anyone who seeks to contest its official stance on the conduct of Poles during the war, which places emphasis on heroism and sacrifice while rejecting the complicity of some in mass murder. Under the new legislation, anyone who publicly attributes blame for the crimes committed by the Nazis to Poles or the Polish state would be liable for penalties.

“Non-governmental organizations indicate that every other day the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ is used around the world,” Poland’s deputy justice minister Patryk Jaki said in a speech before the lower house on Friday. “In other words, German Nazi crimes are attributed to Poles. And so far the Polish state has not been able to effectively fight these types of insults to the Polish nation.”

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has issued a statement opposing the Polish legislation, saying it is “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”

“There is no doubt that the term ‘Polish death camps’ is a historical misrepresentation,” the Yad Vashem memorial said. “However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion.”

Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid, the head of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party, also lambasted the controversial bill on Twitter.

“I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” Lapid wrote.

His comment added fuel to the fire, sparking the Polish Embassy in Israel to respond: “Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel.”

“My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles,” Lapid replied. “I don’t need Holocaust education from you. We live with the consequences every day in our collective memory. Your embassy should offer an immediate apology.”

To which the embassy retorted: “How does that relate to the fact that WW2 death camps were German Nazi, not Polish (our thread)? Shameless.”

Noting that 73 years had passed since the Auschwitz death camp on Polish soil was liberated, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said that respecting the tragic page of history is a must.

 “The Jewish people, the State of Israel, and the entire world must ensure that the Holocaust is recognized for its horrors and atrocities,” Rivlin said. “Also among the Polish people, there were those who aided the Nazis in their crimes. Every crime, every offense, must be condemned. They must be examined and revealed.”

For decades, Polish society tried to avoid discussing the killing of Jews by civilians, with atrocities usually blamed on the Nazis. The discussion was reinvigorated by the book “Neighbors,” published in 2000, by Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross, which explored the murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in 1941. Holocaust historians have gathered a large dossier of evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis. According to one scholar at Yad Vashem, of the 160,000-250,000 Jews who had sought help from fellow Poles, only between 10 to 20% survived.

In 2011, Poland’s then-President Bronislaw Komorowski offered an apology during ceremonies marking 70 years since Polish villagers murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in a World War II massacre.

Jedwabne, Poland

Horror of Auschwitz Recalled on Holocaust Memorial Day

‘You were just clinging to life’

Holocaust Memorial Day each year remembers the estimated 6 million Jews systematically slaughtered in the Nazi genocide which wiped out two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

The world observes those murdered on January 27 and reflects on the atrocities of the World War II, in an effort to ensure that mankind doesn't repeat the horrific mistakes of its past.

This year marks the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland by the Soviet Red Army, eight months before the war officially ended.

Around 7,000 people were still in the Auschwitz camp when the Soviets arrived, with the many other prisoners sent out on a death march.

Here we remember some of the harrowing stories of those lucky to have escaped imprisonment and death in the infamous Auschwitz death camp.

Primo Levi

Initially interned at Fossoli, Levi was transported along with 650 other Italian Jews to Auschwitz in February 1944 but was only one of 20 who actually emerged from the camp. The 25-year-old fell ill with scarlet fever in late 1944 and when the Red Army approached, all inmates, excluding those already ill, were rounded up, with most then killed. Levi’s illness at the time spared him certain death.

She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?"

And they had replied: "It is we who are burning."

Primo Levi

Ephraim Reichenberg, Hungary

Born in 1927, Ephraim and his family were deported to the camp in July 1944, where he and his brother Menashe avoided the gas chambers by claiming they were twins. As a result, however, they had a number of experiments conducted on them by the infamous Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele. After being liberated from the camp, Menashe was hospitalized and died a year later as a result of experiments.

They injected us at the base of the neck with a certain substance that after the war 

we found out to be cancer cells. The experiment was done time and time again. 

Mengele would sit on the side and take notes.

Ephraim Reichenberg

Viktor Frankl, Austria

A psychiatrist, Frankl survived three concentration camps over three years, including Auschwitz, where both his mother and brother would be killed. On his first day at the camp, he witnessed a haunting sight that stuck with him throughout his life – smoke emerging from the chimneys where bodies were being burned. 

U.S. Army / Public Domain

Elie Wiesel, Hungary

Wiesel, 15, and his family were deported to the camp, where both his mother and sister were killed shortly after. Wiesel said he went ''from despair to despair,” later revealing the only glimmer of hope keeping him going was knowing that his father was alive. "I knew that if I died, he would die,” Wiesel said. Wiesel’s father died, however, shortly after the pair were moved to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. That was their obsession to be remembered, and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

Elie Wiesel

Erling Mandelmann / photo©ErlingMandelmann.ch / CC BY-SA 3.0

Eugene Black, Czechoslovakia

Born in 1928, Black was brought to Auschwitz in May 1944 on a cattle truck and separated from the remainder of his family. Forced into slave labor, Black’s job was to load rocks onto truck for up to 14 hours per day, ultimately resulting in pneumonia. “We were full of lice,” Black said. “I tried to make myself small so no-one noticed me.”

“It is hard for anyone to understand unless you were there," he said. 

"You were just clinging to life. We were so starved and hungry and thirsty and afraid.” 

Eugene Black

USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography