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

 

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

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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!

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

Between the Lines - Burden of My Dreams

Burden of My Dreams is book one of a two part series called Between the Lines, by Janusz Siwinski. 

It is a thoroughly delightful biography of the early years of an extraordinary man. Born and raised in communist Warsaw, in the 1950s and 60s, Janek dreams of one day being free from the heavy oppression of communism, and free from the extreme poverty that plagued the masses and never seemed to improve.

Poland was occupied by Russians who were paranoid that everyone was out to destroy communism, so they kept a very tight grip on movement of people, not just to and from Poland, but even within the country. Any kind of change in your life was viewed suspiciously and required permission which was often not easily obtained.

Food was very scarce! People often had to leave work hours early in order to stand in line at a store that might have a loaf of bread to sell them. It was in this dreadful poverty and hopelessness that Janek grew more and more determined to get out from behind the Iron Curtain.

Janek was clever, courageous, and determined. He and his friend decided that the only way they would ever get permission to leave Poland for the west was to make the regime think that they were model communists. This they accomplished, and in their early 20s, the two men separately got permission to visit England. Neither had any intention of returning.

Janek made a big mistake, however, by marrying his sweetheart before leaving. He might have been able to get her out of Poland had he not married her, but Janek found out that because he did not return to Warsaw, his wife would never get permission to leave Poland for the west.

The rest of the story tells us how Janek lived and sought help to find a way to get his wife out. The plot becomes more and more intense as time goes by and Janek is running out of options. The extraordinary efforts to get his wife out led him into many situations that were simply terrifying. I was barely able to put the book down especially in the second half. 

I won't tell you more than that about the plot except to say it would make a thriller of a movie.

One of the most delightful aspects of the book was watching Janek discover the west. In London, he was captivated by the colours - the houses, the advertising in the tube, were all so stunning compared to the drab grayness of Warsaw. 

Janek was taken to see the Polish government in exile. A pitiful yet prideful government still thinking they were the legitimate government of Poland even though they hadn't been in the country for 20 years.

A move to Paris brought many new adventures and enchanting descriptions of the world's most romantic city. It also revealed some of its inherent ugliness in a couple of heart-breaking episodes.

Janek and his friends go on a road trip through Italy and delightfully take us along with them. For awhile, I did something that I did when reading The Count of Monte Christo about 10 years ago. I followed on Google Maps and Satellite view, the movement of the hero as he sailed around the Mediterranean and then into Marseilles.  I did the same for Janek and his friends as they travelled through Italy and across other parts of Europe. It was fascinating until the story got so intense I had to give it up and just read.

Putting the book down at the end of the story left me craving for more. I wanted to be back on the Champs-Elysees in a cafe having a croissant and cafe-au-lait, or a cognac, or a bottle of fabulous French wine with quirky, unpredictable, sometimes hilarious friends. I wanted to be on the road again through Italy and Austria to experience the food, the wine, the incredible views. I can hardly wait for the second book in the series.

Janusz Siwinski, the author, is a man I have recently gotten to know, a little, through a prayer meeting we both attend. Having met him, I can easily see him doing all the things he has written about. While living in Canada now for many years he still has a moderately thick Polish accent. This actually comes out a bit in his writing in what might appear to be a few spelling mistakes, but in fact, is simply what his accent looks like on paper. It's part of the charm of the book. I think I might just read it again.

Gary Wm Myers

Amazing Story of Courage, Resistance, Rescue and Survival from the Nazis

The Bielski Partisans

Holocaust Memorial Museum

JEWISH PARTISAN ACTIVITY IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1942-1944

Group portrait of former Bielski partisans from Nowogrodek taken in the
Foehrenwald displaced persons camp. Germany, April 3, 1948.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Kagan

Operating in Western Belorussia (Belarus) between 1942 and 1944, the Bielski partisan group was one of the most significant Jewish resistance efforts against Nazi Germany during World War II.

While its members did fight against the Germans and their collaborators, the Bielski group leaders emphasized providing a safe haven for Jews, particularly women, children, and elderly persons who managed to flee into the forests. Under the protection of the Bielski group, more than 1,200 Jews survived the war, one of the most successful rescue efforts during the Holocaust.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Germans occupied Western Belorussia (before 1939 Western Belorussia had been a part of Poland; after Germany invaded Poland in 1939 it was annexed to the Soviet Union by previous agreement with Germany). There, German authorities killed tens of thousands of Jews in Nowogrodek (Novogrudok) District (including the cities of Lida and Nowogrodek) between July 1941 and the end of spring 1942, and confined those they did not shoot to ghettos throughout the District. When German SS and police units liquidated these ghettos in 1942-1943, they killed most of the remaining inhabitants.

Tuvia Bielski

After the Germans killed their parents and two brothers in the Nowogrodek ghetto in December 1941, three surviving brothers of the Bielski family—Tuvia (1906–1987), Asael (1908–1945), and Zus (1910–1995)—established a partisan group. Initially, the Bielski brothers attempted only to save their own lives and those of their family members. They fled to the nearby Zabielovo and Perelaz forests, where they formed the nucleus of a partisan detachment consisting at first of about 30 family members and friends.

The family members chose former Zionist activist Tuvia Bielski, a Polish Army veteran and a charismatic leader, to command the group. His brother Asael became his deputy, while Zus was placed in charge of reconnaissance. A fourth and much younger brother, Aharon (1927- ) was part of the group as well.

The Bielskis had been a Jewish farming family in the nearby village of Stankiewicze, and the brothers knew the region well. Their familiarity with its geography, customs, and people helped them elude the German authorities and their Belorussian auxiliaries. With the help of non-Jewish Belorussian friends, they were able to acquire guns. The Bielski partisans later supplemented these arms with captured German weapons, Soviet weapons, and equipment supplied by Soviet partisans.

Asael Bielski

Tuvia Bielski saw his principal mission as saving the lives of his fellow Jews. The Bielskis encouraged Jews in nearby Lida, Nowogrodek, Minsk, Iwie, Mir, Baranowicze, and other ghettos to escape and join them in the forest. Bielski frequently sent guides into the ghettos to escort people to the forest. In late 1942, a special mission saved over a hundred Jews from the Iwie ghetto just as the Germans planned to liquidate it. Bielski scouts constantly searched the roads for Jewish escapees in need of protection.

Many Jews hiding in the forests in smaller family groups joined the Bielski group; Jewish partisans serving in Soviet partisan organizations also fell in with the Bielskis in an attempt to escape antisemitism in their units. The stream of Jewish survivors increased the size of the Bielski group to more than 300 people by the end of 1942.

Alexander Bielski

Until the summer of 1943, the group led a nomadic existence in the forest. In August 1943, however, the Germans began a massive manhunt directed against Russian, Polish, and Jewish partisans in the region. They deployed more than 20,000 military personnel and SS and police officials. Moreover, they offered a reward of 100,000 Reichmarks for information leading to Tuvia Bielski’s capture. The Bielski group, which had increased to approximately 700 Jews, was especially vulnerable to discovery by the German patrols. The group feared in part that the local peasants from whom they obtained food might betray them. As a result, the Bielski group moved in December 1943 to what became a permanent base in the Naliboki Forest, a swampy, scarcely accessible region on the right bank of the Niemen River, east of Lida and northeast of Nowogrodek.

It was in this primitive and unlikely setting that the Bielski group created a community. Despite some opposition from within the group, Tuvia Bielski never wavered in his determination to accept and protect all Jewish refugees, regardless of age or gender. The Bielskis never turned anyone away, permitting the creation of a mobile family “camp”—in effect, a Jewish community in the forest. The group organized the skilled workers among the Jewish refugees into workshops, which employed at least 200 people, including cobblers, tailors, carpenters, leather workers, and blacksmiths.

In addition, the group established a mill, a bakery, and a laundry. The leadership managed a primitive infirmary, a school for the children, a synagogue, and even a courthouse/jail. Work groups supplied the camp with food and cleared the land where possible for the cultivation of wheat and barley.

Bielski Group at mass grave site 1948

COOPERATION WITH OTHER PARTISAN GROUPS

The Naliboki Forest was under the administration of Soviet partisans, wherever the Germans were not present. Although the Bielski group had no ideological orientation, Tuvia Bielski and the other leaders cooperated with the Soviet partisans: Bielski himself established a friendly relationship with the regional Soviet partisan commander, General Vasily Yefimovich Chernyshev (codenamed “Platon”). Despite the prevalence of antisemitic sentiment among several of the Soviet partisan detachments, General “Platon” protected the Bielski group. He recognized the vital role of the camp as a maintenance base for Soviet partisans. In 1944, the camp leaders received weapons from Soviet partisan headquarters.

Bielski refused Soviet requests to provide an operations unit from among the approximately 150 men in his group who engaged in armed operations. He did not wish to abandon the married men, the women, and the children, for he knew that they could not survive without the armed protection of the armed men in his group. This concern was another reason for him in 1943 to draw his entire group deeper into the most inaccessible regions of the forest. Subsequently, although the group remained de facto united and under Tuvia Bielski’s command, they formally split into the “Kalinin” and “Ordzhonikidze” detachments of the Kirov Brigade of Soviet partisans.

At the same time that it saved lives and protected the noncombatants in the camp, the Bielski group carried out several operational missions. It attacked the Belorussian auxiliary police officials, as well as local farmers suspected of killing Jews. The group disabled German trains, blew up rail beds, destroyed bridges, and facilitated escapes from Jewish ghettos. The Bielski fighters often joined with Soviet partisans in operations against German guards and facilities, killing many Germans and Belorussian collaborators.

LIBERATION

On June 22, 1944, Soviet troops initiated a massive offensive in Eastern Belorussia. Within six weeks, the Soviet Army had destroyed the German Army Group Center and swept westward to the Vistula River in Poland, liberating all of Belorussia. At the time of liberation, the Bielski group had reached its peak of 1,230 people. More than 70 percent were women, elderly persons, and children, who otherwise would have perished under the German occupation. An estimated 50 members of the Bielski group were killed, an unusually low casualty rate in comparison not only with other partisan detachments but also with Jewish groups in the region.

After World War II, in 1945 Tuvia and Zus Bielski emigrated with their families to Palestine. They both fought in the Israeli armed forces during the 1948 war that established the Israeli state. They subsequently immigrated to the United States. Asael was drafted into the Soviet Army. He died on the front in East Prussia in February 1945.