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Red Army liberators recall shock of Auschwitz
By News Agencies
When Anatoly Shapiro commanded his Red Army troops to secure a concentration camp complex in Auschwitz 60 years ago, he had no idea he was about to discover the biggest Nazi killing machine.
Approximately 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, perished in the Nazi death camp, situated in what is now southern Poland, before the Soviet soldiers arrived on January 27, 1945.
"We came upon groups of people in striped uniforms. They were no more than skeletons. They were unable to talk. They had a blank look in their eyes," the 92-year-old Shapiro told Reuters.
"We told them we were the Red Army and had come to free them. They began to feel our uniforms as if they didn't believe us. We washed and clothed them and began to feed them," said Shapiro, whose speech will be aired in Krakow during Thursday's commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.
When the advancing Soviet army reached Auschwitz only about 7,000 prisoners remained in its wooden barracks.
The rest were already marched out or dispatched by train in a desperate attempt by the Nazis to cover up evidence of the mass killings.
"We saw everything. The chambers used to gas the prisoners, ovens where the bodies were burned. We saw the piles of ash. Some of my men approached me and said 'Major, we cannot stand this. Let's move on'," Shapiro said in a phone interview from his New York home.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, alongside 40 leaders including France's Jacques Chirac and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, take part in ceremonies in Auschwitz.
Ukraine's newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko, son of an Auschwitz prisoner, will also attend.
Koptev Gomolov, who was 18 when his division liberated Auschwitz, recalls that among the "starved and exhausted" prisoners he saw one waving a makeshift red flag.
"First we didn't understand. Later we found out people had sewn it from pieces of red material and cloths they found. When they heard explosions from the cannons they guessed the Red Army is coming," said Gomolov.
At a tragic cost for Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the Holocaust's deadliest death camp, and most of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
With 9 million Red Army soldiers killed in World War Two, Shapiro said history was clear: "I can say with conviction that the Red Army was an army of liberation. No one can deny that or take that distinction away."
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church called Wednesday for remembrance of Jewish and other victims who died at Auschwitz.
Patriarch Alexy II said that not a single family in the countries of the former Soviet Union was left untouched by the World War II. As well as the millions of Soviet soldiers killed during the war, at least 16 million civilians died of starvation and at the hands of Nazi troops occupying Soviet territory - many in Nazi concentration camps.
"Today we also remember the Jewish people whom the Nazis tried to wipe from the face of the earth. Thanks be to God that He halted the hands of the executioners who planned the most monstrous genocide in history," Alexy said in a statement.
"Thinking of those who died during the years of war hardships, I offer my prayer that the tragedy of world war will not be repeated. For this, it is necessary to learn well the lessons of the past," he said.
-Rudey
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