On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered Auschwitz and opened the gates to about 7000 emaciated human beings, largely Jews, and began to survey the horrors within. These men were hardened by some of the most intense fighting on any front in the war, and had seen starving, maiming, hangings, burnings and mass murders of all sorts. Nothing prepared them for the hell within.
Retired Lt. Gen. Vasily Petrenko, the only surviving commander among the four Red Army divisions that encircled and liberated the camp, was a hardened veteran of some of the worst fighting of the war. "I had seen many people killed," Petrenko says. "I had seen hanged people and burned people. But still I was unprepared for Auschwitz." What astonished him especially were the children, some mere infants, who had been left behind in the hasty evacuation. They were the survivors of the medical experiments perpetrated by the Auschwitz camp doctor, Josef Mengele, or the children of Polish political prisoners rounded up after the ill-fated revolt in Warsaw the previous fall.
But Petrenko didn't yet know that. "I thought: we're in a war. We've been fighting for four years. Million-strong armies are battling on both sides and suddenly you have children. How did they find themselves there? I just couldn't digest it." Only later did Petrenko realize that this was a place where children were brought to be killed. By the hundreds of thousands they had vanished into thin air, and Petrenko's troops marched by the ashes of their bones.
Such accounts were commonplace from those that witnessed that day. Many of this same Red Army who had seen untold horror up until this point had similarly reached a breaking point.
"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 -- the Nazi death camp in what is now southern Poland where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished -- 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.
Humans were reduced to mere cattle; only certain stock selected for insane labor which was almost certain to kill them anyway over time. When you arrived at the camp, those deemed fit were allowed to "live" and go to work; the rest were told they were being deloused but were instead gassed. 75% of all who arrived at the camp were simply eradicated immediately. Over 1.1 million people were killed at this camp, over 90 percent Jewish, or approximately 1 in 6 of all Jews killed during the Holocaust.
Compounding this sick facility was outrageous human experimentation, particularly done on children and twins. Frequently, one twin was injected with something usually extremely dangerous, and they would watch what would happen. If one of the twins died, the other twin was almost always killed. Those who survived live with detrimental health effects to this very day (in one case, one twin had to give a kidney to her sister, because apparently her sister was injected with something that simply caused her kidney to stop growing and functioning correctly. To this day they have no idea what it was).
Sadly, the liberation came
just too late for 58,000 other prisoners, who ten days earlier were evacuated from Auschwitz by the Nazi's and forced into a death march so horrific the few survivors said it was far worse than anything they had seen or experienced in the camp itself. Most would never come back from that.
The camp itself was not the end of the trauma these people faced. In the years following the war, many survivors found it difficult to ever talk about the event. Many could never again be in relationships;
Holocaust survivors are three times more likely to attempt suicide. It didn't matter what success you found, it impacts everyone from the small shopkeep to prominent chemists.
One survivor put it like this:
Later after the death of both of his parents, Art Spiegelman went to a psychiatrist, Paul Pavel who was a Hungarian Jew, survivor of Terezin and Birkenau and who helped him to understand his parents and who was able to explain him what they couldn’t explain.
During one of the session with Paul Pavel, Art got shocked by him saying “Primo Levi was right. The only thing a survivor can do is to kill himself.” Pavel explains it in the following way: “Everything is Auschwitz. Auschwitz is everywhere. People eat meat. Life feeds off life. After the optimism of liberation all the optimisms fail….The impossibility of communicating what happened so it could make difference….All the anger. Who can you get angry at forty years later? All you can do is protest – but to who? (Spiegelman, 2011)
Primo Levi, mentioned by Pavel, was an Italian-Jewish Holocaust survivor, who wrote autobiographical novel If This Is a Man and some other works that won many literary prises. He was giving talks to students about concentration camps, but in the later 1970 and early 1980s, several writers and speakers began to deny the existence of the Holocaust and to claim that it was a lie invented by the Jews.
“Levi was outraged by these articles and attacked them in print and in interviews. These incidents seemed to increase Levi’s feelings of guilt for having survived when so many died. Primo Levi committed suicide at the age of 68. He felt that his entire effort of writing about Holocaust, revealing the truth failed and being totally useless. Feeling guilty of being alive and not doing much for the dead has a special term - survivor's guilt-“a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives themselves to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not”(Gambetta,1990).
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Today, the horrible legacy of human suffering lives on, as concentration camps exist in North Korea and genocide occurs regularly around the world, from Darfur to Cambodia to Rwanda.
But there are some things, no matter how difficult, we really should never forget.
...it really will take vigilant, uncensored total education of every future generation about world history to have the chance to eradicate the potential for future genocides, plus dealing with all the other complicated factors ticking in and around the human mind.