80 years ago, Soviet forces liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and some of the survivors will be joined by world leaders on January 27 to commemorate the 1.1 million people killed there.
The remaining survivors are now mostly in their 90s and this may be the last year any of them can attend.
Within a little over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, built in occupied southern Poland near the city of Oswiecim.
Auschwitz was at the center of the Nazi campaign to wipe out Europe's Jewish population, and about a million of those who died there were Jews.
Among others who lost their lives were Poles, Romans and Russian prisoners of war.
By the time the Red Army cautiously entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners remained. Tens of thousands of others had already been forced to leave on foot on “death marches” as the Nazis retreated west.
Italian prisoner Primo Levi was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when Soviet liberators arrived.
The men cast “strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the ruined huts and our lack of survival,” he would later write in his Holocaust memoir.
“They did not welcome us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by sympathy but … by the feeling of guilt with which such a crime should exist.”
“We have seen people mocked, tortured, poor,” Soldier Ivan Martinushkin said about the liberation of the death campand external. “We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell.”
