80 years ago, the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the last survivors will be joined by world leaders on Monday to honor the memory of 1.1 million people killed there.
The rest of the survivors are now mostly 90 years old and this may be the last year in which one of them may be present.
In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically kills at least 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, built in southern part of occupied Poland near the city of Owencim.
Auschwitz was at the center of the Nazi campaign to eradicate the Jewish population in Europe and almost one million of those killed there were Jews.
Other killed are Poles, Roma and Russian prisoners of war.
By the time the Red Army entered Auschwitz cautiously on January 27, 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners remained. Tens of thousands of others have already been forced to walk on the Marses of Death as the Nazis retired to the West.
The Italian prisoner Primo Levy lay at a campsite hospital with scarlet fever when the Soviet liberators arrived.
The men threw “strangely embarrassed glances at the prosperous bodies, to the knocked huts and to us, the few still alive,” he will write later in his memoirs about the Holocaust Holocaust.
“They did not congratulate us or smiled at us; they seemed to be depressed not only by compassion, but also by … the sense of guilt that such a crime should exist.”
“We have seen a frustrated, tortured, impoverished people,” Soldier Ivan Martinushkin said about the release of the death camp., externalS “We could understand in their eyes that they were happy to be rescued from this hell.