I remember it had first hand accounts of trying to speak to the recently liberated, frail, lithe prisoners unsuccessfully until a Jewish Soviet soldier tried Yiddish, and the horrors of the camp broke several soldiers who had witnessed the Eastern Front and galvanized the desire to destroy the fascists.
It was posted on Hexbear a while back but I can’t seem to find it now.
Here’s some bits I remember seeing here before:
Vasily Gromadsky, an officer of the 60th Army, offered the description: “I realized that they were prisoners and not workers so I called out, ‘You are free, come out!’… They began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us, and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell.”
Georgii Elisavetskii, another of the first Soviet soldiers to enter the camp, admitted in 1980 that ‘My blood runs cold when I mention Auschwitz even now’. He described the liberation in dramatic detail: “When I entered the barrack, I saw living skeletons lying on three tiered bunks. As in fog, I hear my soldiers saying: ‘You are free, comrades!’ I sense that they do not understand us and begin speaking to them in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian dialects; unbuttoning my leather jacket, I show them my medals… Then I use Yiddish. Their reaction is unpredictable. They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’… Finally, as if the barrier collapsed… they rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.”
commenting so i can see when someone finds it
