By Andy Ford
Yesterday marked the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz by the Red Army. To mark this date, we are publishing here Andy Ford’s comments about its discovery and liberation.
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As Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front advanced across Poland towards the industrial areas of Silesia, they defeated a German garrison in the town of Oswiecim, and just beyond it, found a huge sprawling complex of huts, barracks, railway lines and chimneys. They had stumbled across Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The camps looked deserted, but as the first scouts entered through the gates, they realised that there were thousands of emaciated and traumatised prisoners in the huts. They understood that they had found something terrible and unprecedented.
A Red Army cameraman who was there, Alexander Vorontsov, testified how “A ghastly sight arose before our eyes: a vast number of barracks…People lay in bunks inside many of them. They were skeletons clad in skin, with vacant gazes.
“Of course we spoke with them. However, these were brief conversations, because these people who remained alive were totally devoid of strength, and it was hard for them to say much about their time in the camp. They were suffering from starvation, and they were exhausted and sick. That is why our interviews, such as they were, had to be very brief.
“We wrote down the things they told us. When we talked with these people and explained to them who we were and why we had come here, they trusted us a bit more. The women wept, and – this cannot be concealed – the men wept as well. You could say that there were pyramids on the grounds of the camp. Some were made up of accumulated clothing, others of pots, and others still of human jaws.
“Time has no sway over these recollections”
“I believe that not even the commanders of our army had any idea of the dimensions of the crime committed in this largest of camps. The memory has stayed with me my whole life long. All of this was the most moving and most terrible thing that I saw and filmed during the war. Time has no sway over these recollections. It has not squeezed all the horrible things I saw and filmed out of my mind…” (Holocaust Memorial Council of the USA.)
The 7,000 prisoners found by the Red Army represented only 10% of the camp inmates, the vast majority having been marched off in the terrible ‘death marches’ of January 1945. One of the survivors of the death march from Auschwitz, Elizer Eisenschmidt, recalled how a Polish family saved his life out of basic human solidarity, at great risk to themselves:
“I went up to a house where a woman was standing in the doorway. I said: “Please give me something to drink!” She invited me inside. I sat down, and she brought me some coffee and even a hunk of bread. Then her husband appeared and wanted to know who I was. I replied dryly, “What does it matter to you who I am? I’ll drink this and be on my way”.
Prisoners could hardly believe they were once again with good people
““However, the peasant was obstinate: “I want to know who you are”. Out of fear of being rearrested, I feigned indifference and said, “Do you really want to know? I escaped from a transport from Auschwitz”.
“Not far from the house, as it turned out later, was a street where the prisoners had passed by in the “death march” – there were still corpses lying everywhere. The husband asked, “Where do you want to go?” I replied that I didn’t know. “Do you know anyone in these parts?” “No”, I answered. “Well then, stay with us”.
“And so, I stayed for around five weeks with that Polish Christian, until the time when the Red Army liberated the area. Then they took me to the hospital for treatment… “ (Elizer Eisenschmidt, Auschwitz.org)
The Auschwitz prisoners could hardly believe that they were once again with good people. “They rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.” recalled Georgii Elisavetskii (quoted in ‘Liberation of the Camps’ by George Stone).
A Polish doctor interned in the camp, Irena Konieczna, later testified: “Several Soviet scouts with their rifles ready to fire entered the grounds of the women’s camp hospital on January 27, 1945. The prisoners rushed joyously towards them. Later, a horse-drawn military column drove up in front of the blocks. When the Soviet soldiers realized what our situation was like, they supplied us with food of the highest quality – excellent army bread baked in pans, melba toast, and natural fats.” (Holocaust Memorial Council of the USA.)
“We were starved of food but also starved of human kindness.”
Ten-year-old Mozes Kor spotted the Soviet soldiers in the camp. She had been left behind for some reason, after being subjected to deranged ‘medical experiments’. She recalled the Soviet soldiers giving her “hugs and chocolate…We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness.” (Eva Mozes Kor quoted in ‘Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State’)
Soviet soldiers were deeply shocked at what they had found, even after the brutalities of the Eastern Front: “They [the prisoners] 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.” (Vasily Gromadsky, quoted in ‘Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State’)
When the Russians tried to guess how many had been killed at the camp, initially they estimated 140,000 people, based on the 7 tonnes of human hair they had found. In fact, it was around one million.
The Red Army set up hospitals as best they could and local Poles came to assist and because of this, many thousands survived.
German capitalists made profit from workers in the camps
Auschwitz was a death camp, but it was also a work camp. The big German companies operating in Silesia, like IG Farben and Siemens, used the starving prisoners in their factories, and of course made profits from their labour. The gas chambers were for those deemed ‘surplus to the requirements’ of industry – the old, the disabled, the pregnant, the sick and the children.
That was the essence of the brutal ‘selektion’ made by the SS doctors on the railway platforms of Auschwitz: those who could work were sent one way into the hellish barracks in the camp, those who could not work were exterminated just a few hours later, to save on the resources that would be needed to feed them.
In that sense Auschwitz and the other 1,000 concentration camps spread across Nazi-occupied Europe only represented the far extreme of what are ‘normal’ capitalist social relations, where the able-bodied labour for subsistence (or less) and the unproductive are dumped on a meagre welfare-based scrap-heap.
The newspapers and social media today are full of reports about yesterday’s ceremony in Poland that marked the anniversary, and a common feature were the comments of those few survivors still alive: “never again”. That is a commendable sentiment indeed, but we would add that racism and fascism are embedded in the very DNA of capitalism. “Never again” needs to have real content – and that means to struggle against the system that spawns such evils: capitalism.
[All picture froms Wikimedia Commons. Feature picture here, picture of women in barracks, here and picture of selektion, here]
