David Dushman, the final surviving soldier who took half within the liberation of the Nazi demise camp at Auschwitz in 1945, has died on the age of 98. Dushman, a Red Army soldier who later turned a global fencer, died on Saturday, the International Olympic Committee stated in an announcement.
On January 27, 1945, he used his T-34 Soviet tank to mow down the electrical fence of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, serving to to set prisoners within the demise camp free.
“We hardly knew something about Auschwitz,” he said, recounting that day in an interview in 2015 with Sueddeutsche daily. But he saw “skeletons everywhere”. “They staggered out of the barracks, sat and lay among the many useless. Terrible. We threw all of them our canned meals and instantly went on to seek out the fascists,” he said.
Only after the end of the war did he learn about the scale of the atrocities in the camp. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said Dushman’s death was “particularly painful”.
“Dushman was on the entrance line when the Nazi homicide equipment was smashed in 1945; because the ‘Hero of Auschwitz’ he was one of the liberators of the focus camp and saved numerous lives,” she said in a statement. “Today, he was one of the last to be able to recount this event from his own experience,” she added, describing Dushman as a “courageous, sincere and honest man”.
‘Deep human gesture’
Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than one million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland in 1940. More than 100,000 others, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and homosexuals, also perished there.
Dushman was one of 69 soldiers in his division who survived the war, but he suffered serious injuries. Nevertheless, he went on to become a top fencer in the Soviet Union and later one of the world’s greatest fencing coaches, the IOC said.
Dushman coached the Soviet Union’s women’s fencing team from 1952 to 1988, and it was in this position that he also witnessed the massacre of 11 Israeli team members by the radical Palestinian Black September group at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
His lodgings at that time lay directly across from those of the Israelis. IOC chief Thomas Bach voiced sadness about Dushman’s death.
“When we met in 1970, he immediately offered me friendship and counsel, despite Mr Dushman’s personal experience with World War II and Auschwitz, and he being a man of Jewish origin,” stated Bach, who’s German. “This was such a deep human gesture that I’ll by no means ever overlook it,” added the IOC president.
Dushman lived in Austria for several years in the 1990s before relocating in 1996 to Munich, where German media said he died. Up to four years ago, he was still going almost daily to his fencing club there to give lessons, the IOC said.
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