Seventy-five years ago, on 27 January 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz concentration camp. The date has been commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Among those liberated that day was the Italian-born writer and chemist, Primo Levi
Had the Allies lost the war, all Jewish culture from the small towns of Lithuania to the salons of Vienna might have been extinguished in a blink of historical time. European Jewry had reason to be grateful especially to the Red Army. On the night of 19-20 January 1945, Russia unleashed a formidable aerial bombardment on Auschwitz and its 39 satellite camps in occupied Poland. In a sauve qui peut panic, the German staff fled on horseback, on bicycle and by armoured car.
Primo Levi was in the Infectious Diseases Ward of Auschwitz IV recovering from scarlet fever. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he expected to be eliminated by the SS. But the sound of irregular muffled bangs indicated that the Russians were within firing range.
On 20 January, a week before the camp’s liberation, Levi ventured out into a no-man’s-land polluted by excrement and corpses. His feet bandaged with a torn blanket, he tried to salvage what he needed to live from the detritus left by the fleeing Germans. A few potatoes prised from the earth offered sustenance but Levi was still very weak. He had begun to drag a comrade’s corpse to the common grave when four strangers in white camouflage approached on horseback.