Archival photos depict Auschwitz prisoners
Blank expression, barbed wire and an occassional smile for liberators — photographs from Auschwitz-Birkenau 80 years ago offer a glimpse of what greeted Soviet soldiers who entered the camp. First the liberating forces were shocked at the death and depravity they encountered; soon the world would be too.
Auschwitz survivors mark 80 years since Nazi death camp’s liberation
OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — Eva Umlauf was only 2 when Soviet Red Army troops liberated her and her mother from Auschwitz concentration camp — too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched onto her skin — A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life, along with some other Auschwitz survivors.
“You are just a number,” Umlauf, 82, a pediatrician from Munich, told NBC News, explaining how this number will forever make her feel. “But this number is not only on the skin. This is deeper.”
For Umlauf, who traveled for the ceremony along with her sister, son and one of her grandchildren, this was more than a personal journey of memory and reflection. It was a moral responsibility.
“They have to know that it’s true. You know, because it’s so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,” she said.
In the eyes of so many around the world, survivors like Umlauf's very existence is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historic cruelty and vast injustice of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit pleas to the world: Never forget humanity’s capacity to commit unthinkable crimes.