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The Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center and the Holocaust Foundation
(map). Phone/fax: (499) 995-21-82, (495) 953-33-62 E-mail:center@holofond.ru
On January 27, a Commemorative Evening - Requiem devoted to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day that marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz (Oswiecim) Death Camp by Soviet troops was held at the Grand Hall of the Central House of Writers in Moscow. This event has been organized here each year since 1995 following the initiative of the Holocaust Center and Foundation and with the participation of Moscow City Government, Israeli Embassy in Russia, the World Congress of Russian Speaking Jewry and leading Jewish organizations of Russia.
This evening, which took place in one of the most prestigious auditoriums of Russia’s capital, was attended by prominent public figures, ministers, diplomats, the leadership of the Russian Federation Archive Service and former ghetto prisoners and war veterans. The diplomatic corps was represented by Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassadors of Austria, Germany, Israel, Poland and Turkey; Envoys Extraordinary and Ministers Plenipotentiary of the Netherlands, Austria and Latvia; and diplomats from Hungary, Italy, Lithuania and the USA. At least one-third of the participants in this event was made up of over 150 schoolchildren and students from 30 Moscow schools and universities and their teachers, who sat near quite a colorful group of young people dressed in the uniforms of the Israel Defense Force. An exhibition devoted to Anne Frank, courtesy of the Dutch Anne Frank Foundation (Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was one of the 258 Jews freed in Auschwitz), was on display in the foyer.
The evening began with a Kadish prayer performed by the Moscow Male Jewish Choir Hasidic Cappella directed by AlexanderTsaluk. This was followed by the appeal to the audience from Alla Gerber, president of the Holocaust Foundation and member of the RF Public Chamber and host of the Commemorative Evening, to hold a one-minute silence to in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and warriors-liberators.
The RF Minister of Culture, Alexander Avdeyev, noted that Nazi camps became symbols of “the gravest crimes against humanity committed by the fascists and, at the same time, of the largeness and the will to live of the prisoners”.
According to Mikhail Shvydkoi, Russian President's Special Representative for International Cultural Cooperation, Auschwitz may be compared with a crucifixion that takes place in the people’s souls and hearts.
Sergei Melnikov, deputy head of the Humanitarian Policy and Public Relations Department at the RF President Internal Policy Directorate, read the message of the head of the Presidential Executive Office, Sergei Naryshkin, addressed to the audience.
Israeli Ambassador to Russia Anna Azari spoke about the Germans suffering from the post-traumatic effect of genocide. She also noted: “Although such a trauma does not even entail and post-trauma”.
The Polish and German ambassadors also spoke at the Commemorative Evening.
The only living Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Anatoly Vanukevich, who lives in Moscow, shared his memories about the death camp and was greeted by a standing ovation. The daughters of Meier Lay, the former Chief Israeli Rabbi and the present chairman of the Yad Vashem Museum’s Council, Julia and Elena, related the story of their father being saved in Bukhenvald by Fyodor Mikhailichenko, a Soviet prisoner from Rostov-on-Don. They were also greeted by an ovation.
The evening was concluded by the prize-awarding ceremony of the Annual International Contest “Lessons of the Holocaust – Path to Tolerance” of works created by teachers, students and schoolchildren. Schoolchildren who became the winners of this contest were invited to the annual Tenth Conference in Brest and the teachers who won it attended a seminar in Yad Vashem. Ilya Altman and Alexander Gorelik, director of the UN Information Center in Russia, informed the students, winners in the contest, that they were invited to UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. E.Mushtavinskaya, graduate of Hertsen RGPU, spoke on behalf of the contest participants. This contest and the prize-awarding ceremony became possible thanks to government funding provided in the form of a grant in accordance with RF President Order #160-rp of March 16, 2009.
Unique documentaries about the liberation of ghettos and Nazi camps in the former Soviet Union and Europe in 1941-1945 by Soviet troops were shown at this commemorative event. At the end of the evening, the Hasidic Cappella sang the famous Victory Day song.
The preparations for the memorial evening and the event itself were covered by over 20 mass media outlets from Russia and other countries, including leading news agencies such as ITAR-TASS, Interfax and RIA-Novosti (including the TV bridge Russia-Israel aired on January 28), Reuters and France Press; TV channels TVC, Culture, Fifth (St.Petersburg), RUSSIA Today (English, Spanish and Arabian Departments) and Zvezda; German Television; the Russian Services of BBC, Radio Svoboda and Radio France; the radio stations Echo of Moscow and the Russian News Service; the newspapers Izvestiya, Moskovsky Komsomolets and Tribuna; the magazines Kommersant-Vlast, Russian Newsweek and many others.
MOSCOW, Jan 25, 2010 (AFP) - Until the last, Ivan Martynushkin knew nothing of the horrors his unit would uncover when the Soviet army fought its way to the barbed wire fences of Auschwitz -- Nazi Germany's most infamous death camp. But 65 years on, he is still haunted by what he saw -- memories that have only grown more terrible as he learned the camp's story.
Some 1.1 million people died at the camp between 1940 and 1945 -- one million of them Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe. Some died from overwork and starvation, but most were murdered in the gas chambers.
"I will remember those things until the end of my days," the 86-year-old veteran, who headed a gunner unit of the Red Army's 322nd rifle division that liberated Auschwitz, said in interview with AFP at his home in Moscow.
The sprightly, grey-haired veteran sat in his neat apartment surrounded by books and photographs, including one of him with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. A jacket pinned with war medals hung on the wall.
Martynushkin said it was only when he saw the camp's barbed wires and his commander ordered the troops to hold their fire that he "guessed that this was some special military zone, that this was something else."
For many veterans, the lack of shooting on that day -- January 27, 1945 -- in the midst of the fiercest weeks of fighting, remains one of their most powerful impressions, Holocaust researcher Ilya Altman told AFP.
Martynushkin recalled the ghostly quiet and acrid "ash- and smoke-filled" air at Auschwitz. He had seen other Nazi prisoner camps but as his unit moved along the perimeter of Auschwitz he was staggered. "It was huge. It went on and on for kilometres," he remembered. "We started to see groups of people when we reached the fence. They came up to us dressed in prison stripes, some had other clothes on top," he said. "After being in such a hell, constantly threatened by death, they were worn, depleted people. The only thing to them were those eyes that reflected a kind of joy -- of being freed, the joy that hell had ended and they remained alive."
As the Soviet troops closed in, some 60,000 prisoners had been driven back behind the Nazi lines in a forced "death march" that would be remembered by the survivors as worse than all that had come earlier at the camp.
The few thousands left behind were thought too weak to march but by some luck escaped being shot in the chaos of the rushed exodus.
Martynushkin turned 21 just days before arriving at Auschwitz, but by that time he had already spent three years at the front.
Desensitized by the scale of suffering he witnessed over the war, he did not realize the full horror of the death camp, he said. It was only later, when the Nuremberg trials began, that he came to understand what had previously seemed unimaginable.
"Back then when we saw the ovens, our first thought was: 'Oh well, so they are crematoriums. So people died and they didn't bury them all,'" he said.
"We didn't know then that those ovens were specially built for the killing of people, to burn those who had been gassed, that kind of systematic killing."
Auschwitz operated from 1940, a year after the German invasion of Poland. Its victims also included 85,000 non-Jewish Poles, 20,000 gypsies, 12,000 non-Jewish other European nationals and around 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
"It was unlike any other war. It was a war over the existence of entire peoples," Martynushkin said. "We were able to see this plan at Auschwitz. Everyone was there, representatives of all the European nations."
He was planning to travel to Poland with a handful of other surviving Soviet soldiers for the 65th anniversary of the day they liberated Auschwitz.
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