David Dushman, Last Surviving Liberator of Auschwitz Dies At 98
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – David Dushman, the last surviving soldier who participated in the liberation of the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in January 1945, has died. He was 98.
He passed away in a clinic in Munich, Germany, late Friday night, said the city’s Jewish IKG cultural community.
The IKG described the decorated veteran as a liberating “hero of Auschwitz.”
Dushman, a Red Army soldier who later became an international fencer, used his T-34 Soviet tank to mow down the electric fence of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland on January 27, 1945.
“When we arrived, we saw the fence and these unfortunate people; we broke through the fence with our tanks. We gave food to the prisoners and continued,” Dushman said last year.
However, We hardly knew anything about Auschwitz,” he added, recounting that day in an interview in 2015 with Sueddeutsche daily. But he saw “skeletons everywhere.”
MANY DEAD
“They staggered out of the barracks, sat, and lay among the dead. Terrible. We threw them all our canned food and immediately went on to hunt down the fascists,” he recalled.
Only after the end of the war did he learn about the scale of the atrocities in the camp.
Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, most in its notorious gas chambers.
In addition, tens of thousands of others, such as gays, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war, also died in the horrors in Auschwitz.
His war-time experiences Up to four years ago, he was still going almost daily to his fencing club to give lessons, the IOC said.
Dushman was one of 69 soldiers in his division who survived the war, but he suffered severe injuries, according to people familiar with the situation.
TOP FENCER
Yet, he became a top fencer in the Soviet Union and later one of the world’s greatest fencing coaches, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said in a brief statement.
He trained the Soviet Union’s women’s fencing team for over 30 years and witnessed the deadly terror attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
“We heard the gunshots and the hum of the helicopters above us. We lived right across from the Israeli team. All the other athletes and we were horrified,” he told Abendzeitung newspaper in 2018.
His friend, IOC chief and fellow fencer 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 two and Auschwitz and he being a man of Jewish origin,” said Bach, who is German. “This was such a deep human gesture that I will never, ever forget it,” added the IOC president in published remarks.
Up to four years ago, he was still going almost daily to his fencing club there to give lessons, the IOC acknowledged.
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