The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 58

The Saber
“It was cold and gloomy with wet snow
falling .... We saw the barbed wire and
we understood it was a camp.” Once
inside, he and his comrades “found
thousands of wraithlike people laughing
and crying, singing and shouting,
or simply staring dumbly at their liberators.
He saw corpses stacked like cordwood
and abandoned before the Nazis
could set them on fire. He saw the crematories
and the subterranean rooms
he later learned were gas chambers.
‘It made a deep impression.’” 23 Mykola
Karpenko, a Ukrainian veteran, saw
piles of clothes, shoes, piles of human
hair and bones, and other items in a
central square of the camp. Also, there
were “wooden logs ... and dead bodies
stacked on top .... Then another layer
of wood, and then again bodies.” When
thinking of Auschwitz now, all he feels
is “hatred.” 24
The notion of the surviving prisoners
going from one hell to another
as they changed hands from the Nazis
to the Soviets usually tends to be overshadowed
by the inherent joy of liberation.
Ivan Martynushkin explained that
he and his fellow Red Army comrades
“have not been hailed as heroes,” as the
war has faded farther into memory.
“Former Soviet satellite countries—including
Poland and Baltic states—insist
that Red Army troops that liberated
Eastern Europe from Nazi totalitarianism
merely replaced [Nazi brutality]
with a Soviet form.” 25
Another account, like many others,
is one of “abuse, rape, theft and terrible
betrayal.” Helena Citronova and
her elder sister, two liberated women
2