The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 59

and Scroll
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trying to get home to Czechoslovakia,
“trudged the roads of Poland by day
... and then sheltered in hedgerows or
barns at night. Often, they would share
whatever shelter they could find with
other women, also newly freed from
Nazi camps. They soon discovered that,
in the darkness, Red Army soldiers
[who were totally drunk and acting like
wild animals] would search for women.
There were cases where they were raped
to death. They strangled them.” On one
occasion, Helena found a bicycle and
went for a short ride, eventually crossing
paths with a Red Army soldier on
a motorbike. He dismounted and tried
to overtake her. “I kicked and I bit and I
screamed and he asked me all the time
if I was German. I said: ‘No, I am Jewish
from the camp.’ I showed him the number
on my arm. And at that moment he
recoiled. Maybe he himself was Jewish.
I don't know what he was. He turned,
stood up and ran.” When hearing this
account, it is not too much of a stretch
to say that this soldier’s recoiling is indicative
of the Soviet mindset when it
came to Jews, and if that man was not
Jewish, then that very well could have
been the case. 26
At Auschwitz at least, “the Russians
were strangely unaffected by what
they saw ... despite being friendly to
the victims.” Surely, the liberation was
“hardly reported in the Soviet Press—
on February 2, 1945, there was a small
report in Pravda, but hardly the coverage
[one] would imagine. One reason
is that many of the Soviet soldiers who
first arrived at Auschwitz had themselves
endured unimaginable horrors
on the Eastern Front.” To these soldiers,