David Dushman died at a hospital in Munich at the age of 98.
Dushman, a Jew, was 21 years old when he arrived in Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
– When we arrived, we saw the fence and the poor people. We drove through the fence with our tanks, he told the news agency Reuters last year.
He said he saw “skeletons everywhere”.
– We gave food to the prisoners and continued. They stood there, all in prison uniforms. Only the eyes, only the eyes, very narrow – it was absolutely awful, absolutely awful, he said.
Jews get off the train at the station in the death camp Auschwitz. More than 1.1 million people were killed in the camp.
Photo: archive
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Several major battles
In addition to Auschwitz, Dushman participated in several of the major battles of World War II.
He fought both at Stalingrad and at Kursk. The latter is known as the largest tank team in history.
He was one of only 69 men out of a total of 12,000 in his division in the Red Army who survived World War II.
Wounded three times
Despite being seriously wounded three times during the war, he later became the Soviet Union’s best fencer.
After an active career, he became a coach and in 1972 witnessed the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the Olympics in Munich.
Dushman’s friend, IOC chief Thomas Bach, who was also a fencer, praises him.
“When we met in 1970, he immediately gave me friendship and advice, despite Dushman’s personal experiences with World War II and Auschwitz, and that he was a man of Jewish descent,” said Bach, who is German.
– This was such a deeply human gesture that I will never in my life forget it.
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