Auschwitz hero

A tribute to the Jewish combat commander who liberated the Nazi death camp.

By MARTIN SIEFF
Red Army Lt.-Col. Anatoly Shapiro (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Red Army Lt.-Col. Anatoly Shapiro
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
When retired Red Army Lt.-Col. Anatoly Shapiro died in 2006 at the age of 92, he was rich in honors as well as years. The governments of the Soviet Union, Russia, Poland and Ukraine had all awarded him some of their highest decorations for valor; and he was well-known and respected by international gatherings of Shoah survivors.
Yet in the 11 years since his death, Shapiro’s name has been scandalously forgotten by the public at large in Israel, the United States and throughout the Western world. Nor during his lifetime did he ever gain in Israel and the West the renown of thousands of far lesser figures. Shapiro was the Red Army officer who commanded the liberation of Auschwitz – and he was a Ukrainian Jew.
As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, let’s pause to reflect on the life of this special man who liberated Auschwitz.
Shapiro had not planned to become a soldier. The son of a Jewish family in Konstantinograd in the Poltava region of Russia, he graduated from high school with a diploma in engineering. He joined the Red Army in 1935 but also worked as a civilian engineer in Zaporozhye and Dnipropetrovsk. He saw action throughout the full four years of World War II in the east, and was repeatedly promoted and decorated for gallantry. In the great 1943 showdown battle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht around Kursk, he was seriously injured and had to spend time in the hospital.
When Shapiro received his orders from Maj.-Gen. Petr Zubov’s 322nd Division of the First Ukrainian Front, commanded by the legendary Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, to ready his elite 1085th ‘Tarnopol’ Rifle Regiment for immediate action on January 25, 1945, he knew his force was being tapped to liberate a Nazi death camp, but neither he nor any of his men dreamed what an infernal hell they were about to enter.
The liberation of Auschwitz was a far cry from that of the infinitely smaller death camps by the British and US armies in western Germany from Dachau to Bergen-Belsen a few months later. The Third Reich had virtually been destroyed and the SS and other Nazi guards at the western camps fled for their lives at the advance of the Allied liberating forces. But the war was still raging in full fury in January 1945 and the Nazis fought with demented fanaticism to try and prevent Red Army troops from exposing their most hellish secrets.
On the way to the camp, Shapiro’s 1085th regiment ran into a minefield. A doctor and five nurses were killed. As British historian Michael Jones wrote in his acclaimed 2011 study “Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin”: “The following morning the regiment encountered strong enemy opposition and even had to fend off a counter-attack.”
Lt. Ivan Martynushkin, a junior officer, told Jones in an interview more than 60 years later: “As we approached Auschwitz, we had to fight for every settlement, every house.” Yet as the 1085th’s combat journal laconically recorded, “No one wanted to turn back.”
It was in the early morning of January 27, after much heavy fighting, that the 1085th advanced into Auschwitz itself in the face of ferocious Nazi artillery fire. By 11 a.m., Shapiro’s men had crossed the Sola River and he gave the order “Break into
 Auschwitz.”
The fighting continued to be fierce. Dozens of Red Army troops died. Shapiro and his men entered the camp.
The Nazis had evacuated most of the surviving prisoners and sent them on a death march toward the German border. However, the camp still held at least 1,200 people as well as another 5,800 at Birkenau, including 611 children.
“The gates were padlocked. Snow was falling and there was a smell of burning in the air. Inside were rows of barracks but not a person could be seen,” Jones wrote.
The Red Army men shot the locks off the doors with their submachine guns. For the next 60 years, Shapiro vividly recalled what they found inside. Decades later, he told the United Jerusalem Foundation in an interview:
“I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people. But I was still unprepared for Auschwitz… The stench was overpowering. It was a women’s barracks, and there were frozen pools of blood, and dead bodies lay on the floor.”
Before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005, Shapiro shared more of his memories in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Outside one barracks, a sign said “Kinder.” However, Shapiro recalled, “There were only two children alive; all the others had been killed in gas chambers, or were in the ‘hospital’ where the Nazis performed medical experiments on them. When we went in, the children were screaming, ‘We are not Jews!’ They were in fact Jewish children, and mistaking us for German soldiers, evidently thought we were going to take them to the gas chambers. We stared at them aghast… This was the hardest sight of all.”
Shapiro recalled that the Russian Red Cross rapidly entered the camp and started cooking chicken soup and vegetable soup for the starving survivors. However, he told JTA, “The people couldn’t eat because their stomachs were like” – and Shapiro displayed his clenched fist.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers from Central Asia participated in the war against the Nazis and many of them took part in the liberation of the death camps. The full story of their service and sacrifices in the defeat of the Nazis has never been told either in Russia or the West.
One of them, Artillery Sergeant Enver Alimbekov, quoted by Jones from a 1995 article in the French left-wing newspaper “Liberation,” recalled entering a dark wooden hut: “And then in the gloom, I saw bodies, bodies of little children, everywhere. Some were dead, others half alive… I stood there, some of the little bundles began to move – waddling, crawling, and making strange babbling sounds… I froze. Small hands, filthy, dirty – with no flesh on them at all, just bone – clung to my boots.”
The mute testimony of the belongings inventoried was as horrifying as the living and the dead. Jones wrote: “When the clothes store in the warehouse was fully inventoried, 348,820 men’s suits were recorded and 836,525 women’s outfits. It was impossible to count the shoes. There were millions of them.”
Shapiro had commanded the liberation of the camp. Another senior Jewish officer, Colonel Georgi Elisavetsky, became its very first commandant after its liberation. His testimony is preserved in the excellent Russian Holocaust Center in Moscow and was also cited by Jones.
Red Army forces had only a fraction of the medical and relief resources available to the US 12th and the British 21st Army Groups in the West, but the response of Marshal Konev’s forces to the humanitarian catastrophe they had uncovered was exemplary.
Elisavetsky testified: “We knew immediate action had to be taken… It is impossible to describe how our doctors, nurses, officers
and soldiers worked – without sleep or food – to try and help those unfortunates, how they fought for every life.”
Jones noted that Red Army Military Hospital Number 2962, run by Dr. Maria Zhilinskaya, “nevertheless managed to save 2,819 inmates.”
After the war, Shapiro never lost his faith in and love for the Soviet Union. But following its disintegration, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1992 and settled in Suffolk County on Long Island. It was only then that he discovered the full extent of the Holocaust.
Already almost 80, the move opened a new chapter in Shapiro’s life. He wrote several books on the subject and on his own experiences in his native Ukrainian before his death on October 8, 2005.
This brave and outstanding man is buried at Beth Moses Cemetery in Suffolk County, Long Island.