Soviet liberator recalls Auschwitz
By CNN's Ryan Chilcote
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Ivan Martinooshkin led 50 machine gunners from Moscow to Auschwitz. It took more than a year.
"The battles went day and night. Every village, every town, every height had to be taken in battle," he says.
"Sometimes the battles went on for two days for each little town. We'd attack, they'd counter-attack, then we'd come back ... all the way from Krakow to Auschwitz."
Sixty years on, 81-year-old Martinooshkin pulls on his coat to attend the Auschwitz commemorations, one of a handful of Red Army veterans still alive.
"They could only find five people to go. There may be more, but not all of them can walk, talk or remember anything," he says. "They said they doubt they'll find any liberators for the 70th anniversary."
In 1945, his job was to mop up resistance in towns and forest around Auschwitz.
"The camp was always on our right. It has enormous stakes and lots of rows of barbed wire. At one point, we saw people behind the wire. We didn't know who they were at first."
When they were done, he and a group of officers went inside. But by then, he'd already seen so much.
"I saw the furnaces they stoked with bodies. I can't say I was horrified, because on the way there we'd been through a lot of smaller camps. I already had more than a year of war behind me, moving through destroyed and scorched land," he says.
"Destroyed villages, burned-down villages, mutilated people, kids, corpses. We were already carrying all that internally. Auschwitz was just another episode."
The prisoners greeted Martinooshkin and his men as liberators. In the decades since, the horror of what he saw has receded.
"Over the last 60 years, there have been so many other nightmares -- just take Iraq. Those pictures of places that were just blown up are all over TV. The news doesn't start anymore without showing some military scenes."
