On January 27, 1945, a group of Soviet soldiers were moving through southern Poland when they came across what looked like an empty Nazi camp near the town of Oświęcim.
They didn’t even know the camp was there and were shocked to see thousands of thin, weak, and mistreated people staring at them through barbed wire. Some were so sick and starved they could barely stand. One soldier later said, “I still remember their faces, especially their eyes. Their eyes told the story of what they had been through.” This place was Auschwitz—the biggest and deadliest of all the Nazi concentration camps—and the soldiers were about to see just how terrible things had been for the people there.
When the soldiers went inside, they found no guards. The Nazis had left not long before, taking 60,000 prisoners with them and trying to hide the terrible things they had done. But there was too much proof left behind. The soldiers found buildings full of shoes, eyeglasses, and other personal items—belongings of the 1.1 million people who had died there.
In the end, the Soviet troops were able to save 7,500 people, many of them children and sick prisoners the Nazis had left behind to die.