New Delhi: David Sushman, a Red Army soldier and later international fencer, passed away on Saturday (June 5) at the age of 98. He was the last surviving solder who took part in the Auschwitz liberation of 1945.

On January 27, 1945, Dushman had used a Soviet tank to mow down the electric fence at the Nazi death camp and free prisoners.

“When we arrived we saw the fence and these unfortunate people, we broke through the fence with our tanks. We gave food to the prisoners and continued,” Dushman told Reuters in 2020. “They were standing there, all of them in (prisoner) uniforms, only eyes, only eyes, very narrow – that was very terrible, very terrible.”

Dushman, who joined the Red Army in 1941 after Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, said the soldiers had not known of Auschwitz's existence.

More than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives at Auschwitz, built by the Nazis in occupied Poland as the largest of their concentration camps and extermination centres. Some six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Soon after arriving at Auschwitz, Dushman was ordered to leave and push on toward Berlin.

One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong column of tanks to survive World War Two, Dushman was seriously wounded and he had to have part of one lung removed. That did not stop him becoming a professional fencer.

“I couldn’t walk at all because I got out of breath. I started … I made up my own workout routine for one minute per day. So very, very gradually, slowly, slowly I reached a point where in 1951 I became the champion of Russia (in fencing),” he had told Reuters.

International Olympic Committee chairman Thomas Bach expressed sadness at Dushman's death, Times of Israel reported. “When we met in 1970, he immediately offered me friendship and counsel, despite Mr Dushman’s personal experience with World War II and Auschwitz, and he being a man of Jewish origin,” said Bach, who is German.

Dushman, whose sports physician father died as a victim to Stalinist purges, moved to Austria in the 1990s for several years before relocating to Munich in Germany's southern state of Bavaria.

Honoring him during his 95th birthday in 2018, Munich IKG community president Charlotte Knobloch said Dushman, who also survived the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, had endured enough "for three lives."

"Every contemporary witness who passes away is a loss, but the departure of David Dushman is particularly painful," Knobloch added in Sunday's IKG press statement about its honorary member.

(With agency inputs)

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