generalspeaking: A Hero For His Times

Saturday, June 12, 2021

A Hero For His Times

"We hardly knew anything about Auschwitz. We were soldiers in tanks."
"The captives were standing there ... all of them in uniforms, only eyes, only eyes, very narrow -- that was very terrible, very terrible ... they staggered out of the barracks, sat and lay among the dead."
"We threw them all our canned food."
David Dushman, Jewish Red Army veteran

Mr. Dushman was a 21-year-old tank driver in the Soviet army when he drove through the electric barbed-wire fence surrounding Auschwitz in 1945.

Born in Gdansk in 1923 to a physician in the Red Army, his mother a pediatrician, David Dushman was an extraordinary individual who as he left childhood behind took up fencing in which archaic sport he became ultra proficient. He moved with his family to Moscow for his father to take up a position as head of the medical centre at the State Institute for Sports.

Things changed for the family in 1938 when Dushman's father, Alexander, was sent to a gulag, one of many victims of Stalinist purges. He lasted ten years in the gulag before dying there. As a young adult in his 20s, David Dushman participated in some of the bloodiest military conflicts of the Second World War. He was involved in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk.

Seriously wounded three times, he survived the war, one of a mere 68 comrades out of a tank division of 12,000 men who fought the Nazis -- who had turned against Russia -- in its defence. Soviet Russia lost a staggering ten million military to the war. Their death rate amounted to more than every other Allied nation combined.

Every 24 days the Soviet Union lost men in combat, enough to equal the entire wartime losses of the United Kingdom whose loss stood at 383,700. Soviet males born in 1923 had a 70 percent chance of survival. "The victory over Hitler's Germany was essentially won, and could only have been won, by the Red Army", wrote British historian Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist.

"Over and over on the eastern front, the same ironic scene was played out. German soldiers fed by Ukrainian grain, transported by Caucasus oil, and outfitted with boots made from rubber shipped via the Trans-Siberian railroad fired their Donetz -- manganese -- hardened steel weapons at their former allies", a 1999 history of Soviet-Nazi trade read, authored by Edward E. Ericson.

Nikita Kruschev who eventually denounced Stalin for the mass murderer that he was, wrote in his memoirs: "Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. He cursed the French, cursed the English, [asking] 'How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them'?" In point of fact, Stalin thought the "capitalist" powers would end up ruined by the conflict, to the extent they would be soft enough for a communist takeover.

"Our goal is that Germany should carry out the war as long as possible so that England and France grow weary and become exhausted to such a degree that they are no longer in a position to put down a Sovietized Germany", Stalin is reported to have said in a secret address to the Soviet Politboro in 1939.

In the rank and file of the immense number of Russians in the Red Army was David Dushman. In the end, as a survivor he was awarded over 40 medals and recognized with various decorations, including the Order of the Patriotic War. His greatest accomplishment, however, was to drive his T-34 tank into the fence at Auschwitz0-Birkenau, to free the prisoners.

His division soon after liberating Warsaw had been instructed to proceed onward to Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its remaining 7,400 prisoners. He recalled later that neither he nor his comrades were able to realize at the time the full magnitude of what had occurred there. The grim reality soon sunk in as the bedraggled, starved and gaunt human specimens staggered out of their barracks, near death.

David Dushman, the Jewish Red Army veteran, thought to be the last surviving soldier who had been involved in the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a complex of concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland where over a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945, died last week at age 98.