JANUARY 27, 2019 MARKS THE DAY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ CAMP

...Soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates of Auschwitz Concentration Camp on January 27, 1945. The prisoners greeted them as authentic liberators. It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism. The Red Army obtained detailed information about Auschwitz only after the liberation of Cracow, and was therefore unable to reach the gates of Auschwitz before January 27, 1945.

..... As Steven Spielberg – who is credited with having brought the story of the Holocaust to a far wider audience with his 1993 picture Schindler’s List and whose Shoah Foundation has collected the testimony of 53,000 Holocaust witnesses – told an audience of survivors gathered at a Cracow hotel on the 70th anniversary of the liberation, four years, ago that the “call to remember” was increasingly 

important at a time of rising anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
“We’re once again facing the perennial demons of intolerance - anti-Semites, radical extremists and religious fanatics that provoke hate crime.”