Transcript
Narrator It was February 1945. Red Army troops were fast approaching the Oder River. The SS in the Gassen subcamp in today’s Poland were nervous. They had just received orders from the Gross-Rosen parent camp: The subcamp was to be cleared immediately, the inmates to “somehow” be brought to Leipzig, and those incapable of walking to be shot.
On the morning of the 12th of February, the SS drove the inmates out of the camp; SS officers set fire to the barracks. They were to leave as few traces of the camp as possible.
In rows of four or five, gaunt figures in wooden clogs and utterly inadequate clothing dragged themselves across the snow-covered ground, a heavy frost in the air. One of inmates was Pёtr Stefanovič Koržunkov.
Once again, he was walking for his life. There had been so many times like this in the past years. Just don’t fall down, he told himself. Pёtr knew that if he fell or couldn’t go on, he would never be on his feet again, but instead would be shot.
Pёtr Koržunkov was from southern Russia, born near Stavropol in 1919. His parents – simple farmers – were very religious. Yet, believing in God was not for Pёtr. He became a Red Army soldier, learning quickly: You can only hope that your will and your body will be strong...
Early in 1942, near Smolensk, Pёtr was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans. For many Soviet soldiers, this meant certain death: They would be shot or would starve or freeze to death in the camps.
This was not a fate Pёtr was about to accept. He escaped with two comrades. Yet their escape failed: they were discovered. It is almost a miracle that they were not immediately shot. Pёtr was brought to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and from there to Gassen, where he was a forced labourer.
And now he found himself with 700 other inmates on a march from Gassen to Leipzig. After just a few kilometres, several debilitated prisoners sank to their knees. On the first day alone, the SS guards shot as many as fifteen inmates. It would not be until the final stage of the journey that the surviving inmates were crammed into goods wagons. They reached the Buchenwald subcamp Leipzig-Thekla on the 22nd of February.
Pёtr was taken to Abtnaundorf, one of the three locations of the subcamp. Here, inmates were forced to produce airplane parts. Pёtr was in such a debilitated state that he could hardly work anymore.
On the 13th of April 1945, the SS cleared this camp as well. 304 sick prisoners remained behind, including Pёtr.
What happened next was not exceptional in the spring of 1945.
Members of the SS and the Volkssturm locked the remaining inmates in a wooden barrack and set fire to it with bazookas. Whoever tried to escape would be shot.
Piotr Stefanowitsch Korschunkow “Out of the instinct to save my own life, I crawled with a pile of moving people, people exhausted and groaning. [...] In the end I pulled myself up to the window with the last of my strength. It was already ablaze and I let myself fall out of it. It burnt my face and hands, but I did not feel the pain. After getting over a barbed wire fence, I had to get through a series of three wire rolls and then over a fence again. All of this happened in a black smoke that smothered everything, and under a hail of bullets.”
Narrator The Americans arrived in the Abtnaundorf camp on the 19th of April 1945. Here they found 67 severely injured survivors, including Pёtr Koržunkov. After his convalescence, he served a further year in the Red Army. In 1947, he returned to the Soviet Union and worked as a photographer and artist.
