Obama Speaks with "Deep Humility" on Memorial DayObama said he suspects that one of the reasons his grandfather seldom spoke of his wartime experience was the trauma he had witnessed. "In World War Two we didn't have the concept of post traumatic stress syndrome. People had to basically handle it on their own," he said. Referring to an uncle who had been one of the first U.S. troops into Auschwitz, the concentration camp, Obama said: "The story in the family is he came home and just went up in the attic."
THE QUOTE IS “I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps and the story in our family is that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months, right. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” OBAMA said.
"Whose Zoomin Who" , Obama's Uncle liberated Auschwitz, was he a Russian soldier, because no US Troops liberated Auschwitz.
Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau;
The Auschwitz main camp, the Birkenau death camp and the Monowitz labor camp were liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union in the First Army of the Ukrainian Front, under the command of Marshal Koniev, on January 27, 1945
Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. Photo credit: Meczenstwo Walka, Zaglada Zydów Polsce 1939-1945. Poland. No. 538.
Evacuation and liberation;
The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the SS in January 1945 in an attempt to hide the German crimes from the advancing Soviet troops. On January 17, 1945 Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; most of the prisoners were forced on a death march to the camp toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau). Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind; about 7,500 prisoners were liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army on January 27 1945.
The Auschwitz main camp, the Birkenau death camp and the Monowitz labor camp were liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union in the First Army of the Ukrainian Front, under the command of Marshal Koniev, on January 27, 1945.
On January 18, 1945, the three Auschwitz camps, called Auschwitz I, II and III, and the 40 satellite camps had been abandoned by the Germans. The gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, had stopped at the end of October 1944. The evacuation of the Birkenau survivors to other concentration camps in the West had already begun in early October. Anne Frank and her sister Margo were on one of the first transports out of Auschwitz, which took them to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died of typhus.
The photo above shows a few of the survivors in the main Auschwitz camp, standing near the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate. One prisoner has his arms around the neck of Soviet soldier who is wearing a fur hat. This photo was staged in early February, 1945 after the liberation, as the liberators did not have cameras with them.
After the three Auschwitz camps were liberated, the survivors were on their own. Unlike the concentration camps in Germany, where the liberated prisoners remained in the camps as Displaced Persons and were cared for by the Americans or the British, the Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners from 29 countries were released to find their own way home. Primo Levi was one of the survivors who wrote a book, later made into a movie, about his long journey home to Italy which took him many months. He describes how the Jewish prisoners were greeted with hostility in every country along the way. Binjamin Wilkomirski also describes this in his book, Fragments: "And the people outside the camp, in the countryside and the nearby town -- they didn't celebrate when they saw us."
