The word “celebrate” can mean different things. We can mark bright moments with unrestrained joy, and we can be thankful that some dark chapters ended before they became worse. In that vein, today marks 70 years since the Soviet Red Army marched into the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland and liberated around 7,500 survivors of the Nazis’ hell on earth on January 27, 1945. For a million or more others, the day came too late.

The number of people killed at Auschwitz has been debated. The Nazis intentionally made it impossible to tell for sure by burning corpses and mixing the ashes. The Soviets initially claimed four million, but this was probably anti-Nazi propaganda (not that any was needed). One camp commandant testified he was told the number was over 2.5 million, but later said he doubted the number, noting “Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities.” A widely-accepted historical range is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million deaths, or about one in six of all people killed in the Holocaust. (The fact that the argument centers around how many millions the number should stop at places the exact figure in its grim context.)

However many were murdered there, it’s likely that around 90% of them were Jewish, with the remainder made up of gypsies, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet POW’s, Polish resisters, and various other unfortunates. Their lives at Auschwitz were as horrific as their deaths. The gates to the main camp (by the end, Auschwitz was a network of three primary camps and 45 satellite camps) displayed the motto "Arbeit macht frei,” which mockingly promised “Work makes you free.” This twisted promise was true, in a sense. For many inmates at Auschwitz, the only route to “freedom” was to work until they dropped from disease or starvation. When this cruelty became too inefficient, the gas chambers were installed to help facilitate Hitler’s “final solution” at a much brisker clip. Life expectancy for inmates at one of the main camps was about three months. Some escaped work only to fall into the hands of Josef Mengele and his grisly medical experiments, which were too cruel to describe here.

The Allies were not unaware of the horrors, or at least they had no excuse to be. Reports of the Nazi camps, including the gas chambers (often disguised as showers to put the inmates at ease) had leaked out of Poland for years before the Red Army arrived, but were frequently dismissed as exaggerations. Maybe it was hard to believe that anyone, even the Nazis, was capable of such cruelty. When the Soviets got close, the Nazis forced about 58,000 remaining inmates to march out of Auschwitz, with many dying on the march. Those left behind were too weak to leave. The Soviets found thousands of survivors, including the children pictured here. They also found an array of grotesque souvenirs left by the Nazis, including over 8 tons of human hair.

Auschwitz has been converted into a memorial, and today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day in honor of its discovery. The survivors of Auschwitz did what they could to return to life and tell their stories. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which he described his ability to find meaning in the darkest circumstances. Elie Wiesel refused to talk or write about his experiences at Auschwitz for a decade before finally writing his memoirs and becoming an activist for peace. Primo Levi wrote “The Periodic Table,” connecting his experiences in the camp with his love of chemistry.

If the Soviets hadn’t made it to Auschwitz when they did, there’s no telling how many books never would have been written, how many speeches never would have been heard, and how many sunrises never would have fallen on the faces of its survivors. We can’t throw a party today…but it is an anniversary worth celebrating.

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