When, 60 years ago, Anatoly Shapiro commanded his Red Army troops to secure a concentration camp complex in Auschwitz, he had no idea he was about to discover the biggest Nazi killing machine.
"We came upon groups of people in striped uniforms. They were no more than skeletons. They were unable to talk. They had a blank look in their eyes," says the 92-year-old.
"We told them we were the Red Army and had come to free them. They began to feel our uniforms as if they didn't believe us. We washed and clothed them and began to feed them," says Mr Shapiro, whose speech was aired in Krakow during yesterday's commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.
When the advancing Soviet army reached Auschwitz only about 7,000 prisoners remained in its wooden barracks.
The rest were already marched out or dispatched by train in a desperate attempt by the Nazis to cover up evidence of the mass killings.
"We saw everything. The chambers used to gas the prisoners, ovens where the bodies were burned. We saw the piles of ash. Some of my men approached me and said, 'Major, we cannot stand this. Let's move on,'" Mr Shapiro said.
Koptev Gomolov, who was 18 when his division liberated Auschwitz, recalls that among the "starved and exhausted" prisoners he saw one waving a makeshift red flag.
"First we didn't understand. Later we found out people had sewn it from pieces of red material and cloths they found. When they heard explosions from the cannons they guessed the Red Army is coming," said Mr Gomolov.
At a tragic cost for Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz.
Three generations later, Moscow's sphere of influence over its liberated lands is diminishing, with eight post-communist states in the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and now Ukraine, after President Yushchenko's hard-fought election victory, leaning west.
"The role of the Soviet army changed quite clearly at the end of the war from that of liberator to instrument in maintaining Moscow's influence," said historian Vadim Krushinsky. - (Reuters)