Auschwitz was enormous. Our gaze followed the walls for miles. We began to see groups of thin people when we reached the fence. They approached us dressed in stripes. After being in such hell, constantly threatened by death, they were worn out and exhausted, their skin blackened. They were dressed in all sorts of different ways: one wore only a tunic, another had only a coat, and others were covered only by a blanket. The only thing you could see were their big eyes, which reflected a kind of joy that I have never seen in a person in my life: they knew they were going to be freed, the joy that hell was over and they had managed to stay alive.

At first, when we saw the ovens, our first thought was, “So they have crematoria for the corpses.” We thought that people had died and they didn’t want to bury them all… But when we asked the people at the camp more questions, we saw the degree of evil and brutality to which those people had been subjected, and then we knew immediately that those ovens were specially built to kill people, to burn those who had been gassed. It was a structure of systematic murder.

What did I feel when I saw these people in the camp? I felt an emotional impact, a lot of compassion, sorrow, and pity. I quickly understood how these people’s fate had unfolded because I could have ended up in the same situation as them. I fought in the Soviet Army, I could have been taken prisoner, and the Nazis could have thrown me into that camp too. I will never forget the looks on those people’s faces. I felt that humanity was restored when we liberated them.

Source -> https://xcancel.com/DaniMayakovski/status/2016528849916379285#m