Philatelic document - liberation of the camps 1945-2025

On July 23, 1944, the Majdanek extermination camp in occupied eastern Poland was liberated by Soviet troops. It was the first discovery of a death camp. On the western front, a similar revelation took place on November 25 with the liberation of Struthof, in annexed Alsace, by the American army. As the Allied armies advanced, thousands of concentration and extermination camps of all sizes were liberated, the last being Terezín in Czechoslovakia on May 8, 1945. The SS attempted to destroy the evidence of their crimes, dynamiting the gas chambers at Auschwitz, for example. They also threw prisoners onto the roads, starving and freezing, to reach other camps further from the front. Of the 700,000 people interned in January 1945, almost 300,000 died in the final months of the war. General Eisenhower, who visited the Ohrdruf camp on April 12, 1945, was disgusted and brought in film crews to bear witness to Nazi barbarism. Liberation was not the end of torment for the deportees. In the camps, supplies and medical care were improvised and inadequate. For fear of spreading the typhus epidemic at Bergen-Belsen, the Allies kept the deportees there for several weeks. 13,000 of them died of typhus and general exhaustion. On their return, the survivors - resistance fighters and Jewish deportees - were confronted with the difficulties of returning to normal life. This is a time for celebrating fighters and heroes rather than victims. In 2025, for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Auschwitz survivor Esther Senot calls for the transmission of memory: "There are only a handful of us left, and we're counting on you. "If the echo of their voice falters, we will perish". (Paul Éluard)

Timbre (héliogravure), document philatélique, cachet d'oblitération : création Stéphane HUMBERT-BASSET