The Prisoners Who Hid from Freedom

On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers pushed through the gates of Auschwitz. They expected to find the dead. Instead, they found seven thousand survivors — skeletal, hollow-eyed, wrapped in thin blankets against the Polish winter. The soldiers called out that liberation had come. The war, for them, was over. But many prisoners did not move. Some crouched behind bunks. Others pressed themselves against walls, trembling.…