David Dushman

David Aleksandrovich Dushman (; 1 April 19234 June 2021) was a Jewish-Soviet Red Army soldier and a fencing trainer of the Soviet Olympic team. Dushman assisted in the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in occupied Poland, and also fought in the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk during World War II.

Second World War

Dushman was a volunteer in the Red Army as a tank driver, and participated in the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk during the Second World War. He received more than forty decorations and distinctions, including the Order of the Patriotic War. In the camp, he witnessed starving people, piles of dead bodies, and later said "we threw them all our canned food and immediately went on to hunt down the fascists", but was not aware at the time of the real purpose of the camp or the scale of the atrocities. Bach added that the act was "such a deep human gesture that I will never ever forget it".

Dushman continued to visit his local fencing club to give lessons nearly every day until he was 94, according to the IOC.

Personal life

Dushman was born in Danzig on . His father was a general, sports physician, and military doctor in the Red Army, while his mother was a pediatrician. Dushman spent part of his childhood in Minsk before the family moved to Moscow, where his father had been hired to lead the medical center at the state institute for sport. His father was later deported to a Gulag north of the Arctic Circle in 1938 during the Great Purge of Joseph Stalin, where he died ten years later.

Dushman lived in Austria for a few years during the 1990s before moving to Munich. From 1996 until his death on 4 June 2021, he lived in Munich-Neuperlach, along with his wife Zoja until her death several years prior. However, there were still other liberators of the camp who were alive, including Ivan Martynushkin who lives in Moscow.