The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Jews who found themselves in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Germans attacked in 1939 were frequently deported eastwards and many died of disease and hardship. But they were not systematically exterminated. The advance of the Red Army through Ukraine and Byelorussia into the Baltic States, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany saved the remaining Jews in these lands. It was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz.
