Prisoners were marched out of Auschwitz on January 18th & 19th 1945, at which time the Soviet Army had begun to shell the camp. On January 20th the SS begin killing many of the people left behind and destroying the crematoria. Soviet troops arrived in the afternoon of January 27th, freeing 7,000 survivors. Auschwitz was liberated by the 100th Soviet rifle division, & Monowitz by the 107th division.

At this point, American troops were on the other side of Europe, they had not crossed the Rhine and were nowhere near Poland. So it seems that your relative did not meet a Black American soldier in the woods outside Auschwitz, but for a moment let’s consider whether it’s possible he met a Black Soviet soldier:

While there were a few rare Afro-Russians in Imperial Russia, such as Pushkin’s ancestor Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the early days of the Soviet Union also saw a limited number of Black people move to the USSR. Almost all of them were African Americans or Afro-Caribbeans who came to the country because they interested in the political changes taking place in Russia. The Soviets felt that accepting people of different races could be a point of pride for their new society, and the black visitors appreciated the respect offered by their Soviet hosts, not to mention the lack of blatant Jim Crow discrimination they were used to back home. A very small number of Black Americans such as Robert Robinson, Homer Smith, & Otto Hall lived in the USSR through the Stalinist period and World War II (and some others like Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson visited during the pre-war period). But, according to Matusevich (see references): ”By the outbreak of World War II, the majority of black sojourners had left the Soviet Union, leaving a smattering of mixed-blood descendants, many of whom would consititute the core of a small but significant diasporic community of black Russians”.

So perhaps, maybe, one of these early Black American immigrants to the USSR had a son born circa 1925 who joined the Red Army and was present at the liberation of Auschwitz in the 100th or 107th infantry division, and your relative escaped from the Nazis, and he happened to run into this extremely rare Black Soviet soldier. But, considering that the SS guards were still in charge of the camp on the 18th & 19th of January as the prisoners were being marched out, and they were looking for any excuse to shoot remaining prisoners, and the Soviet Army was still a few miles/km away on those days, it seems unlikely that your relative is remembering this story correctly.

References: Hilberg, Raul (1961). “The Destruction of the European Jews”, p.982 - 983

Matusevich, Maxim (2008). “Black in the U.S.S.R.”, Transition, (100),