The Auschwitz album : a book based upon an album discovered by a concentration camp survivor, Lili Meier
(Book)

A powerful visual presentation of the extermination process at Auschwitz is viewed through candid photographs of its victims.

This album, an extraordinary find, was originally discovered during the tumult of the first days after the liberation. It reveals how two SS photographers documented the arrival of shipments of Jews to the platform in the Birkenau concentration camp, the selection process, and their path to the gas chambers and the crematoria. The photographs also memorialize the piles of possessions left by the Jews which were sorted in the 'Canada' Barracks. They are accompanied by three articles that describe the development of the camp, the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, and the story of how the album was found; a fourth focuses on the camera as a historical tool. The 189 pictures, arranged in chronological order and reproduced in this album for the first time, are unusually powerful, not least because 70% of the people shown have been identified. -- Publisher description

"It was a magic touch on behalf of the angel of history or a simple miracle, that a rare photographic document like the "Auschwitz Album" survived, and was donated to the photo archives of Yad Vashem." "This Album is unique: there is not a similar album of its kind in the whole world. It documents, in about two hundred photos from every direction and from every angle, the process of arrival, the enlisting, the selection, the confiscation of property and the preparation for the physical liquidation of a Jewish transport. This Transport came from the area of Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, and arrived at the ramp of the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on May 1944. The most surprising and striking fact is that the Album fell into the hands of a survivor of that same death transport. Lili Jacob opened an album and suddenly recognized the people of her community, who arrived with her to the platform of Birkenau: her rabbi, her numerous family relatives and...herself."--BOOK JACKET.

English.