The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon An Album Discovered By A Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier

Plot

Because of its content as well as its history, the publication of this book is an extraordinary event: in April 1944 a young woman named Lili Jacob (now Lili Jacob Meier) was deported with her family from Bilke, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, to Hungary. With the other Jews of Bilke, the Jacobs were sent by the Nazis first to a ghetto in the nearby town of Berehovo and, a short time later, to Auschwitz and its death camp, Birkenau. Everyone in Lili's family was slaughtered. One she survived, after being subjected to bestial treatment. Eventually Lili was sent to Dora, a Nazi slave camp four hundred miles to the west, and it was there that she and other inmates of the prison were liberated by the Americans. On that day, gravely ill, Lili fell asleep in a newly vacated German barracks. When she awakened, she searched for warm clothing and found, under a pajama top, a photograph album. She opened it and, on the very first page, saw the picture of Naftali Svi Weiss, the distinguished rabbi of Bilke. Turning the pages, LIli found, in the neatly positioned photographs, the images of the doomed Jews of Auschwitz--among them members of her own family. Now, years later, these photographs, most of which have never been published before, are made available to the general public in what is one of the century's most powerful and unique historical records. Harrowing, eerie, immensely poignant, these pictures of the German death factory and of the pained and bewildered faces of people "selected" for either slave labor or the gas chamber form what has been called "a holy document"