In the early 1950s, word spread among Holocaust survivors that a waitress in South Miami Beach had a unique photo album which contained pictures of Jews taken as they got off the train at Auschwitz.
So they sought her out, hoping that pictures of lost family — parents, grandparents, little brothers and sisters — might be among them.
And, for a time, hardly a week went by without Lili Jacob bringing someone home from the restaurant to pore over the pictures in the album and weep for what had been lost.
Most of the time, the people would leave disappointed; but if someone found a picture of family, Lili would give it to them.
‘Here he is on his last day,’ they would say.
Lili understood the need and the pain. The album contained pictures of her parents, her grandparents, her little brothers, her neighbors and her rabbi.
The Nazis had come to Lili’s town of Bilke, in the Carpathian Mountains of Czechoslovakia, in April 1944, when she was then eighteen.
Lili and her family were ordered out of their house and sent to the yard of the town synagogue with the other Jewish families of their neighborhood. Later, they went to a Jewish ghetto, where they slept on the floor of a brick factory.
Then, in May 1944, came the three-day trip to Auschwitz in the cattle car of a long train.
When the Jews of Bilke arrived at Auschwitz, professional SS photographers were standing on the train platform. They photographed the arrival of the train and the selection process, where healthy teenagers and young adults were chosen for forced labor and all the rest were sent to the gas chambers.
On the platform, Lili was singled out from everyone else in her family. As the others were marched away, she was led into the camp, registered as a prisoner and given a number tattoo.
Lili:
"I was standing next to my mother as they were sorting us. The German came over and put me in the working group. But he noticed that I ran away, back to my mother. He stuck me in my arm with his bayonet and he said, 'You're in a concentration camp and you'd better behave or you'll be shot on the spot.' Then my mother marched away, and my father, and my five brothers. I never saw them again."
For the next six months, Lili cleaned the camp toilets, subsisting on a slice of bread and a cup of water in the morning and barley soup and bread at night.
After transfers to other labor camps, Lili was sent to a Buchenwald subcamp in late 1944, where she contracted typhus. She was placed in a camp hospital for treatment.
One day in December 1944, camp prisoners heard English being spoken in the camp streets. They rushed out into the streets to see the liberating soldiers, then ran into the Nazi barracks to confirm that the Nazis had really fled.
Lili, still weakened from typhus, fainted; and her camp friends laid her on an empty bed in the Nazi barracks.
The day was cold, and so Lili reached for a pajama jacket laying on a nightstand near the bed.
And there, underneath the jacket, lay the beautiful brown photo album. It was entitled The Downfall of the Jews from Hungary.
Lili opened it and looked at the pictures. There were 192 of them. They had been taken on the day she had arrived at Auschwitz with her family and the other Jews of Bilke.
There were photos of her parents and grandparents, her rabbi and neighbors, and a photo of two of her little brothers.
In the back of the album, she found a photo of herself, her head shorn of her long, dark hair, standing with other bald girls in front of a building at Auschwitz.
The pictures are in sequence, from arrival to crematorium, and display the barbarous efficiency of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
When the war ended, Lili went back to Bilke and waited at the train station every day in hopes that someone from her family would return.
But no one did; so Lili immigrated to America, bringing the photo album with her.
In 1980, Lili traveled to Israel and showed the album to Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
It is now in the museum of Yad Vashem, a Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Her album is the only photographic evidence of Jews arriving at a death camp and the Nazi selection process.
But what is not shown in the album is the slow, methodical process which culminated in the extermination of European Jews.
Eleven years separate the date of Nazi Germany’s first anti-Jewish actions in 1933 and Lili’s 1944 arrival at Auschwitz.
In those intervening years, step by step, Jews were singled out, ostracized from society, stripped of their property, forced to emigrate, then sent to concentration camps.
All the while, German propaganda convinced people that Jews were the enemy of the people, creating passive acceptance for harsh anti-Jewish measures while depicting Hitler as the protector of western civilization.
So, dare to look around.
See the echoes of the past.
America is now building camps.
What do you think will happen next?
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
https://www.yadvashem.org/
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