The Auschwitz Album. The Story of a Transport

This album is unique in the fact that there is no similar album of its kind in the entire world. It documents, in almost 200 photos, from every direction and from every angle, the arrival, selection, confiscation of property, and preparation for the physical liquidation of a Jewish "transport" to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This particular transport arrived in May 1944, at the ramp of the Birkenau extermination camp; it had originated in the area of Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region that had been annexed, in 1939, to Hungary from Czechoslovakia. The most surprising and striking fact is that the album, documenting the dispatch of a Jewish transport of deportees in the spring of 1944, eventually fell into the hands of a survivor of that same death transport. She was one of the few lucky ones who had escaped the fate of the thousands who were murdered. When she opened the album, she suddenly recognized the people of her community who appear in it and who had arrived with her in Birkenau - among them, her rabbi and numerous family relatives - and also she herself!