Metro

AUSCHWITZ REMEMBERED

Robyn Gorell
Special to the Jewish News

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Years After
Liberation

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>7'

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An elderly Jewish women waits for her fate near the transport train to Auschwitz.

HMC to display SS soldier's photos
revealing Nazi selection process at Auschwitz.

ighteen-year old Lili Jacob (now Lili Jacob-
Zelmanovic Meier) and her family were
among 3,500 deportees in a 1944 trans-
port sent from Hungary to Auschwitz in Poland.
After arriving at the camp, Jacob was moved 400
miles away to a Nazi Germany slave labor camp
called Dora, which was eventually liberated by the
Americans.
One day in April 1945, while searching for warm
clothing inside an abandoned German barracks
at Dora, she discovered a photo album contain-
ing images of her family and friends from that
Auschwitz transport. An SS soldier whose job it was
to take ID photos and fingerprints of the concentra-
tion camp inmates snapped the pictures.
That album is the source of a traveling exhibit,
"The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport."
The exhibit opens at the Holocaust Memorial Center
Zekelman Family Campus on Wednesday, Jan. 27, to
coincide with the 65th anniversary of the liberation
of Auschwitz.
"The Auschwitz Album" exhibit was created by
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes
Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and made
available here by the American Society for Yad
Vashem. It is the first traveling exhibit to be dis-
played at the Holocaust Memorial Center.
Lili Jacob kept the album for many years but not
hidden. She gave away some photos to survivors
who identified relatives in the photographs and
even presented testimony about the album at the
Auschwitz War Crimes Trials in Frankfurt during
the 1960s. It has often been written about. In 1980,
encouraged by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, she
donated it to Yad Vashem.
The album has 56 pages and 193 photos. The
photos document the selection process carried out
by SS doctors and wardens. Those fit to work were
sent into the camp, deloused and moved into the
barracks. The rest went to gas chambers. No killings
are shown.
Yad Vashem restored the album in 1994. The
exhibit was first presented at the United Nations
headquarters in New York in January 2005 in obser-
vance of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz.
West Bloomfield resident Rose Eizikovic Bohm
was on that particular transport. Originally from
Tacovo in Czechoslovakia, she was 15 years old
when taken from a ghetto in Hungary with her par-
ents and four siblings. As they arrived at Auschwitz
that fateful day, May 27, women and children were
sent in one direction and men and older boys in
another. One of the SS physicians supervising the
selection of prisoners was Dr. Joseph Mengele, the
"Angel of Death:' determining who would be killed
and who would become a forced laborer.
"It was a terrible day:' recalled Bohm. "We'd been
cramped together for three days on the train with
no food or drink. There was so much heartbreak,
as families were separated. Nobody knew what was
going on."

65 Years on page 16

January 21 • 2010

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