Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination
center created by the Nazis,
it has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of wilful radical evil in our time.
The album you will see presented here is known as the Auschwitz album
and it is the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass
murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The album is unique, there is not a similar album
of its kind in the entire world; it documents
in photos from every direction
and from every angle the arrival at Auschwitz the selection of those slated
for immediate death and of the few who were
destined to be slave laborers.
The confiscation of their property and the
preparation for the physical annihilation of a transport of Jewish people.
This transport of Hungarian Jews from
the area of Carpathian Ruthenia arrived at the ramp of the extermination camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.
In the photos we see the men women and children
step out of the overcrowded train, traumatized
and fearful after their horrendous journey.
They have no clue that they have just been delivered to a
death factory and that few of them will survive.
Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Elie Wiesel described his arrival
as a teenager at Auschwitz
"Every yard or so an SS man held his gun trained on us hand in hand we followed
the crowd 'men to the left women to the right'
eight words spoken indifferently
without emotion, eight short simple words.
For a part of a second I glimpsed my
mother and my sister moving to the right, I saw them disappear into the distance
while I walked on with my father and the other men.
I did not know that at that
place at that moment I was parting from my mother and my sister forever."
The selection process carried out by SS doctors
and wardens took place 24 hours
a day, seven days a week as train after train unloaded its human cargo.
Most Jews were sent immediately to the left
to their death.
The undressing rooms of the
gas chambers were not sufficient for the masses
of Hungarian Jews who arrived daily in the summer of 1944.
They therefore had to wait until the
undressing rooms were ready to absorb them.
The common waiting place was the
grove closest to the crematorium that would soon turn their bodies to ash.
They were told to sit among the trees and
wait for further instructions.
These were their last peaceful moments together
before being driven into the gas chambers and murdered.
It has been said that there will never be people as
innocent as the victims on the threshold of the gas chambers.
The SS kept the
victims destined for gassing in complete ignorance of what lay in store for them,
they were told that before being placed in
the camp they had to be disinfected and washed.
They would soon discover that what they had assumed where the shower
areas were actually hermetically sealed gas chambers.
A minority of Jews was selected for forced
labor; their personal belongings
were confiscated, their hair was shaved and a registration number was tattooed
on their left arm.
In the words of survivor and author Primo Levi,
"For the first time we became aware that our language
lacks words to express this
offense, the demolition of a man, it is not possible to sink lower than this.
Nothing belongs to us anymore, they have taken
away our clothes, our Shoes, even our hair,
if we speak they will not listen to us and if they listen
they will not understand.
They will even take away our name and if we want to
keep it we will have to find in ourselves
the strength to do so.
It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term extermination camp."
The work of sorting the positions that the
Jews brought with them to
Auschwitz was done by Jewish prisoners who were forced to collect the packages
and sort the items that would then be sent to the Reich.
By the time the sorting was completed most
of the previous owners were already dead.
No memory of the men, women and children that
were deemed valueless upon their arrival remains in camp records.
This album is the sole witness to their fate.
The Auschwitz album was discovered after the
war by Lilly Jacob, a survivor of the
transports pictured here.
Lilly gave the album to Yad Vashem where she knew that
it's tragic contents would be safeguarded
for posterity and shared with generations to come.