Israel (9) and Zelig (11) Jacob on the ramp in Birkenau. USHMM #77218
May to June 2024 marks 80 years since the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators deported Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. 424,000 Jews from provincial Hungary were killed in the space of eight weeks. In late May – that is, exactly 80 years ago – unknown Nazi perpetrators at Birkenau took photographs of some of the Hungarian arrivals. The collection of photos subsequently became known as The Auschwitz Album.
May to June 2024 marks 80 years since the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators deported Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. 424,000 Jews from provincial Hungary were killed in the space of eight weeks. In late May – that is, exactly 80 years ago – unknown Nazi perpetrators at Birkenau took photographs of some of the Hungarian arrivals. The collection of photos subsequently became known as The Auschwitz Album.
One Day in May 1944: The Auschwitz Album
Dr Jaime Ashworth
On May 24, 1944, a transport numbering approximately 3,500 people left the Berehovo Ghetto in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a territory of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hungary in the late 1930s. Two days later, on May 26, the transport arrived on the railway siding inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
It was a hot day: photographs show sun glinting off the faces and hair of the deportees as they waited to find out where they were. The transport was arranged into two columns, one of men, the other of women and children, five people per row. An SS doctor proceeded to select the Jews either for immediate death in the gas chambers or more prolonged death through starvation and forced labour. The number of Jews selected for forced labour is unknown; photographs suggest that perhaps 300 were chosen, about 10% of the total. Women, children, the elderly and infirm were killed.
After selection, those selected for forced labour went to registration facilities in Birkenau. Those selected for the gas chambers also made their way through the camp, mostly it seems to Crematoria IV and V in the woods beyond the camp, though other images suggest that some were sent to Crematoria II and III, visible in some images at the end of the siding.
Those who went to Crematoria IV and V had to wait in the woods which hid the gas chambers from view. A bottleneck developed as people were killed faster than the bodies could be disposed of. The photographers who had been recording this process did not stop as the deportees waited. The scenes might be from picnics or summer outings: only the few images showing distress indicate that perhaps the smoke rising from the chimneys, and the sound of the screams, had reached them.
The photographs were taken by two SS men from the Erkennungsdienst (Camp Identification Service). An inmate assigned to work there remembered developing them and putting them in the album itself.
Why they were taken is unknown. Albums of photographs were a common practice among the perpetrators. It is striking that the one absent aspect of the process otherwise so faithfully recorded is the actual process of murder. Was this album intended to recall what a similar collection from Treblinka termed The Good Old Days?
The album was discovered in Spring 1945 in Buchenwald. We don’t know how it got there. A just-liberated young woman, Lilli Jacob, was searching for food in an SS barrack. Finding the album, she opened it to see the transport she had been on a year earlier. Her brothers, Israel and Zelig, looked back at her from the ramp.
Lilli took the album and shared images with fellow survivors and researchers. In the 1960s, she testified at the trial of Auschwitz SS in Frankfurt. In 1980, Lilli donated the album to Yad Vashem. Lilli died in 1999. The photos she found continue to be some of the most important and recognisable images of the Holocaust that killed her family and millions of others.
Dr Jaime Ashworth is G2G’s historical expert and advisor. His PhD concerned the use of the Auschwitz Album in Holocaust museums.