On 15 March 1945, the SS set up the only women’s subcamp of the Mittelbau concentration camp in the village of Gross-Werther near Nordhausen. Two restaurants there served as lodgings for approximately 300 Jewish women from a Gross-Rosen subcamp. One of those women was the 18-year-old Lili Jacob.

Lili Jacob contracted typhus and was admitted to the inmate infirmary at the Dora parent camp. After the camp’s liberation, she discovered a photo album containing some 200 photos in an abandoned SS accommodation. The SS had photographed several selections of Hungarian Jews on the station ramp after their arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.

Now Lili Jacob found herself holding a copy of the album brought to the Southern Harz Mountains by an unknown SS man. She recognized herself and members of her family in some of the photos. She was the only one of them to have survived.

 

(Marvin Keitel)

 

References:

Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.), Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp 1943–1945: Companion Volume to the Permanent Exhibition at the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial, Göttingen 2011.

Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman (eds.), The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport, Jerusalem and Oswiecim 2008.