Photo of Auschwitz in color: so even worse

The death of over a million people in the death camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau) is a terrible page in the history of the twentieth century. Amazing how calm and thoroughness, the Nazis documented what happened there. These pictures were taken in 1944 by an unknown SS officer, and recently fell into the hands of the colorist. Colored frames erase the difference in time...

Entire families — men, women, children line up in neat rows of five and wait for the verdict to live or die. The stream of arriving trains don't run dry, and people with yellow stars on their clothes. Some just "cull" to send to the gas chambers.

The rest are suitable for physical work — send them to sanitize, and then to a labor camp where almost all eventually will die. We have heard many times about this since childhood, but still every time this nightmare just don't fit in the head.

In anticipation of the release of 26 January 2020 new documentary Untold Auschwitz ("Auschwitz: the untold story") on the British television station Channel 4 dedicated to the 75-th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp, the photos presented here were first edited in color.

All of these images stored in one album, but in total, there were 193 photos on 56 pages. Album accidentally found 18-year-old Lili Jacob, a miracle survivor of a prisoner camp. At first, Lily and her family (they lived in the small town of Bilka in Hungary), the Nazis sent the ghetto in the Carpathians, and in may 1944, was put on a train to Auschwitz.

Parents Lily and her five brothers immediately sent to the gas chambers. The girl was taken to work in a labor camp Mittelbau-Dora (Department of Buchenwald) in Germany, where the prisoners helped to build the rockets "FAU-2".

Lily Jacob is one of those girls with their heads shaved, stands in the centre in the front row.

Lily fell ill with typhus — it happened just before the liberation of the camp. On the day of release she was hospitalized in the former barracks of the SS. And in the closet, under the pyjamas a German officer, she found the photo album. Leafing through the pages, Lily saw the picture of his two brothers — 8-year-old Israel and 10-year-old Zelig.

Speaking 20 years later at the Frankfurt process, which was conducted between 1963 and 1965 with the sole purpose to accuse the 22 Nazis who served at Auschwitz, she said:

Lily took this album with me in Bilka, where he returned after the war. Every day she went to the railway station: all hoping that someone from her family survived and come home. But none of them never returned.

Lily's brothers Israel and Zelig. They died in Auschwitz immediately upon arrival, along with his parents and three brothers.

Lily later Jacob married and my husband and I moved to Miami (USA) to start a new life away from the horrors that she experienced, and the problems of postwar Europe. But news is that she has such an album, soon spread among the survivors of Auschwitz.

Many continued to search for their missing relatives and to the last refused to believe that more will never see them. In search of answers these people from all corners of the globe came to Lily Jacob, to see the photos from the album — suddenly they find their there? If suddenly someone did know of a family member, Lily gave him this picture.

In 1980, the French lawyer and historian, a renowned Nazi hunter Serge klarsfeld convinced Lilly to give the album deposited in the Center of the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad VA-Shem. Lily Jacob died in 1999. Pictures from found her album of Auschwitz now immortalized in color.