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'Holy Document' of Auschwitz Found
New York Times August 14, 1980 By JO THOMAS Special to The New York Times MIAMI, Aug. 13 — It is an album filled with photographs of people on the edge of death, the new Jewish arrivals at Auschwitz in 1944. A young survivor found the album and, in it, her own photograph and those of her parents, grandparents and little brothers, now all dead. She kept the album for 36 years. It was not until three weeks ago that Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi hunter, found Lili Jacob, now Mrs. Eric Meier, a waitress in Miami Beach, and told her the album was, in his words, "a holy document" containing all but three of the known photographs of the Jews at Auschwitz. A number of photographs that Mrs. Meier sold from her album to the Jewish Museum in Prague in 1946 to get money to emigrate to the United States have been reproduced in books all over the world, Mr. Klarsfeld said in a telephone interview today. But the existence of the album itself had not been known. The album is also significant, he said, because it shows that all the Auschwitz photographs, taken by an unknown official of the S.S. (Nazi elite guard), were made in 1944. Previously, he said, historians believed they were taken over a period of years. Mrs. Meier has agreed to give the album to the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel in a ceremony Aug. 25. Closing the Past "A stone will come off my heart,".she said this morning. "I want to close the past," she said, looking at a stack of copies of the photographs in the album, which will remain in a bank vault until her departure. "I felt this was all I had left. I never thought of parting with it. But I'm feeling relieved that I'm doing the right thing." She was 17 when she arrived at Auschwitz. Her family had lived in Bilki, a town then in Czechoslovakia and now in the Soviet Union. Her father was a cattle dealer. One day the whole family was told to gather a few things to go to a resettlement camp. The cattle cars took them instead to the death camp. When her family was divided up by the guards, "three brothers went to the left with my father and the two youngest went to the right with my mother." She went on: "Me, they selected out. I looked like I would work. I ran back to my mother. The guard noticed me and ran back He beat names. He stabbed me in the arm with a bayonet. I never saw my parents again." She testified against the guard in a 1964 trial in a German court in Frankfurt, and she still bears the scar of the bayonet wound on her arm. The tattoo she was given on May 9, 1944, was erased many years later in Miami Beach after she won a contest on the television program "Queen for a Day." She asked for a plastic surgeon to remove the tattoo, and it was done. Knew Her Tattoo Number When Mr. Klarsfeld rang her doorbell last month, he knew the tattoo number. It was one of the reasons Mrs Meier changed her mind about being afraid to open her door. On the day Auschwitz was liberated by Allied troops in December 1944, Lili Jacob was ill with typhus, lying in a camp hospital. was weak and I passed out. Two of my friends carried me into a deserted German barracks. "It was very cold. When I woke up, was freezing. I saw a nightstand and reached for a pajama jacket. The album was underneath. When my friends came back, we looked in it and we found a picture of the rabbi who married my parents. Then I found a picture of my two brothers." The photograph shows Selig Jacob then 10 years old, and Zrilu, then 8 and a half, a star pinned to his coat, the faces of both boys serious and uncertain. Another photograph, on a page labeled in elegant script, "No More Capable Men," shows old people near a boxcat. One man with a white beard was the grandfather. A woman lying on the ground was her grandmother. Lili Jacob was in the front row of another picture showing a crowd of young women in ill'fitting dresses, their heads shaved. There are dozens of other pictures, some taken twice, as if the photographer wanted to be sure he was not out of focus pregnant women walking to their deaths, old women and young children waiting outside the ovens in a pleasant grov chosen so they would not be alarmed. The photographer is not known. Mr. Klarsfeld said today that he believed it was Ernst Hofmann, a teacher by profession, who had become assistant to the chief of the identification service at Auschwitz. When she left the camp, Lili Jacob took the album with her. She married Max Zelmanovic, a childhood friend who had also survived the Camps. Penniless, she sold some of the photographs in Prague in 1946 so she could come to the Unite States. When she arrived in New York in 1948, she had the album in her arms. She has worked as a waitress at the Famous Restaurant in Miami Beach for 2 years, and the years have brought twice children and three grandsons. Mr. Zelmanovic died three years ago and she has remarried. The walls of her home are hung with color photographs of smiling children but she also treasures the black and white pictures of people who do not smile -people who were caught for a moment before they vanished. Finally, she is read; to let them go. "I am happily married. I have a good job. I have nice people to work for," sh |
