It is with the greatest pleasure that I use this opportunity on concluding this book to thank those who helped make this volume possible. My expression of gratitude first goes to Wojciech Pπosa,
Head of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Archive, who gave generously his time whilst I sifted through many hundreds of images at the Auschwitz museum during a number of visits between 2006 and 2008.
I wish to also thank the staff of the United States Holocaust Museum. The archive has been an unfailing source; supplying me with a number of photographs that were obtained from numerous sources, including obtaining images from a rare SS photograph album of the Nazi leadership at Auschwitz. This 1944 album belonged to and was created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945. The photographs show Höcker with other SS officers in Auschwitz in the summer and autumn of 1944, and provide the reader with a new understanding of their lives and activities of the camp. Other images supplied by the United States Holocaust Museum include a photograph album known as the ‘Auschwitz album’. The original owner of the album, was Lili Jacob (later Zelmanovic Meier), who was deported with her family to Auschwitz in late May 1944 from Bilke (today: Bil’ki, Ukraine), a small town near Berehovo in Transcarpathian Rus which was then part of Hungary. They arrived on May 26, 1944, the same day that professional SS photographers photographed the arrival of the train and the selection process. After surviving Auschwitz, forced labour in Morchenstern, a Gross-Rosen subcamp, and transfer to Dora-Mittelbau where she was liberated, Lili Jacob discovered an album containing the ‘Auschwitz photographs’ in a drawer of a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks while she was recovering from typhus. After the war she brought the original album with her when she immigrated to the United States, and these images were used as part evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (in which Lili Jacob testified and in which Karl Höcker was a defendant). In 1983, Lili Jacob donated the album of photographs of her transport’s arrival in Auschwitz to the Yad Vashem Museum.
I wish also to thank my friends Chandran Sivanson and Kevin Bowden for spending time with me whilst researching at Auschwitz. A very warm thank you to Chandran for providing some of the images for this book, one of which appears on the front cover.