Lilly Zelmanovic

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Lilly Zelmanovic (born in 1926 in Hungary as Lilly Jacob , died 17th December 1999 in the United States ) was an American waitress Hungarian origin. She was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944 and was the only one in her family to survive. She became known through the chance discovery of a photo album by the SS guards , which contained photos from Auschwitz and is an important document on the Shoah .

Life

Lilly Zelmanovic was the oldest child of the Jacob family from the village of Bilky / Bilek and had five younger brothers: Moshe-Aron, Zisl, Moshe-Hersh, the twins Zril and Zeilek. Lilly's father, Martin, was a farmer and traded horses. Lilly did not experience anti-Semitism in her childhood .

In May 1944 she became a victim of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Hungary and was deported with her family to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. During the selection on the so-called “ramp” she was separated from the other members of her family, none of whom survived. She survived her imprisonment in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp . In the latter she fell ill with typhus . There in Nordhausen she was freed by American troops and taken to a hospital ward previously used by the SS for their military. On the day of her liberation, she found a photo album with photos from the Auschwitz concentration camp in the abandoned barracks. Her maiden name is often linked to this photo album from Auschwitz (such as the Lilly Jacob album).

After the war she married Max Zelmanovic, an acquaintance from the pre-war period. The sale of glass plate photographs from the album to the Jewish Museum in Prague enabled the couple to emigrate to the United States with their daughter Esther, born in 1946, in 1948. They moved to Miami . In the years that followed, it spread that Zelmanovic was in possession of the photo album, so that relatives of Shoah victims often contacted Lilly and asked to see the photos. Those who could identify a loved one were often allowed to keep the photo. However, since there were few relatives to whom this applied, this was seldom the case.

As a witness she took part in the Auschwitz Trial there with the photo collection in Frankfurt in 1963 (118th day of the trial).

After the death of her husband, she married Eric Meier from Hanover in 1978.

In 1980, Serge Klarsfeld was able to convince her to leave the album to the Yad Vashem memorial for safekeeping. She visited Jerusalem, showed it to then Prime Minister Menachem Begin and handed it over to the memorial where it is kept to this day.

Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier's name changed several times due to marriage in the post-war period (Zelmanovic, Meier; Lilly Jacob also spelled Lili ).

She died on December 17, 1999.

The photo album

The 193 photos almost all show the arrival of captured Hungarian Jews from the Carpathian Ukraine to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the early summer of 1944. Many of the people depicted, like the Jacob family, were deported in train transports from the Nazi assembly camp in Berehove / Berehovo . As far as is known to this day, it is the only photographic evidence of the arrival of a "transport of Jews" on the train in the Nazi Jewish extermination camp Auschwitz II in the "Province of Silesia" (or Upper Silesia - west of Krakow ) annexed as German after the Polish defeat. . The photographs were probably taken by members of the SS-Totenkopf-Wachmannschaft (professional photographers) on the arrival of three trains. The photos in the album show almost the entire process of a selection of Hungarian prisoners until shortly before they were killed in the gas chambers . As a result, the image quality differs significantly from the four secret shots of inmate Alex (= Alberto Errera) of the Sonderkommando of the extermination processes, which must have taken place at the same time.

Some photos from the album are obviously missing. Ms. Jacob explains this by saying that she gave away individual photographs to relatives when they saw someone from her own family in the pictures. Some photo reproductions were already used in the post-war period with your consent for exhibitions, for example in the Jewish Museum in Prague and in the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial , and were therefore available to the public before Serge Klarsfeld , Paris, published the album in 1980 and handed it over known to Yad Vashem .

See also

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zelmanovic, Lilly
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian survivors of the Nazi persecution of Jews
DATE OF BIRTH 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Hungary
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 1999
Place of death United States