In May 1944, a Hungarian Jewish woman Lili Jacob Meier was sent to Auschwitz along with her family and community. She was selected for labor, but almost everyone else in the group she was in were sent to the gas chambers for extermination.
Lili was imprisoned at Auschwitz for several months before being sent to several different camps and finally Dora Concentration Camp in Central Germany, where she was eventually liberated in 1945.
After regaining her health from a year of brutal conditions, Lili ventured into a former SS barrack. In there she discovered in a cupboard a photo-album of Auschwitz with pictures of her and her family on the day she arrived at the camp.
The photo-album Lili Jacob Meier discovered is now known as the Auschwitz Album, and is the one of the only known pictorial evidence of the extermination process at Auschwitz, with over 193 different photographs.
It is not known who took the photographs, all that is known is that they were likely taken from a vantage point to keep track of the rate in which prisoners entered the camp, but even these theories have not been verified. It is likely that the photos were taken over a period of several days in spring 1944, during the Nazis' extermination of Hungary's Jews.
What is fascinating that not only did Lili discover photos of herself and her family when they arrived at Auschwitz, she also discovered them in a camp more than 400 miles (640 Kilometers) away from Auschwitz, and that the pictures were very detailed in showing the extermination process at the camp, especially since the Nazis were extremely adamant about destroying all evidence of their crimes.
Lili privately kept the album for several years until in the 1960s during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of former SS officials, in which she used them as evidence against the defendants. She then donated the Auschwitz Album to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel to teach others about the Holocaust and warn against the evil humanity can commit.