In October of 1986, during a tour of Auschwitz, Ann Weiss made a remarkable discovery: She came across over 2,400 photographs depicting Jewish deportees and their families from across Eastern Europe. These pictures evidently belonged to a trainload or prisoners arriving in 1943 and were among the few valued personal possessions they had been able to salvage from home Rather miraculously the photographs survived and remained hidden virtually forgotten in the archives of Auschwitz for over forty years.Weiss spent a decade traveling the world in an effort to uncover traces of the people depicted in the photographs and research their personal histories. Following every possible lead she was able to identify many of them and track down friends, relatives and survivors in Europe Israel and America slowly piecing together lives destroyed by the Holocaust. This volume represents a selection of over 400 images and the stories behind them showing those portrayed "as they were in life, not as the victims they became in death."