Zypora Frank is coming to terms with the discovery that she is the heir to a place called Auschwitz

By LISA BEYER /JERUSALEM

any families have secrets. For most of her life, Zypora Frank could only guess at her mother's. "She was there for me always, but in a remote way, never soul to soul," says Zypora of her mother, a Holocaust survivor. "With her, it was, 'Don't come too close to me. I can't talk about it.' But I didn't know what the 'it' was."

Zypora's mother, Rifka Jacoby, took the mystery to her grave in 1991, but she left behind clues. Zypora, 63, a retired schoolteacher living in Hadera in central Israel, has doggedly traced that evidence to its horrifying conclusion: through her inheritance from her mother, Zypora is an owner of Auschwitz, the largest death camp of the Holocaust.

Zypora's odyssey began in Israel in 1987 when for the first time she decided to return to Poland, which her family had fled twice, once in 1939 just ahead of the Germans, and again to escape postwar anti-Semitism. In an effort to dissuade her from going, her parents showed her a set of yellowed papers documenting the properties in Poland owned by Rifka's late father, a prosperous businessman named Josef Melzer. They included a plot--a crude map of it inked in by hand--whose location was marked as Birkenau, where Melzer had run a tar shingle factory before the war. "My parents said they were afraid for my safety, in part because of this inheritance," says Zypora.

Undeterred, she traveled to Poland, even visiting the remains of the Birkenau concentration camp, where she was overtaken by a sick fantasy that the Nazis got the idea for their crematoria from the two huge pots her grandfather had used to boil tar. After she returned to Israel, she wrote her parents a 27-page letter about her experiences in Poland. Their response was utter silence. "It was a taboo in our family to talk about it," says Zypora.

When her parents died, three months apart, Zypora and her brother Shaul found an Israeli court order transferring the deeds to the property in Poland to their names. Says Zypora, "It was as if to say, go and find it." The motivation for that journey came only after Zypora's husband, Yitzhak Frank, a businessman, died in 1995, leaving her with a sense of purposelessness. A year later, a friend put her in touch with a film crew from Britain's Granada TV.

With the crew, Zypora again returned to Poland. As recorded in the film, Witness: Owning Auschwitz, Zypora discovered step by step that her grandfather's land was actually part of the Auschwitz camp, which included the facility called Birkenau. At the Auschwitz museum, researchers produced aerial photographs taken by U.S. warplanes showing how the Germans had built a munitions factory over what had been her grandfather's plant. The factory, Zypora learned, was staffed by female Jewish slave laborers, many of whom died in the horrific conditions of Auschwitz. "The Birkenau connection, I lived with," says Zypora. "But Auschwitz, I can't. Auschwitz is the Holocaust. The word, it means the Holocaust. When I learned the truth, I came apart, and I am still in pieces."

Still, Zypora is trying to bring some meaning to her legacy. For one thing, she has a new understanding of her late mother. When in 1946 Zypora's family returned to Poland from the Soviet Union, where they'd spent the war, they learned that her mother's entire extended family in Poland, including Josef Melzer, had been killed at Auschwitz. "She was consumed by guilt because she fled, she survived," says Zypora. "Now I understand it was that period that changed her, that made her withdrawn and silent, and not singing any more." Zypora knows from her father that her parents visited the Auschwitz camp. And the documents show that her mother paid property taxes on Josef Melzer's land, in order to have it registered in her name.

Zypora thinks her mother made a mistake keeping her story secret, and she is trying to undo the silence. "We should tell again and again the story of the Holocaust to prevent it happening again," she says. "It's why I did the film. I thought that people could identify with a personal story much more than with a national story." After the film aired in April, Zypora, who was visiting Britain, was stopped on the street by people who'd seen it. "They'd say, 'For the first time the Holocaust was more clear to me.'"

As a result of press coverage, Zypora has heard from an Israeli cousin on her mother's side whom she didn't know existed; the cousin has promised a picture of Josef Melzer, as Zypora has none. Zypora also received a letter from a grandson of Melzer's business partner who lives in America. Together, they are petitioning to have the property in Auschwitz recognized by the Polish authorities as theirs; the Poles consider it government land. Zypora is seeking compensation for other properties that Melzer owned but won't take money for the Auschwitz land. "I don't want anything, no compensation, just that it will be in our names," she says. Not that that will bring Zypora peace. "I don't know what it would take to come to terms with this inheritance," she says. "I am still digesting it."