She sat down on the bed to leaf through it.

She was horrified by what she saw.

She flipped through page after page of simple, yet striking, ink-and-watercolour drawings that detail the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of the Second World War.

Arrival, enslavement, torture, death -- the 30 pictures exposed the worsening nightmare through the artist's eye.

Scholars who have seen it call it historically unique and an artistic treasure.

As a child, Klages didn't know what to make of the book. Now, she finally wants to make the album public.

But it wasn't her father who drew the chilling images. So who did?

Only Klages' father, Arnold Unger, could know. Unger brought the album back from Dachau when he immigrated to the U.S. on a ship with more than 60 Holocaust orphans. He committed suicide in 1972.

Klages' only clue was a signature at the bottom of several drawings: Porulski.

Klages, 47, has started a quest to find out who Porulski was, and why her family became the custodian of his remarkable wartime legacy.

With help from The Associated Press, a remarkable tale of Holocaust survival has unfolded.

But Klages still wants to know how her Polish Jewish father, a 15-year-old newcomer to Dachau, ended up with the artwork of a Polish Roman Catholic more than twice his age, who had been in concentration camps through most of the war.

None of the records Klages found confirmed the two men knew each other, even though they lived in adjacent blocks in Dachau.

All that's certain is Unger's stay overlapped with Porulski's during the three weeks the boy spent among nearly 30,000 inmates of Dachau's main camp.

"He never talked about his experiences in the war," said Klages. "I don't recall specifically ever being told about the album, or actually learning that I was the child of a Holocaust survivor."

As adults, Klages and her three siblings took turns holding onto the album and Unger's other wartime memorabilia.

The album opens with an image of four prisoners in winter coats carrying suitcases and marching toward Dachau's watchtower under the rifles of SS guards.

It's followed by a scene of two inmates being stripped for a humiliating examination by a kapo, a prisoner working for the Nazis.

In one image, two prisoners stop work to tip their caps to a soldier escorting a prostitute.

Another shows a leashed dog lunging at a terrified inmate.

The drawings grow more and more debasing.

Three prisoners hang by their arms tied behind their backs; a captured escapee is paraded wearing a sign, "Hurray, I am back again"; and, in the final image, a man lies on the ground, shot dead next to the barbed-wire fence under the watchtower.

The album also contains 258 photographs. Some are copies of well-known, haunting images of piles of victims' bodies taken by the U.S. army that liberated the camp. Others are photographs, apparently taken for Nazi propaganda, portraying Dachau as an idyllic summer camp. Others still are personal snapshots of Unger with Polish refugees or with American soldiers.

Director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Barbara Distel, said Porulski probably drew the pictures shortly after the camp's liberation in April 1945. She said he "would never have dared" to draw such horrors while he was under Nazi gaze.

Holocaust artwork has turned up before, but Distel and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum say they are unaware of any sequential narrative of camp life comparable to Porulski's.

In 2005, Klages showed the book in a neighbour, Avi Hoffman, who was director the National Center for Jewish Cultural Arts. Hoffman immediately recognized its importance and was determined to help Klages uncover its background.

In August, Klages, Hoffman and Berenbaum went to Germany to start their quest for the mysterious artist. They took a film crew with them, hoping a movie would help finance a foundation to exhibit the book.

Their first discovery came at the Dachau memorial, outside Munich, where they found a 1941 arrival record for Michal Porulski, whose profession was listed as artist.

They also learned that Klages' father hid the fact he was Jewish when he reached Dachau three weeks before the war ended. "That probably saved his life," said Hoffman.

It also seemed likely that the album's binding was made from the recycled leather of an SS officer's uniform.

Research by Klages' group and the AP has started to pull together the scattered threads of Porulski's life, with the help of long-forgotten records at a various Holocaust museums, the Red Cross and immigration records.

After completing two years of army service, Porulski enrolled in the Warsaw arts academy in 1934 .

His application says he was a farmer's son, born June 20, 1910, in the town of Rychwal, Poland. Chronically poor, he left the academy after failing to get a loan for his tuition. He was later reinstated.

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he made some money painting watercolour postcards of Nazi-occupied Poland, two of which have survived and are now in the Warsaw Museum of Caricature.

In June 1940, he was arrested in a Nazi roundup.

Two months later, he and 1,500 others were the first Poles to be shipped from Warsaw to Auschwitz. He spent eight months there, then was sent to the Neuengamme camp and finally to Dachau in May 1941.

In Dachau, he painted portraits, flowers, folk dance scenes and decoration for a clandestine theatre.

In 1949, he sailed to Australia and tried to work as a painter and decorator but mostly lived off friends.

He returned to Europe in 1963 and lived in England and France. He visited Poland in the early 1970s for several months and stayed with family.

He brought his sister paintings of Dachau, his niece, Danuta Ostrowska, now 75, recalled. But her mother threw them away, saying "I can't look at them." The family still owns 10 of his mostly pre-war paintings.

Porulski was robbed of his money and passport, and Poland's Communist authorities wanted him out of the country, a relative, Malgorzata Stozek, recalls. "My mother even found a woman willing to marry him, to help him stay in Poland," she said. But he had already borrowed money from his sister and left.

His letters from England said he found work maintaining bridges, said Stozek.

"He lived in terrible poverty," said Stozek, adding that he became so lonely that he thought about killing himself.

In 1978, he sent a request for war compensation to the International Tracing Service in Germany.

"I have no occupation of any sort," he wrote. "I was unable to resume my studies after all those years in the camps. I am just by myself, and I live from day to day."

The ITS replied that it had no authority to give grants, but was sending confirmation of his incarceration to the United Nations refugee agency to support his earlier reparations claim.

The lives of Porulski and Unger, briefly intertwined by the Holocaust and an album of photos and paintings, ended 17 years apart.

Unger hanged himself in 1972, while Porulski died of pneumonia and tuberculosis in 1989 at a hospital in England.

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