Jewelry, tobacco pipes, buttons, keys. Archaeologists uncovered more than 16,000 such items in the remains of Auschwitz's Crematorium III and gas chamber in 1967 -- "the last personal belongings of the Jews" led to their deaths.

But while watching an old documentary about the excavation, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum officials realized there was a problem: they had only 400 of the artifacts on record, so what happened to the rest? After a months-long search, the last living witnesses to the dig provided information that led to 48 cardboard boxes that had been tucked away at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, reports AFP.

"These were items belonging to Jews from Poland, Hungary and from across Europe. They made their way to the threshold of the gas chambers with only their personal clothes, with their tiny bags," museum director Piotr Cywinski told Reuters, calling the collection of items "a gigantic find."

"I had considered the discovery of such a huge collection in whole after nearly half a century as unlikely as finding the treasure of the lost Galleon," Cywinski added. …