Mary Berg, a Polish Jewish teenager who wrote one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the Nazi genocide to be published in English, has long been something of a mystery in the annals of Holocaust literature.

Her diary recounting her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto, serialized in U.S. newspapers in 1944 and released as a book in 1945, won wide praise and turned the author, who had escaped to the United States in March 1944 at the age of 19, into a prominent campaigner on behalf of Hitler’s Jewish victims. But by the early 1950s, the book, "Warsaw Ghetto," had fallen out of print, and she disappeared from public view, refusing to speak with researchers and sometimes denying that she had written the diary at all.

Now a trove of Berg’s albums and scrapbooks has surfaced, promising to shed light on the enigmatic life of a woman sometimes described as an Anne Frank before Anne Frank. The material was set to be sold at Doyle New York, the Manhattan auction house, on Nov. 24, but on Monday afternoon, Doyle canceled the auction after relatives, contacted by a reporter from The New York Times, inquired about the sale.

The cache contains photographs of Berg’s family life in Poland, including a handful of images in what appears to be the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as material documenting her early years in the United States, where she was both a speaker at rallies and forums and an ordinary young woman, striking modellike poses on the beach.

Before the sale was canceled, some scholars had expressed concern that a public auction risked fueling a commercial market for Holocaust-related collectibles, compromising the mission of keeping evidence of the Nazi genocide in accessible archives. Rachael B. Goldman, an assistant professor of history at the College of New Jersey and a Judaica consultant for the auction house Bonhams, said news of the Doyle auction had provoked "an enormous amount of shock."

"What’s to stop people from coming out of the woodwork with other things that are extremely sensitive?" Goldman said. "This could set a tragic precedent of less Holocaust material being put in archives and instead ending up in private hands — including the wrong private hands, I might add."

The Berg material, which carried an estimated value of $4,000 to $6,000, came to light last spring after a part-time antiques seller in York, Pennsylvania, where Berg died in 2013, bought it for $10 at an unidentified estate sale, according to a report in June in the online magazine Tablet. (The antiques seller, identified by Tablet as Glen Coghill, did not respond to messages requesting comment.)

Relatives of Berg’s who could be reached said they had been unaware of either the sale or the auction. Steven T. Powell, Berg’s nephew, said that last week, after learning of the auction, he and another relative had contacted the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to encourage them to acquire the material.

Berg’s daughter, who asked not to be identified by name to protect her privacy, said she had no knowledge of the estate sale but declined to comment further.

On Monday, a spokesman for Doyle said, "We are working with all involved parties toward the goal of finding an appropriate permanent home for the archive." He had earlier declined to comment on the identity of the seller.

A Holocaust museum spokesman had also declined to comment but said, "Whenever possible, we seek to have artifacts donated to the museum."

The photo albums, which a curator at Doyle showed to a reporter last month, cover the years from roughly 1916 to 1950 and include several hundred photographs, many annotated. They show the ordinary life of a prosperous family edging into something darker, as scenes of country picnics and vacations give way to a handful of casual snapshots from Warsaw, including one showing Mary smiling amid a group of friends, some wearing armbands with Jewish stars.

Since Mary’s mother was a U.S. citizen, the family lived in a relatively privileged part of the ghetto, protected from many of the horrors that Mary recorded, partly in code, in a series of spiral notebooks. In July 1942, the family, along with other foreign citizens, was moved to Pawiak, the Warsaw prison from whose windows Mary watched as Jews were shot or rounded up for transport.

In January 1943, the family was sent to Vittel, France, to an internment camp for British and U.S. citizens, shown in several pages of photographs. When Mary, her sister and her parents sailed to the United States in March 1944, they were part of an exchange for German prisoners of war.

Almost immediately, they met S.L. Schneiderman, a journalist who helped Mary turn her diaries into a series of articles and then a book, published under the pen name Berg, a shortening of her family name, Wattenberg. (The original notebooks are not known to have survived.) A thick scrapbook of newspaper clippings and other material carefully records the book’s reception — The New Yorker called it "brave and inspiring" — and Mary’s various public appearances. Alexandra Zapruder, the author of "Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust," who has not seen the new material, said it could shed light not only on Berg’s life but also on the period when public memory of the Holocaust was still being formed.

"It’s interesting that there was someone who came along before Anne Frank but didn’t have that same lasting hold on the public imagination," Zapruder said. ("Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" was published in English in 1952.)

In part, that’s because Berg resolutely distanced herself from her diary, a posture she maintained even as the Holocaust became a more prominent topic of public conversation.

A 1986 article in The New York Times about a stage version in Poland noted that Berg had "let it be known through friends that she does not wish to talk of her book or her memories." When Susan Lee Pentlin, a professor at the University of Central Missouri, was preparing a new edition of the book in the 2000s, Berg brushed her off.

"Mary told her to get a life; there were other things happening the world," Floyd Pentlin, Pentlin’s widower, said in an interview. "She accused Susan and others of making money off the Holocaust."

Pentlin, who died last December, took care not to give away any details that might lead others to Berg or even state definitively whether she was still alive. The fear, email correspondence provided by Floyd Pentlin suggests, was that further probing would upset Berg, whom she described as deeply traumatized by her experiences, and might even prompt her to renounce the diary as a fabrication.

"Basically, she doesn’t want to be Jewish," Susan Pentlin wrote to one researcher in 2012. "It’s a strange story for a survivor. She totally denies who she is."

Powell, a son of Berg’s sister, Ann, said it was not until shortly before his mother’s death that she told him the family was Jewish. The family, he said, never mentioned Mary’s book. He said the silence might have been a reaction to perceived criticism that the Wattenbergs, with their privileges, had survived while others died.

The family, he said, had "mixed feelings" about Mary Berg’s private mementos’ becoming public, in seeming defiance of her fierce desire for anonymity. But he said the heroism in particular of his grandmother Lena Wattenberg in getting her daughters out of Poland deserved tribute.

"All the players in this drama are deceased, so it’s a part of history now," he said.