Archaeologists have made a remarkable find at a former Nazi concentration camp more than seven decades after an Adelaide woman hid her mother's wedding ring from Nazi guards.

Regina Zielinski, now deceased, was a teenager when she hid the ring and just days after that she was part of the largest breakout of Jewish inmates from a death camp during World War II.

Just recently, the anniversary of the Sobibor camp's mass escape was marked with an exhibition in Adelaide, the city where Regina eventually made her life after the war years.

Holocaust expert Peter Monteath said Sobibor was less widely known to the public than camps such as Auschwitz, because it was smaller and the 1943 mass escape gave the Germans a powerful incentive to destroy the camp and evidence of its grim purpose.

He thinks about 60 people survived after the escape.

While captive in Sobibor, Regina had been forced by Nazi guards to sort through the clothes of people sent to the gas chambers and found her mother's jacket.

"The jacket had a breast pocket and she hid her wedding ring there but I didn't give up the ring," she recalled, years later.

"The floor boards, they were not together [there were gaps]. They were lying on sand so I just dug with my shoe, with my toe, a little hole and I dropped the wedding ring in. I didn't give it up."

The young woman was given someone else's identity papers after the escape and then made her way through Poland.

The Sobibor camp was razed by the Nazis. ( ABC News )

She became part of a flood of labourers taken to Germany and worked with a family outside Frankfurt.

After the war, Regina found a new life in Australia.

Her son Andrew did not know the compelling story of his mother's ordeal until recently.

He wrote a book of his mother's memories, having enticed from her stories of the horrors of life and death at Sobibor.

Regina Zielinski died recently, not knowing of the jewellery found. ( Supplied )

In recent weeks, archaeologists uncovered physical evidence of the horrors of Sobibor, including the foundations of gas chambers and items of jewellery, including a ring which might well have belonged to Regina's mother.

Mr Zielinski thinks the act of hiding her mother's wedding ring best illustrates his mother's determination.

She urged her son to use that trait in the fight he now wages with multiple sclerosis.

Regina, at 89, was due to open the Adelaide exhibition but instead it became a celebration of her life after she died on September 12, just days before the jewellery at Sobibor was found.

As a historian, Peter Monteath said it did not matter precisely which wedding ring belonged to the Zielinski family.

"I think what matters are the memories, the recollection of this act of defiance, that Regina was determined the ring she found in her mother's jacket was for her and not to fall into the hands of the Nazis," he said.

For more on the remarkable life of Regina Zielinski, watch 7.30 SA tonight on ABC.