After trudging through the liberated concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, photographing piles of human bones, S.S. officers in prisoner uniforms who attempted escape and failed, and glass-eyed, barely living prisoners standing around in groups, waiting to see what happens next—Lee Miller took off her muddy boots, making sure to wipe their horrific mud on the clean, fluffy bathmat, and posed in Hitler’s bathtub.

In some takes, her head is turned, in others her eyes wander—one is clouded with blurring, and in the final, famous image taken by Life photographer David E. Scherman (and Miller’s companion through the war), she’s looking up and over, eyebrows raised, as if at someone who interrupted her bath—a washcloth held to her bare shoulder.

We wouldn’t have these other drafts—four or five total when Miller typically only took one or two per shot—if her son’s wife, Suzanna, hadn’t discovered them in his family’s attic. Hell, we might not even know who Lee Miller was if Antony Penrose hadn’t made it his life’s work to revive her incredible and inspiring story. That bathtub scene? Just the beginning.

Lee Miller, SS Guard in Canal, 1945. Miller’s notes on the back of some of her photographs were very telling of “the level of coldness and anger that was in her heart in that moment,” said Penrose. © Lee Miller Archives, England.

After modeling in fashion ads for Vogue and other magazines in the 20s, Miller moved behind the camera, taking notes from Man Ray. History has her recorded as being his “muse,” which doesn’t seem to be the right label for Miller (it connotes some passivity, which wasn’t how she lived). She watched and studied him, and then moved on to make a name for herself. Miller was always in the driver’s seat; but her relationships with men were, well, prolific, and complicated. At one point, Miller was living as a “kept woman,” married to a wealthy man in Egypt (her photos from this time are fascinating, as if you’re looking at a movie set), but it didn’t last long. Her second and final marriage, to sculptor Roland Penrose, was spiced up with threesomes with other surrealist artists. It wasn’t until after her death when her son, Antony Penrose, was researching her life in order to write her biography, did he find out from one of her brothers that she had been raped as a 7-year-old child.

“I think in that moment, Lee had the attitude that the world had failed her,” Penrose told us, “and the only person who was really going to take care of her was herself.” She lived with the secret until she died in 1977 of cancer; even her husband had no idea.