On March 25th in 1942 nine hundred and ninety nine teenage Jewish girls boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia, they and their parents thought they were going to work in a factory for three months. Most of the young women had never left home before, some were really excited and others are upset.

Instead they are sent to Auschwitz in cattle cars, they were the first group of women to arrive there and be processed. The young women had to wait in line for hours, they had to remove all of their clothes and were subjected to a humiliating and brutal medical exam, had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arm.

The girls were fed a small serving of soup, which consisted of rotten horse meat and vegetables and a small piece of bread. They were expected to do hard work and with their bare hands spreading cow manure in fields, demolishing bombed houses and in all types of weather. The lucky ones worked inside, sorting through new arrivals clothes and in a section called “Canada”. The girls suffered from malnutrition, exposure, frostbite, typhus, and some had medical experiments carried out on them. Towards the end of the war the Germans destroyed documents, evidence and sent the young women on a death march.

I received a digital copy of The Nine Hundred from NetGalley and Hachette Australia in exchange for an honest review. Heather Dune Macadam interviewed survivors, witnesses, relatives and did extensive research to discover what happened to the first group of women sent to Auschwitz and Birkenau. An amazing story about a group of teenage girls who lost so much and including, education, health, fertility, and family, many always felt scared, their feelings and hearts were damaged and they suffered from survivor’s guilt.

Like all young women they had hopes and dreams for their future and this was taken from them. A powerful, heartbreaking, moving and inspirational Holocaust story and five stars from me.

‘Why would anyone want to take away teenage girls?’

I did not know what to expect when I read this book. I was unaware that the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz contained 999 young Jewish women. And, as distressing as it is to read of yet another example of inhumanity, it is important that the stories of these women are not forgotten.

On the 25th of March in 1942, nearly one thousand unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. They believed that they would be working for the government for a few months, in a factory. Instead the young women (many still teenagers) were sent to Auschwitz. Few of them would survive. Their government paid 500 Reichsmarks per person for the Nazis to take them as slave labour. These women were powerless, both because they were Jewish and because they were female.

In this book, Heather Dune Macadam reveals some of their stories. To do this, she has drawn on interviews with survivors, witnesses and families and the USC Shoah testimonies. This is a harrowing read. In terms of survival, some work assignments were slightly safer and more comfortable than others. Some women survived, most did not. Illness was almost always a death sentence, as were the whims of the guards. Survival had its own cost for many.

There are few survivors now. And many of us, born after World War II, have limited knowledge of what happened. Accounts such as this are important: we need to remember their lives; we need to acknowledge the horror; we need to acknowledge the failings of so many who allowed (by ignoring what was happening) such a tragedy to occur.

These women were not fighters or prisoners of war. They were young women who thought they were helping the government. They were young women looking to the future. Their stories are important and should not be forgotten. Thank you, Ms Macadam for writing this book.

‘A novel would end here. It would wrap up with everyone safe and happy and travelling home to be with loved
ones. Fiction can do that. Nonfiction cannot. And that is not how wars end.’

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Australia for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith