Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

999 is the meticulously researched story of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz from Slovakia in 1942. Due out 31st Dec 2019 from Kensington Books, it's 417 pages and will be available in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook formats.

The writing was riveting and emotionally difficult to read in some places. Especially in light of the trends in modern politics, and the fact that it's all too believable that it could happen again, I felt an undercurrent of urgency reading this book. It was compelling and the third person narrative put an accessible human face on the history.

Most of the books I've read about the Holocaust seem to have been a lot more focused on the male dominated parts of the war, the Holocaust, and the history. This book seemed a lot more personal to me.

Really well written, full of annotations and a bibliography for further reading. This would make a superlative resource in an academic setting as well as an important personal read.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Heart breaking and informative, this is not a light or easy read.
Often times when I read books on the Holocaust, unless they are written by survivors, I wonder how much has been assumed, or embellished by the author for the sake of the story.
However I never got that feeling with this book.

Macadams tells the story of the 999 young girls who, under the guise of going to work at a factory, made up the first transport of women to Auschwitz.
With firsthand accounts from Auschwitz survivors, this book is not for the faint of heart

The stories are harrowing, inspirational, and thought-provoking. The narrative is disjointed and the women are hard to keep straight within it. There are also at least half a dozen typos or mistakes in the book.

In one of the last chapters, she calls members of the German army "brownshirts", which is wrong. Brownshirts were civilian thugs used by Hitler in the 30s for intimidation. They were never part of the actual German armed forces. This made me wonder how much I could trust the rest of the book. She also relies heavily on the testimony ofvery elderly women, which they themselves admit could be inaccurate at this point. To her credit, she does admit this, and also includes LOTs of detective work from archival sources.

Other than that, fascinating. Those poor girls.

We talk a lot about the Holocaust in the abstract sense but reading the stories of individual women is more jarring and vital to carrying on the memories of the atrocities they suffered. The first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz was of unmarried girls 16 to 36. It starts as a horrible experience and gets markedly worse and then unimaginably worse. The horror of it all is astounding but it is our responsibility to read, remember and carry on where these women could not and Macadam's book gives us that ability.