I didn't like the beginning much. It was very hard to follow and all over the place. The names of the 50 different girls throughout the book are hard to follow too. Hard to follow aside, it is a very eye opening book about the Holocaust. I knew the people there suffered, but I didn't know what the Jews were told at first to get them to come or all the specific horrors or work details people went through. This is a heavy read, as you might expect. I'm going to have to read something fun and lighthearted after this one.

Oh my God. This book is not only well researched but it also so so well written. Yes, the material is heavy and there were parts that even I had trouble with (as someone who has read a lot of Shoah material), but man it reads like a beautiful novel.

Please please if you get a chance to read this, do it.

I just finished an amazing book on the first Jewish women transport to Auschwitz, which included interviews with survivors called “999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz” by Heather Dune Macadam and honestly can’t recommend it enough. It’s intense of course but not as much as some books on the subject though somehow feels more intimately felt as someone read/seen/treated as a woman - so many books only show the mans experience in those death camps that it’s important but jarring to read about 14-42 year old women’s experiences.

I had no idea the first transport was unmarried girls - in all the reading I have done on the topic it never came up & it shocked me somehow. It makes sense to start there considering how Nazi Germany worked, but it still feels so completely outrageous even knowing all that I do. These voices need to be heard & remembered, too.

With each person that hears & shares one of these life stories, their memory lives on - including the families entirely wiped out. Listen, carry it with you, share it so others can continue the legacy in words, if all else has failed. Then, maybe, when the warning signs show again, we might be ready to change the course before it’s too late & words are all we have for lives shattered.

This was an important book that tells the stories of women who had previously been ignored by history, but the phrase that has stayed with me the most is “chipmunk-faced mass murderer” about Himmler. I laughed out loud when I read it and it lives in my head absolutely rent free.

A brutal and necessary read. There’s no shortage of historical account of life inside the Nazi’s concentration camps, and Macadam decided to focus on the accounts of the first 999 girls who arrived in Auschwitz. She follows the group from their lives before the camps all the way through the infamous death-marches and subsequent camp liberations. The decision to narrow her focus to this group of women results in a fascinating look at the creation and destruction of Aushwitz. She also is clear-eyed about the ethical choices each of the girls grappled with while imprisoned, and how the survivors choose to live with that later on. I also respected that she brought us back again and again to the fact that, not only were these women prisoners, but they were slaves, and slavery as a concept is often forgotten in how we talk about the camps.
The only down-side to Macadam’s retelling is that it was easy to get lost in the cast of characters and lose track of the storylines we were following, something that is mostly due to the destruction of camp records before liberation.
Would recommend this to anyone who is interested in the role women are forced to play in warfare and as prisoners of war, as well as to those who enjoy reading about ethics and the way trauma can impact our view of morality.