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.