The Nine Hundred by Heather Dune Macadam (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)
I happened to read this book on a train from Cologne to Frankfurt. All trains were delayed that day, as a Second World War bomb had been found at the station and was being defused. The past seemed within a hair’s breadth.
On the 25th of March in 1942, almost one thousand young and unmarried Jewish women were forced to board a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Their families were told they’d spend three months working for a shoe factory to aid the government.
Many of the young Jewish women were eager to report for government service. They left their parents’ homes dressed in their best Shabbat clothes, and waved goodbye believing they would soon return. Some sang the national anthem on the way. But the SS and local Hlinka guards, forced them into cattle wagons in what was the first “official” transport to Auschwitz. Soon afterwards, acts of rape, torture and murder followed.
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the Nazis decided to murder some of the Jewish people straight away, while forcing others to work themselves to death. Whenever you think the horror can’t get any worse in this book, it does.
In her previous book, Rena’s Promise, Heather Dune Macadam co-wrote the story of Rena Kornreich, who was on the first convoy. In The Nine Hundred, she chronicles a wider group. In an extraordinary feat of research, Dune Macadam combed through lists at Yad Vashem, testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation’s visual archives, the Slovak national archives, as well as reaching out to the few women who are still alive today, and their relatives.
The result is a vivid picture of their upbringing, their families, how they lived, and died, and how a very small minority of them survived.
In among all this, there are extraordinary acts of kindness and heroism.
One of the women we get to know is Edith Friedman, who survived despite being forced into extremely dangerous manual labour, while managing to keep her moral compass.
Dr Manci Schwalbova saved many lives with her medical skills; Ria Hans spent six months in a standing cell in the “Block of Death”, for trying to save a fellow prisoner. The Zimmerspitz girls operated an underground network, and almost escaped the camp, but were caught and executed.
As Edith Friedman says on the final page of Macadam’s account, thousands of books could be written about the Holocaust, “but it will never be fully described. Ever.”
This year, of course, marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945. But why were the Allies so slow to act, when the horrors of the death camps were already well-known two-and-a-half years earlier? As I read the book, I bitterly thought that the bomb being defused that day, should have exploded on the railway tracks much sooner.
Marina Gerner is a freelance writer
