The announcement that was to seal the fate of hundreds of Jewish girls across Slovakia was made in a blizzard in 1942. Town criers braved the brutal weather to declare in public squares that unmarried Jewish women aged between 16 and 36 were to sign up to three months of “government service”.
Slovakia by that point in the second World War was a Nazi satellite state that had only become independent in 1939 under German protection. Anti-semitism in the young country had been ratcheting up for years. By 1942 Jews were living under stringent codes that forbade them from attending high school, gathering in groups, travelling without permission and even owning pets.
The news that Jewish girls were to leave their homes to serve their country somewhere unknown provoked different reactions. Some girls from poor households were thrilled at the opportunity to support their families from afar. Others worried what government service might entail. It was rumoured that it would involve work in a shoe factory.
Heather Dune Macadam’s book, The Nine Hundred, focuses on what happened to a group of around 999 Slovakian women who boarded the first official transport to Auschwitz in March 1942.
Macadam’s bestselling first book, Rena’s Promise, told the story of a single Jewish woman in Auschwitz, Rena Kornreich. This book weaves in the stories of many other women, drawing upon the testimony of survivors and their descendants, as well as archival material and research.
Much has been written about men in Nazi concentration camps, but rather less attention has been paid to the women who suffered and perished there too. That is partly due to a paucity of information about them. While male deaths were studiously logged, records of what happened to the female prisoners are missing or were never made.
Of the many horrors recorded in this book, the hardest to bear is the fact that there are many girls who simply drop off the map. They were sent to Auschwitz and never heard from again.
Deportation
The book advisedly starts long before deportation when Jews were living among Slovakians without fearing for their lives. Macadam focuses on Humenné, an ordinary town in Slovakia with a bustling Jewish community, in which, as one survivor describes, “everyone knew each other”. The town had its haves and have-nots but remained, despite the privations of war and injustices of antisemitism, “one big family”.
The decision by the Slovak government to entrust its Jewish population to the Nazis shattered the community forever. At the start of the war Slovakia had a Jewish population of 70,000. By the end of it over 80 per cent were dead.
While it was against Slovak law in March 1942 to deport Jews, the authorities bent the rules under German pressure. In the end the Slovak government actually paid the Reich for every Jew it handed over to Nazi control – 500 Reichsmarks, about €190, per person.
The first train load of deportees were told to pack up to 40 kilograms. They left their homes in their best outfits, laden with toothpaste, work shoes, bread. One even brought what sounds eerily like a modern day keep-cup – a drinking cup “that telescoped so she could fold it”.
The horrific reality of what their government had signed them up became clear at once. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, after a grim journey in cattle cars, they were forced by sneering SS to surrender all their belongings. Those who could not get their ear-rings out of their ears had them torn out. They were made to strip and undergo heinous gynaecological examinations.
One survivor kept the shame of the examination under wraps for 50 years. “The SS put their hands into our private parts,” she recalled when finally able to revisit the memory. “We were bleeding and ripped from the rings they had on their fingers.”
After the strip search the girls’ entire bodies were shorn by male prisoners from the camp. And eventually the girls were tattooed with their prisoner number.
This initiation was merely a taster of the hell the girls were to face inside Auschwitz. The lucky got jobs indoors – as cleaners and scribes – while the unfortunate were made to labour outside. They spread manure with their hands, dug ditches, transported corpses, hauled bricks. They died in their droves: from typhus, exhaustion, beatings, tuberculosis. Many were gassed. Many were shot by bored overseers.
High-voltage fences
Many took their own lives by touching the high-voltage fences on the camp perimeter. “In the morning it was like a Christmas tree,” one survivor recalled.
Detaching the corpses from the fence was a task that fell, of course, to the prisoners.
At times the stories of the young women can become hard to keep track of. Macadam permits herself what she calls “dramatic licence” and imagines conversations and scenes that might have occurred. The book is far stronger when it sticks to the facts.
Macadam also has the tendency to lay it on a bit thick. “This was not a dystopian society created by some novelist,” she writes at one point. “Auschwitz was a real-life Hunger Games.” She is right, of course, but at times the tragedy of the girls’ fates is undermined by the mawkishness of her writing.
While the Slovakian girls were enduring hell on earth, their families were wondering what could have happened to them. The book includes very moving postcards sent to the camps from worried relatives, which attest above all to how little was known about what was really going on.
In Slovakia propaganda was being used to assuage fears about the fate of the Jews. One pensioner read newspaper reports about the successful rehoming of the Jews, and was so piqued that he sent a note to the minister of the interior complaining that elderly Jews were receiving better treatment than he was.
Eventually Auschwitz was liberated. For many it was too late. Those that survived went on, often, to rebuild lives abroad, but lived in the shadow of trauma.
Some had been sterilised and could not bear children. Others returned to their home towns to find their relatives dead, their houses repossessed and their belongings stolen.
Yet amongst the surviving women a fragile fraternity could sometimes be established.
“We came out of it,” acknowledges Edith, one of the survivors from the first transport. “But we will never, ever get rid of the damage that they made in our hearts, changing how we look on the world and on people.”
