‘999: The Forgotten Girls’ begs the question, “Why were girls targeted first?”
For 70 years, Adela Gross’ relatives had no idea what had happened to her after the red-headed girl seemingly vanished in 1942. It wasn’t until her nephew saw Gross’ name on a list of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in a Slovak train station that they understood the truth.
Heather Dune Macadam, the Holocaust biographer and author who compiled that list, made her directorial debut with “999: The Forgotten Girls,” a documentary that sheds light on the true story of the nearly 1,000 young women who were the first Jews to be transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“I had to ask myself, how many other families are out there who don’t know what happened to their girls who disappeared off the face of the Earth?” Macadam said.
Based on Macadam’s internationally bestselling book “999,” the 2024 documentary will be screened at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27.
Macadam researched and conducted interviews with survivors over the course of 12 years to capture the “female perspective of the Holocaust,” according to a press release. These narratives are interwoven with historical photos in the documentary in Macadam’s efforts to tell the Holocaust story from the girls’ point of view.
“999: The Forgotten Girls” explores themes of survival and resilience rather than detailing the suffering and labor the young women were forced to endure, some of them for three years before their liberation.
Macadam had co-written the book “Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz” based on survivor Rena Kornreich’s Holocaust experience, and didn’t realize there were other survivors from the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz. On a trip to Slovakia, Macadam discovered another survivor, Edith Grosman, and asked to interview her on camera; Grosman became the “backbone” of “999.”
“The story that she told was about all of these girls from her town going to Auschwitz together,” Macadam said of Grosman. “I was just really blown away by this new and old experience, and I wanted to tell a story of girls who go through this horrendous experience for three years, longer than any man.”
On March 25, 1942, close to 1,000 young Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia, believing that they were going off to do mandatory work service for a few months, Macadam said. Many of them were teenagers as young as 15 and had been excited for the opportunity to serve their country.
Instead, the girls were sent to Auschwitz, sold by the Slovakian government for 500 Reich Marks — the equivalent of $200 dollars — each for the Nazis’ slave labor. The girls were tasked with clearing land, dismantling buildings, moving materials and doing agricultural work with their bare hands, constructing what would become the largest Nazi concentration camp and killing center.
The girls’ parents never heard from them again. Throughout the terrifying ordeal, the girls had each other in what Macadam calls a “sorority of survival.”
“I was in awe of their courage and their tenacity and their resilience, and I really wanted to share this story with people,” Macadam said. “I think girls and young women are really overlooked by our society.”
So she began the process of directing a film, but halfway through, decided to first write a book. Macadam said that she had taken a break from writing nonfiction, “and then this story came and grabbed my heart.”
Macadam hopes viewers of the film walk away with a sense of the “spirited young women who survive Auschwitz through tenacity, courage and sisterhood.”
“They helped each other survive again and again,” she said, adding that a group of girls recognized their classmate, Irena, in the “Block of Death” due to her two frostbitten toes and snuck her out before she could be sent to the gas chambers.
The final ordeal before being liberated was a death march through a blizzard, Macadam wrote in National Geographic. If anyone stumbled or fell, they were shot: “The snow was red with blood,” Grosman told Macadam.
When Grosman thought she couldn’t take another step, Irena encouraged her to keep going.
“If Irena hadn’t survived, Edith wouldn’t have survived,” Macadam said. “This is the message: We don’t know how our acts of kindness are going to influence the world.”
She added that she is inspired by the way the girls helped one another through what was likely the worst experience of their young lives. Each survivor that Macadam interviewed for the film adds important context to the larger story in a way that viewers might not necessarily fully grasp from watching one video testimony online.
“This is a tapestry,” Macadam said. “The stories are the threads in the tapestry that I weave together.”
She told this story in particular because she believes that history tends to ignore women’s narratives, especially those of teenage girls, who Macadam said aren’t viewed as economically or culturally important.
Because of Macadam’s decades of research into the “forgotten girls” of the Holocaust, Adela Gross’ family now knows details about her life — and untimely death. And now countless others will hear and see the untold stories of the Holocaust too.
