Remembering the 999 women sent first to Auschwitz
Heather Dune Macadam speaks to one of the last survivors from the 999 women sent on the first transport to Auschwitz
Apale forehead with wisps of chestnut-dyed hair peers above the bottom of the FaceTime screen. “I can see you! Can you see me?” The voice is surprisingly chirpy. Ninety-two-year-old Holocaust survivor Edith Grosman moves her iPad lower so I can see her face, but I’m astounded that she even knows how to use one at all. My own father is a few years younger and he can’t get the technology to work. I am thrilled to speak to her, however virtually, and we chat for about half an hour before making plans to meet in person.
A few weeks later, I am in Poprad, Slovakia, standing in the lobby of a minimalist Soviet-Bloc era hotel, complete with brown, striped Sixties carpets and fake wood-panelled furniture, which reminds me of my dorm room in college. And Edith Grosman is the centre of a group of Slovak and Israeli dignitaries, who are escorting her to a concert in her honour. Outside of Slovakia, Edith may be of little importance, but here she is a star: a survivor from the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz, she has sat down with ambassadors, presidents and prime ministers. And me.
A diminutive, dynamic woman, Edith – who survived an unheard-of three years in Auschwitz and the death camps – seems undaunted by the horrors she experienced. Yet her story is one that sends chills down my spine.
At 17, she had barely ever spent a night away from home when she and her elder sister, Lea, were told by the Slovak government that all “young, unmarried girls – Jewish girls”, Edith emphasises, “had to go to the school to register. For work.” In her own hometown of Humenné, near the border of Hungary, a little over 200 young women from the urban centre and the rural provinces turned up to sign up for what they thought would be government factory service.
The girls were collected in an army barracks in Poprad, where Edith and I first meet in 2017. It is now a high school and for the first time since 1942, Edith enters the building under a flourish of flashing cameras following her down the hallway. Outside, a new plaque is about to be unveiled and a group of schoolgirls, about the age Edith was when she was last here, greet her with bouquets of flowers.
Seventy-five years earlier, Edith and her sister were locked inside this building and forced to clean it, while being fed starvation rations, the equivalent to one tin of cat food per day. “We couldn’t stop crying,” Edith recalls. “We were all scared.” Every day, more girls kept arriving in the barracks, until one afternoon they were told to pack their things.
Outside on the railway tracks was the longest line of filthy cattle cars Edith had ever seen. The girls balked at getting in them – “We didn’t think that these were for us,” another survivor recounts – but the guards began beating them until they scrambled aboard. With that, 999 young women, 297 of them teenagers, found themselves on the first transport to Auschwitz – ordered by the Reich security services (RHSA), which had been paid 500RM (the equivalent of about £150) per girl by the Slovak government to take them away.
Why take girls? It seems absurd, unless you consider that they would be the bearers of the next generation of Jews. Young women are almost always the first targets in wartime aggression, and especially in genocides. Yet the fact that this transport was all female has been almost entirely overlooked by historic timelines – a disservice to womankind that is now being corrected.
The number aboard this transport seems anomalous. Why not bring 1,000? One reason could be that Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, deemed astrology to be “scientifically justified and completely accurate”. It is significant that the numerology of his full name is three nines. And, according to historical astrologer Robert Wilkinson, the transport’s date and time had a number of factors indicating it was a “fork in the road of destiny”.
Their destiny would come as a shock to all of them. “We arrived in Auschwitz an empty place!” Edith says. “There was nothing there. Nothing!” Not even the arching, brick death-gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, now emblazoned as a symbol of evil on our minds: just snow-filled fields with nothing visible for miles but “some boxes with lights” – the men’s prison camp, where the girls would be housed for the next five months.
Edith recalls wondering why there were barbed wire fences, and as they marched past the provisional gas chamber, one of the girls whispered, “That must be the factory where we are going to work.”
It is this innocence that most astonishes me about the story of these girls. Stripped naked, shorn like sheep and tattooed like cattle, they had large, awkward four-digit numbers, starting with 1000, inked on to the outside of their forearms. “So I stopped being a human being. I was number 1970,” says Edith. Her sister, Lea, was #1969. “We weren’t adults. We were still young enough to want to throw temper tantrums, to be lazy, to shirk a duty or sleep late.” They had to learn quickly to adjust to their circumstances or die trying. And many did die. Lea among them.
Edith’s eyes brim full of tears whenever she mentions her sister. “Lea is always here,” she taps her heart, “every day. Every family gathering. I miss her … The guilt of the survivor, it never goes away.”
All I can do is nod, listen and memorialise Lea through my writing. Over the past three years, I have worked extensively with Edith to chronicle the story of the first girls in Auschwitz for a documentary film, and now a book. We have celebrated together, as well. For Edith’s past three birthdays I have flown to Toronto, Canada, where she now lives, and we have live-streamed virtual birthday parties on Facebook with her fans.
Last autumn, I was honoured to be a guest at her great-grandson’s bar mitzvah and this weekend I will be with her to commemorate tomorrow’s 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
For most Auschwitz survivors, of course, this is a bittersweet date. When the Russians opened the gates of the camp on January 27 1945, it was almost empty, but for 4,000 ill and infirm women and 2,000 men. One week earlier, over 24,000 able-bodied prisoners had been forced into a blizzard and death marched towards the German border. The death march “was the worst” of the horrors, Edith says. “The snow was red with blood.” The SS shot weakened prisoners without hesitation. To this day, Edith does not know how she survived it. Somehow she did, but it is important to note that while the world commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz tomorrow, Edith and many others would not be freed until May 1945.
Still, Edith had hoped to go to Poland for this weekend’s commemorative ceremonies, but winter is a bad time to travel for any 95-year-old and no one in the family wanted her to risk her life for another trip to what
‘We didn’t think the long line of filthy cattle cars were there for us’
‘I miss my sister every day. The guilt of the survivor, it never goes away’
is now a memorial museum. Instead, tomorrow – as limousines scoot along the A4 from Krakow, carrying officials to the town of Osweiçim – Edith, along with her granddaughter, Naomi, myself, and a few other children of survivors, will be going to her favourite Hungarian restaurant in Toronto, to eat stuffed cabbage and goulash.
The worldwide televised event will be full of dignitaries, celebrities, and a few survivors wearing their threadbare striped uniforms. But there won’t be anyone from the first official Jewish transport speaking – there are only five of those original girls still alive today, and, like Edith, they’ve spent enough time in Auschwitz for one life.
The Nine Hundred: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish
Transport to Auschwitz by Heather Dune Macadam (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is available from Telegraph Books. Buy now for £16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514