Published in 2019
417 pages
Heather Dune Macadam began her career as a performance artist and dancer with the Martha Graham Contemporary Dance Company. After an accident prematurely ended her performing career she began writing.
Ms. Macadam’s book 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz was published in 2019. It is being translated into 12 languages to date, and was released in the UK as The Nine Hundred. A documentary with the same title is in post production. Her first book was the memoir Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz which she co-wrote with the 716th woman in Auschwitz.
Heather Dune ventured into fiction in 2000 and released The Weeping Buddha which is a murder mystery based on the disappearance of Sam Todd, who was celebrating New Year’s Eve in the loft where Macadam and her loftmates lived in Chinatown, NY. Sam went for a walk and never came back. It was a finalist for the Nero Wolf Best Mystery-2002.
She has been published by The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian UK, The Daily Mail, Marie Claire, Newsweek among other national and international publications, and was a semi-regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.
What is this book about?
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents’ homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women–many of them teenagers–were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reich Marks (about $200) apiece for the Nazis to take them as slave labor. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few would survive.
The facts of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz are little known, yet profoundly relevant today. These were not resistance fighters or prisoners of war. There were no men among them. Sent to almost certain death, the young women were powerless and insignificant not only because they were Jewish–but also because they were female. Now acclaimed author Heather Dune Macadam reveals their poignant stories, drawing on extensive interviews with survivors, and consulting with historians, witnesses, and relatives of those first deportees to create an important addition to Holocaust literature and women’s history.
