999 - The Forgotten Girls

This is a story about teenage girls and young women and how they are the first targets of war, genocide and violence. Sadly, this is still the case today.

“Our lives were ruined by a madman, who no one dared to stop,” Antonia Rosenbaum, #1341.

When Oscar and Emmy Award-winning producer, Susan Lacy, came on board as our EP, she said, “I would be honored to be a part of this film.” Susan’s participation has been a guiding hand on this momentous 11-year journey.

Based on the Pen Finalist and international best-selling book, “999-The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz,” written by director/producer, Heather Dune Macadam, this film brings a wider audience into the conversation about the historical significance of women and girls in the Holocaust and how their story should help us transform conditions perpetuating injustice and inequality against women and girls, today and in the future.

When I started filming this documentary eleven years ago, I envisioned a premiere with our featured subject, Edith Grosman. Edith has now passed away, as have three of our other subjects: Ella Rutman, Elizabeth Bence, Eta Neuman. Of the women I have interviewed for this film, there are only three still alive. These women and their stories encompassed the world though: from Europe to Australia, North America to South - they emigrated everywhere after the war.

As you are about to see, this film is a work of love and commitment to place these girls into women’s history. Their story has been ignored for too long.

This sorority of survival is told from a uniquely female perspective; using rare archival documents, survivor’s home movies, prisoner art, and first-person testimonies to explore why the first official Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz were all young women, and why their story has been overlooked by historians for 80 years. Shot on various formats and over decades, in both digital and analog formats, co-director/editor, Beatriz M Calleja took the initiative to embrace all of these formats and their textures. Rather than forcing everything into HD, we focused on how the narrative and visual archive fit together as a way of illustrating the passage of time and the collective voice of our girls. Framing aged family photographs invokes naiveté. Using a mosaic of film grain, VHS glitches, photographic paper, and backcloths, provides raw visual metaphors.

One vital element of our girls’ story is the actual list of their names and the creation of that list. Without this list we would have no record of the girls’ who were deported on that fateful day, nor of those who did not survive. Incorporating the typing of the list itself, creates a rhythm that resonates in the audience's heads, builds tension and reminds us of vast organization that was about to perpetrate genocide.

Sisterhood is fundamental to our story. “The bonds between these women were unbreakable. They all saved each other,” the daughter of Marta Friedman told me in 2017. Marta was sterilized in Auschwitz. Her daughter, Orna, was adopted.

After liberation, many young women had issues bearing children or having the kind of large families they themselves had been raised in. That is one of the reasons why their story is of such importance today. We have to ask the question: Why take girls take, first? And face the answer.

Our story begins with girls and ends with girls. The powerful narration of our female protagonists has not been slicked up or manipulated. Empowerment is simple. It is in their voices. Their faces. Their eyes. And it is time we heed the truth: the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz was all young women.

Our narrator is the two-time Emmy Award winning, British-Iranian reporter, Ramita Navai, whose documentary for Frontline “Afghanistan: No Country for Women” received multiple awards. She has covered the UN Sex Scandal and India’s Rape Scandal and broke the story on Syria. As a voice for women’s and girl’s rights, the world over, Ramita’s voice reminds us that this is a story about women’s and girls’ rights in history and today.

One of our main challenges in telling this story is that Auschwitz 1942 has no archival visual record. Because our focus is only on female prisoners, it has been hugely difficult to find appropriate archive. Archival footage and photographs mostly record men. I have had help and support from multiple archives and archivists the world over, and unearthed incredible archival images - but some things have no visual record. We solved that problem by using footage from the 1948 Polish film, “Ostatni Etap” (The Last Stage) directed by former Auschwitz prisoner, Wanda Jakubowska, and working with the Polish artist, Zofia Kostyrko. Zofia created portraits of the girls taken prewar or early postwar photographs, sketched them, and then removed their hair. The result is stunning and disturbing. Finally, we can see how young and vulnerable they were on the first day in camp. In addition, families of survivors and non-survivors have opened their family archives to me.

Shalom, Heather Dune Macadam