A remarkable story of courage in the face of injustice and brutality in the Second World War

Books such as this are essential: they remind modern readers of events that should never be forgotten' - Caroline Moorehead

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.

That is not what happened. The young women - many of them teenagers - were sent on their way to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reichsmarks (about £160) apiece for the Nazis to take them as cheap, forced labour. 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 rendered powerless and treated as insignificant not only because they were Jewish - but also because they were young women.

Now, for the first time, 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, The Nine Hundred sheds crucial light on an overlooked moment in the Holocaust, and in women's history in the twentieth century.