The First Jews of Auschwitz

Eighty-one years ago, Red Army troops marched through the gates of Auschwitz and confronted the vestiges of the horrific industrial killing factory: the corpses, bones and ashes of more than 1.1 million people slaughtered there and the 7,000 skeletal prisoners who’d proven too ill or weak to be sent off on death marches by Nazis attempting to hide their crimes.

To commemorate that day in January 1945, we take you back to the first days of the concentration camp with an interactive event built around the screening of an award-winning documentary film about the first official Jewish transport sent to it, 999: The Forgotten Girls.

The young unmarried Slovakian Jewish women on that transport were rounded up by their government with the promise of a few months of paid factory work in Germany, sorely needed income for families whose businesses had been seized and jobs had been taken away. They found neither factory work nor wages: just the agony of slave labor, brutality and starvation at Auschwitz.

Weaving together first-person testimony and archival materials, the film tells the long-ignored story of the Slovakian government’s fervor to rid the country of Jews and the young women who managed to survive three years of living hell.