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When asked in Isreal about her dream venue for screening her film, Heather Dune Mcadam knew her answer because it was already happening. “Well, I’m going to the Martin Luther King Library,” she recalled. The setting, dedicated to a man who fought for civil and human rights, was fitting for the conversation that followed—a discussion about 999: The Forgotten Girls, a documentary that resurrects the voices of young Jewish women deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
Macadam, the author and filmmaker behind 999, sat beside her longtime friend and producer Jane Shurger in conversation with Brie Jackson, former NBC News national correspondent. Together, they brought this history to light.
A Backwards Process, A Story That Would Not Let Go
Macadam’s path to the documentary was unconventional. “I thought it would be so much easier to make a documentary than write a book,” she admitted with a wry laugh. “That’s a joke.” Initially, she envisioned a film following the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors as they retraced their ancestors' steps. “It didn’t work,” she said simply. Instead, she wrote 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. “As I was working on the book, I realized that was the movie we needed to make.”
But a book could describe scenes without visuals. A film needed something more. “There is no 1942 women’s camp archive,” she explained. So she and her team turned to docudrama elements, stunning portraiture, and archival materials to piece together a visual narrative.
Letting the Story Speak
Shurger acknowledged that their initial vision for the film shifted. “Like most documentaries, you're not entirely sure what the story is until it's done.” They attempted various storytelling structures but kept returning to a straightforward approach. “Audiences really wanted to see the women—they met them, they loved them, and they wanted to hear them.”
For Macadam, interviewing these women was an exercise in silence. “I’m not a great interviewer, but I’m a very good listener,” she confessed. “The trick to interviewing any trauma survivor is to shut up and let them talk.” Survivors often withheld their experiences from their own children, not wanting to burden them. “I wasn’t connected to their lives in that way,” she said. “They could tell me without worrying about how I would feel.”
One survivor, Reena, once told Macadam, I don’t know how you wrote this—I think sometimes you read the story in my tears.
The Missing Pieces and Unwritten History
Many of the women who survived had chosen silence for decades. Shurger noted that “for many years, even decades, they just tried to bury it.” But in their later years, they were finally ready to talk. Not all, though. “One woman, a friend of Edith’s, declined to be interviewed,” Macadam shared. “She said, ‘I don’t want to think about this before I die.’” Respect for those choices became just as important as amplifying the voices of those who wanted to be heard.
Macadam emphasized the significance of these women’s experiences, ones often absent from mainstream Holocaust narratives. “How many of you knew that they didn’t keep death records of women in Auschwitz until mid-August 1942?” she asked. Few hands went up. “How many of you knew that the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz was 999 young women?” The room was silent.
“There’s a reason we don’t know this,” she continued. “There’s a reason it’s been ignored for 75 years.”
A Legacy That Echoes Forward
Beyond the historical significance, the film has become an educational tool. “We’re involved with Teen Screen in Pittsburgh,” Shurger shared. “We screen the film with high school students, then do talk-backs with them. It’s so meaningful to go into a theater and say to teenagers, ‘These were teenage girls. And they were awesome. And you’re awesome. Let’s use them as role models.’”
Their goal is impact. “We are doing a lot of educational outreach,” Shurger said. “This is an evergreen story. It will be watched and be important for a very long time.”
A Story That Finds You
For Macadam, the project has become something larger than herself. “I sort of hate to say the word ‘blessed’ because it’s overused,” she admitted, “but I feel really blessed.” She spoke of the inexplicable connections that kept bringing this story to her—how families of survivors found her, how lost pieces of history revealed themselves, how the narrative seemed to open up before her.
“You get the feeling you’re not really in control,” she said. “At some point, you stop questioning it. You just do it.”
999: The Forgotten Girls is a testimony, a reclamation, and a tribute to the resilience of women whose names and faces might have been lost to time—if not for those who refused to stop listening.
The full discussion can be viewed below. This event was generously supported by the DC Public Library Foundation.