Heather Dune MacAdam – författare

For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah who are looking for an immersive true account of Nazi-occupied Paris, Star-Crossed is an epic story of love and resistance during WW2 from the award-winning author of Pen America Literary Award Finalist and Goodreads Choice Award Nominee, 999. Part historical portrait of life during the Occupation, part valentine to The City of Light and the resilience of its people, this transportive love story follows the romance between a Catholic Resistance fighter and a Holocaust victim who meet at the famous Café Flore before war, prejudice, and disapproving families set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.A Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee  “What a beautiful, heartbreaking story.” —Erica Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Sisters of Night and Fog Paris, 1940. The City of Light has fallen under German occupation. Among patriotic Parisians, the pursuit of art, culture, and jazz has become a bold act of defiance. So has forbidden love for talented and spirited Jewish teenager Annette Zelman, a student at the Beaux-Arts, and dashing young Catholic poet Jean Jausion. Despite their devout families’ vehement opposition, the young couple finds acceptance at the famed Café de Flore, whose habitues includeSimone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and other luminaries of the Latin Quarter. For a time, Annette and Jean feel they have eluded the brute might of the relentless Nazis -- and more immediately, their parents’ threats and demands. But as restrictions on the Jewish community escalate to arrests and deportations, the maleficent forces gathering around the young lovers set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths. Drawn from never-before-published family letters and other treasures, as well as archival sources and exclusive interviews, Star-Crossed offers us precious insight into the Holocaust and the lives French people bravely led under the Hitler regime. This breathtaking true story of beauty, art, liberation, and the transformative power of love resonates with an intimate story of undying devotion, seen through the prism of history.

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.

El primer transport oficial de jueus a Auschwitz no estava format per combatents de la resistència ni presoners de guerra. No hi havia homes, de fet: eren noies enganyades, que van partir d''Eslovàquia creient que anaven a treballar per al seu govern durant uns pocs mesos. Era una «oportunitat de feina» que, literalment, no podien rebutjar. Les poques supervivents d''aquell grup amb la xifra maquiavèl·lica de 999 dones han ajudat a recuperar el relat ocult de la construcció de Birkenau: una història d''amistat, sororitat i resistència a la barbàrie.