Poprad, Slovakia, March 26, 1942.

The girls sang as the train pulled out of the station.

They sang in Slovak and in Hebrew, voices rising over the clatter of wheels on rail,

and when the snow-capped peaks of the high Tautras slid past the windows,

somebody started up the old folk anthem about the beautiful mountains.

99 young women, most of them teenagers, dressed in their best clothes,

suitcases packed with handmade dresses and jars of food their mothers had pressed into their hands that morning.

They believed they were going to work in a factory. They believed they would be home in three months.

They believed the man who had stood on the platform before departure, an SS officer named Dieter Vislacchene,

when he told them they would be allowed to return once the work Germany had planned for them was finished.

Not one of those promises was true.

Five days earlier, town criers in the villages and market towns of eastern Slovakia's Sharis-Zemplin region had read a decree.

All unmarried Jewish women between the ages of 16 and 36 were to report to local schools and firehouses for government work service.

The order gave them 24 hours.

Some of the girls were excited.

They had already been forbidden to attend school past the age of 14, forbidden to hold jobs,

forbidden to own so much as a house cat under

the cascade of anti-Jewish laws, the Slovak puppet government had been ratcheting tighter since

1939. Work service sounded like something. It sounded like purpose. Edith Friedman, 17 years old,

and from the town of Humanaeene had dreamed of becoming a doctor.

Her older sister Leah wanted to be a lawyer. Those dreams were already dead. When the decree came,

their parents had, as Edith would later recall, two girls ripe to go. What the families did not

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