On 25 March 1942, 999 girls and women were taken to the camp from Poprad, Slovakia. Now just one is still alive. Edita Grosman tells her story as she prepares to return to her home city

“I’m sure I’ve survived for a reason,” says Edita Grosman. “One of us had to still be here to tell you what happened. And even if I was lying on my death bed, as long as my brain was working, I’d have to keep talking about it, especially because there are so many people who say it never happened.”

The 92-year-old has travelled from her home in Toronto to her native Slovakia. On Saturday she will return to the railway station in the city of Poprad, from where, 75 years ago to the day, she was one of 999 girls and women driven in windowless cattle cars to Auschwitz.

It was the first mass transport of Jews to the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Edita, who was 17 at the time, is the last remaining survivor.

“Only about 15 of those 999 came out alive,” she says. “And now I am afraid I am the only one of those left.

“I will make the journey back one last time to try to keep alive the memory of all those girls who were together with me.”

Grosman was living in the eastern Slovak town of Hummené, where about 60% of the 6,000 residents were Jewish, when a crackdown on Jews and the Jewish way of life began in 1938.

“It was a gradual process of dehumanisation over several years,” says Grosman. “They took our jewellery from us, then our fur coats. Then we couldn’t live on the main street, we couldn’t own a cat. We had to wear a yellow band – the yellow stars were introduced later – and then we were prevented from going to high school and the non-Jewish neighbours stopped greeting us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jews arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the war. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

One day her family was informed that she and her sister Lea, who was two years older, and all the non-married girls aged between 16 and 30 had to be at the school at 8am on 20 March 1942. Their families were told they were to be taken off to work for the war effort. “We were allowed luggage weighing no more than 20kg. There was no way we could have carried anything like as much. We packed warm sweaters, shoes, I had two dresses, hygiene items, chunks of thick bread for the journey”.

They were rounded up by members of the Hlinka guard, the military arm of Catholic priest Jozef Tiso’s First Slovak Republic, a satellite to Nazi Germany. She recalls how the families cried and ran after the cattle car she and around 50 girls were packed into as it travelled to the spa town of Poprad. “There were no windows. Just one empty vegetable tin can as a toilet.” Arriving that same day in Poprad, they were joined by hundreds of other girls from around the region, all of whom were kept in a holding pen near the station.

Numbering 999, they left Poprad for Auschwitz on 25 March at 8.20pm.

She vividly recalls the conversation among the girls in her wagon. “My sister, all my school friends and neighbours, people with whom we ate and played and went to the synagogue, lovely girls – from the Jakobovic, Grossmannova, Marckovicova, Reicherova families,” she says, reeling off their names at a great speed. “We asked ourselves: ‘Where are we going? Why only girls?’

“We had never heard of Auschwitz – it was a complete unknown to us.”

One girl is believed to have leapt from the train as it made its way through Hungary, although whether she survived is unknown. They arrived at the camp, which was still in the process of being set up as a death camp, after an estimated 12 hours, on 26 March.

The SS guards had not yet arrived. Instead they were met by female German prisoners classified as convicted criminals and prostitutes who had been ordered to inspect the transport, shave the women, give them uniforms and prepare them for work. While the prisoners had been given the numbers 1-1000, the Slovak women were numbered 1001 to 2000; Edita was tattooed with 1970, her sister with 1969.

They were given a red bowl and spoon, an itchy sack-like uniform, and wooden shoes the prisoners nicknamed “clappers”. “They made such a racket we had to take them off and walk bare foot whenever we went through the gate, so as not to annoy the SS,” she says. They slept four or five to a wooden bed, one blanket between them, were woken at 4am and brushed their teeth using a finger dipped into the tea they received for breakfast.

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When her group was ordered to stand outside for a roll call on the first day she recalls seeing the snow stained with blood. “Bizarrely quite a large number of us had got our periods at the same time,” she says. “We had no underwear, no sanitary protection. But then that never happened again because of what they put in the water to prevent us from menstruating.”

One day in winter Heinrich Himmler of the Nazi leadership came to inspect the camp. “An SS guard suggested it was too cold for us to be outside working. I heard Himmler reply: “Für Juden gibt’s kein Wetter [there’s no such thing as weather for Jews].”

Their bodies and clothing were infested with lice. “I took off my blouse and put it on the ground one day and it walked off,” she recalls. The lice also carried disease including typus, which claimed her sister’s life. “When they took her away she was in a coma. I said to her: ‘don’t be angry with me that I survived and you didn’t.’”

The cleaning job Grosman was assigned to undoubtedly helped her to survive. Most prisoners not sent directly to death in the gas chambers on arrival lived only a few months, while she was there for nearly three years.

In January 1945 she was among the 58,000 forced on death marches as the Nazis tried to flee the approaching Red Army. “I had tuberculosis in my knee and could hardly walk. My friend Elsa was pushing and pulling me, urging me on, because anyone not strong enough was shot. It was the second time I saw blood in the snow, watching people who had survived that whole time with me, now dying.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arbeit macht frei – work sets you free – on the gates of Auschwitz. Photograph: Kuba Ociepa/Agencja Gazeta/Reuters

She was in Ravensbrück when the Russian troops arrived to liberate them, but the soldiers proved a new threat. Warned that they were raping prisoners, she and Elsa hid during the day and walked at night as they made their way homewards to Slovakia.

Edita had managed to get word to her mother that she was coming home so she had gone to meet her train in Hummené. “When I arrived I couldn’t see her as she’d fainted on the platform,” she says.

Only later did she find out her family had received exemption orders, which could have prevented her and Lea’s deportation. Her father, a glazier, was working on a government project and was deemed vital to the war effort. “But the exemptions only came after Lea and I had been rounded up.”

New York filmmaker Heather Dune Macadam, who has dedicated her life to reconstructing the biographies of those on the first transport, has crowdfunded Edita’s return to Slovakia and will make a film of the journey as they retrace the route to Auschwitz together with her granddaughter Naomi, and the children and grandchildren of others from the first transport.

On her return to Slovakia in June 1945 Edita found it rife with antisemitism. With her husband Ladislav Grosman – the author of The Shop on Mainstreet, which dramatises the nazification of a small Slovak town and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1965 – she moved to Prague, where she became a biologist. They fled to Israel after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Following her husband’s death in 1981, she moved to Canada to be near her only son.

“It has been a life of fighting against the fear,” she says. “To have spent so many years where every second you have been in a state of danger, it stays with you and it’s so big.

“I dream about it, I speak about it, I read everything I can about it, and I know I will never be free of it.”