The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive

Abstract

This question is posed to the reader at the outset of Lucy Adlington’s The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive. It echoes the first words said to Adlington by Berta Berkovich Koh ut, who, until her passing last year at age 99, was the last of a group of Jewish women who survived Auschwitz—perhaps the most infamous of all World War II death camps—by making high-fashion ball gowns and cocktail dresses for the wives of Nazi officers. Indeed, the idea that a fashion salon could be operating in the same facility where more than one million people were killed systematically is almost unbelievable. But, as Adlington’s well-studied yet poignant book reveals, the story is entirely true. By weaving together extensive archival research, including contemporary fashion press and advertisements, the harrowing personal accounts of the dressmakers, and diverse black-and-white illustrations ranging from fashion sketches and magazine spreads to personal photographs, Adlington illuminates a muchunderstudied area of history and pays tribute to the remarkable women who survived the Holocaust by their needles and thread. The text is one of several publications about women’s clothing during World War II by Adlington, a British novelist and costume historian. Her prior work on similar subjects includes The Red Ribbon (Candlewick Press, 2018), a fictionalized account of the dressmakers of Auschwitz, and Women’s Lives and Clothes in WW2: Ready for Action (Pen and Sword History, 2020), the latter reviewed by Nan Turner in Dress (vol. 47, no. 2 [2021]). The subject of women’s fashion during World War II has benefitted from an abundance of fresh