I didn’t know there were magpies at Auschwitz.
I didn’t know, either, that Hedwig Hoss (a Nazi wife) set up a tailoring shop, there, where female prisoners were forced to make high fashion for her and friends. As well as many other “clients”.
This book is about the dressmakers.
It follows them from before they were put on trains and sent to the camp, and lifts them off the page until your heart is in your mouth with worry about what will happen to each of them.
This book is also about the Nazi machinery of greed, and about how the people designated less than human by them were ceaselessly exploited as a resource. For money, for property, for goods and for slave labour. The scale of that greed is beyond anything I previously understood. I knew, of course, that they looted. They hid artwork in salt mines, hoarded treasures, and even stole gold from the teeth of people they murdered, but this book details the sheer rapaciousness of their theft. There was no item too small, too valuable only to its owner, for them to not want to extract wealth from it.
In amongst the cruelties of the Nazis, there are the stories of Jewish people and often in their own words. One of the dressmakers, bright and capable Bracha, was the daughter of a deaf-mute man who was a highly talented tailor. He ran a successful business before it was taken from him, one that saw him employing three others who were also deaf-mute. Many of the stories of the dressmakers families are touchingly told and wonderful. Even though the shadow of what comes next is so impossibly dark that it looms over this happiness.
This is a remarkable, sorrowing book about the humanity of a persecuted people as they try to survive the unrelenting and inhumane behaviour of others.
The scale of that inhumanity is found even in fleetingly offered pieces of information. I could not get over the discovery, for example, that Jewish people who were not yet in the camps were forced to give up their coats. Every coat they owned. Despite the bitter coldness of the winters.
Or that Hedwig Hoss had a little garden, a “paradise” made possible only through the labour of camp prisoners; she grew strawberries there that her children liked to pick and told them to wash them thoroughly, as they may have become covered with human ash.
How do any of us understand the mindset of people committing such atrocities and treating those atrocities as mundane?
Hedwig’s husband Rudolph is busy participating in full scale genocide. Yet he comes home each night to read his children bedtime stories, as though he is not.
This book doesn’t shy away from the darkness of this and it is a truly powerful record of these events. It is full, too, of the courage, love and friendship that the dressmakers held onto and shared. They are towering women. Sewing for their lives and protecting each other as best they can.
The book, in fact, is full of women. This is a rich text of women’s history. It contains the indomitable spirit of women, seen in dressmakers like Bracha and Marta and Hunya, and it also contains women’s capacity for cruelty. Both in the form of female SS members and in the form of the Nazi wives, some of whom are particularly present here. How much those wives knew, or didn’t, is a question the author poses (and answers about some of them).
The author also tells us about some of the acts of resistance inmates engaged in and about their determination to protect others from the same fate they were enduring by getting information out of the camp. At one point, the Nazis allowed prisoners to write highly censored letters home, and many of those who wrote tried to put hidden warnings into their letters so people they loved would go into hiding.
I wish I could lend this book to each of you, in turn, and despite having read and admired an uncountable number of books there are so few I would say that about.
I want you to ‘meet’ these incredible women and hear their stories. It is a moving book, and one that will change many of its readers. Certainly, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Most astonishingly of all, this book is somehow encouraging because of the character of many of the women inhabiting it. It is a reminder that even the greatest evil cannot crush the humanity of others. In their decency, and their stoicism, they actively deny a monstrous regime the ultimate annihilation it seeks.
We must never collectively forget the memory of such resilience. Of how, even as vast cruelties were being perpetrated there were those working against that cruelty and who were willing to give their own lives to stop it. Including those who heroically gave their lives to protect even one other person from greater suffering, such as the young woman, here, who went to the gas chambers with her mother so that her mother did not have to die alone.
I am listening to this on Audible based on this review and it’s lovely. I’ve read a lot of Holocaust books and it takes something really special to draw me in deeply. We all dress so casual now, it’s fascinating to think about how many important roles clothing plays in society.