Remarkably, Adlington’s novel was inspired by true events. Hedwig Höss, wife of camp commandant Rudolf Höss, really did establish an Upper Tailoring Studio in the Stabsgebäude, then part of the administrative complex of Auschwitz I (now a school outside the boundaries of the Museum). A number of eyewitness testimonies collected by Dr Lore Shelley, herself an Auschwitz survivor, attested to its existence. Around two dozen female prisoners – Jewish and non-Jewish, from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, France and other countries – worked to produce high quality garments for the wives and girlfriends of the SS and top-ranking Nazi officials. How did they have access to beautiful silks and fabrics, threads and sewing notions during a war, in such a place? Simple – these were plundered from the deportees who arrived at Auschwitz from all across Europe on a daily basis. Photographs showing mountains of victims’ belongings in the Kanada section of Birkenau indicate that supplies would certainly never be a problem.
Shortly after the publication of The Red Ribbon, Adlington was contacted by people whose relatives had worked in the Upper Tailoring Studio. Thus began several years of correspondence and research to discover the identities of those who had worked as dressmakers in Auschwitz and trace their lives before, during and after the Holocaust. An initial list of first names – Bracha, Katka, Irene, Reneé and so on – grew to full biographies and photographs of these women, which are beautifully and movingly presented in The Dressmakers of Auschwitz.
Adlington’s book stands out to me for two main reasons. Firstly, the descriptions of items, people and places are, quite simply, stunning. Never did I imagine, for example, that I would be so interested to learn about different collars, or what cutting ‘on the bias’ meant, such is the level of detail given to them! Reading the names of the styles and fabrics worn by the dressmakers and their families in particular brings this history to life. Black and white photographs that may appear or feel antique are colourised and made more relevant by Adlington’s writing. In narrating the lives the dressmakers had before their imprisonment in Auschwitz, the author also paints beautiful scenes such as a market day in Slovakia, and the idyllic rural landscape of the Tatras Mountains, that almost come to life before the reader’s eyes.
Adlington’s mastery of description, however, occasionally makes for a difficult read. For instance, in both survivor testimony and historical studies, elements of arrivals’ ‘processing’ at Auschwitz are often overlooked or mentioned only briefly. In The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, Adlington dedicates three pages to a description of the women being forced to undress before washing. She emphasises how each layer of clothing hesitantly cast aside also removes the prisoners’ certainty, modesty, choice and individuality. The reader does not – cannot – empathise with the group, but the discomfort and humiliation these prisoners must have felt almost pours out of the page. Such is the power of Adlington’s descriptions.
The second point also relates to the details of the book, but in terms of the illustrations with which the writing is juxtaposed. Towards the middle of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, the author explains the process of arrival of deportees at Auschwitz and the subsequent handling of their luggage. As previously mentioned, victims were stripped of all their belongings and these were sorted by other prisoners in Kanada, with the most valuable and useful goods being sent back to the Greater German Reich (although many items, unsurprisingly, found their way into SS pockets). As possessions such as suitcases and watches are mentioned, they are contrasted with advertisements for the same items in fashion magazines of the period. Illustrations from magazines such as Eva and Die Dame appear throughout the book, yet their placement here is especially notable. Adlington even describes photographs from the so-called Auschwitz Album, but does not include them. Their absence, however, does not detract from this section. In fact, not seeing these photographs – even if one already knows what they look like – and instead looking at these adverts adds a certain sense of re-humanisation. Debates abound regarding the educational use of Holocaust-era photography taken from the perpetrators’ viewpoint.2 Whilst I would advocate for its inclusion in certain contexts, here the emphasis on the victims as people – and the inevitable thoughts of ‘What would I buy? What would I take?’ – is incredibly powerful.
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz is wonderfully written and brilliantly accessible, whether or not you have a pre-existing knowledge of the history of Auschwitz. As someone who has spent years learning about the former camp, and taking school groups to visit, I was stunned by how much I learned from this book, and how much food for thought it provided – not just about Auschwitz, but the role of fashion and clothing in Nazism and fascism more generally. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of Auschwitz, particularly those who wish to discover more about its lesser-known elements. For me, Adlington’s book is a reminder of the stories we have not yet heard, and the complexities and paradoxes of a camp ‘society’ we may not have yet considered. The image of women cutting and sewing elegant ballgowns and ladies’ suits in a factory of death shall stay with me for a very long time.
1 For more on these elements of camp life see, for example, Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’ (London: BBC Books, 2005) or Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, trans. Harry Zohn (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). ↩
2 See, for example, Susan A. Crane, “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography,” History and Theory 47 (2008): 309-330.↩
