At the height of the Holocaust, twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp - mainly Jewish women and girls - were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. Drawing on diverse sources including interviews with the last surviving seamstress, The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women.
In this captivating podcast recorded live at the Shrine, author and historian Lucy Adlington joined us virtually in conversation with the Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s Dr Breann Fallon.
This program was presented in partnership with the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and Melbourne Jewish Book Week.
In the podcast, Lucy speaks about multiple belongings. See images of the belongings below.
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: The Shrine of Remembrance embraces the diversity of our community and acknowledges the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we honour Australian service and sacrifice. We pay our respects to Elders, past and present.
Welcome to Live at the Shrine – a series where we give you a virtual seat in the audience of one of our onsite talks. In this episode, writer and social historian Lucy Adlington unpacks her book The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive. Convening the conversation is Dr Breann Fallon, the Head of Programming and Exhibitions at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.
This event was held in partnership with the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and Melbourne Jewish Book Week, and Lucy joined us over Zoom for an incredibly enlightening conversation.
DR BREANN FALLON: Hello, Lucy.
LUCY ADLINGTON: Hello.
DR BREANN FALLON: Thank you so much for joining us here in Melbourne this evening. What time is it for you?
LUCY ADLINGTON: Really early. It's cup of teatime.
DR BREANN FALLON: Well, we'll be having a cup of tea after so we'll be joining you there. Now, we've already had a- we should tell everybody we've had a pre chat online. So, we know that we have so much to cover, and I hope that we'll be able to go as deep as we did in our first chat when we spoke a few weeks ago. Before we go there, I was chatting to a few people before we came into the room, and not everyone has read the book yet. So, without giving us any spoilers, I'm wondering if you can just give us a brief overview of the Dressmakers of Auschwitz.
LUCY ADLINGTON: Well, the title, I think, is very descriptive and very shocking in its way. So, we think of the dressmakers. We think of lovely fashions and home sewing, maybe, or glamour or beautiful clothes. And then Auschwitz is, of course, a place synonymous with horror. And so, the book came about after I saw mention that there had been a fashion salon in Auschwitz, and although I was already aware of many ghetto workshops and concentration camp workshops and small factories, to read of a fashion salon was extraordinary. So this book comes out of many years of research, but also an interview with the last surviving dressmaker of the fashion salon in Auschwitz. And essentially, it was a small and rather brilliant group of young, mainly Jewish inmates of Auschwitz who sewed fashions for not only the Commandant's family in the camp, but other SS families stationed there, and also elite SS women in Berlin. So the book traces not only the young woman who ran the fashion salon, but also women and girls whose lives were essentially saved because they sewed there. It's really been the most remarkable piece of history that I've ever had the privilege of working on. I don't think I gave anything away.
DR BREANN FALLON: No, there were no spoilers in that, but the Dressmakers of Auschwitz, when you said you may not be able to hear that, it was a fashion salon, there was an audible gasp in the room here. And I think there is some awareness of the history around slave labor for uniforms, for example. But the idea of a fashion salon has a completely different element to it. And when rereading your book before this conversation, thinking about also the women that ordered from that salon, and that kind of dual nature of this gendered history, tell me about what it was like for you looking at essentially women's history from two completely different sides of that coin.
LUCY ADLINGTON: Yes, my goodness, and I think it was really important to centre the women's stories. And I found in my work as a clothes historian over the decades that sometimes women's experiences have been sidelined and perhaps less credit has been given to so called traditional female skills such as sewing and women's domestic experiences. So for me, I always look, I always look for the women in history and to explore the ramifications of a fashion salon in Auschwitz gave really incredible, quite staggering insights, not only into the networks of friendship of the Jewish inmates that help them survive, but also the grotesque psychology of the SS perpetrators and the bystanders. And so if you think about it in dress making terms, you've got a sewing room, so a room filled with wooden tables and women mainly doing hand work, even though machines were available. And then a fitting room. And in this fitting room, Marta Fuchs, who was the head of the fashion salon, a cutter, very talented young woman, she would be with SS women. So this, this is Hedwig Höss, the Commandant's wife, and other officers wives and they would be stripped down to their to their lingerie, their girdles. And she would be measuring them. She would be fitting garments to them, fitting toiles, which is the practice garment, and it's so intimate, it is normally the sort of relationship, if you ever had a garment, a bespoke garment made, perhaps for some people, it would be a suit or a wedding dress these days. How close are you? And to have Jewish bodies so intimate with German SS bodies is to me, it's just staggering. So the book can explore not only the immense resilience and talents of the Jewish dressmakers in the salon. But also, what on earth is going on with SS women ordering clothes from Jewish enslaved workers when so much of Nazi propaganda has been telling Germans that Jews "pollute you through making clothes" that that Jews are "parasites", they can't work. And so to me, unravelling all of these stories and laying them out for reader has really been extraordinary.
DR BREANN FALLON: And there's so much more to this unravelling. Because not only did SS women come into the salon to be fitted in that very intimate sense, but there were orders all the way from Berlin with up to a six month lead time. So it's quite a popular place to order clothes from.
LUCY ADLINGTON: It's been really hard to trace the specifics, but you're absolutely right. One of the surviving dressmakers a really incredible woman called Hunya. And I hope people will get chance to read the book, to read about Hunya and the others, Hunya said in her testimony that there was a large black order book, and she said there were the very highest names in Berlin. And sadly, Hunya died before I was able to interview her, so I couldn't say which names, so we can only speculate in that sense, but they could be women such as Magda Goebbels and Emmy Göring. It could be Ava Braun who becomes Hitler's wife, because we know that they all indulged in fashion, and they all benefited from the talent of Jewish makers, both before the war and during. So that hypocrisy is something that writing the book, that it really came to the forefront, that not only is antisemitism driving so many choices by the Nazis in the Third Reich, it's also greed and vanity. They want super wonderful clothes. They want to exploit Jewish fashions, and at the same time, they don't want to pay for it, and they want to render Europe Jew free. So really, there's, there is so much in the context of this book, and all of it can be, we can explore it all just by focusing on a core of women in this salon.
DR BREANN FALLON: You mentioned Magda Goebbels just a moment ago, and she very famously said, "with the Jews goes the elegance of Berlin", because she had a very famous Jewish tailor that she was very, very known to shop with. I just want to take us back to that room, that salon that we've spoken about. There's a beautiful line in your book where one of the sewers said "the hum of sewing machines was our lullaby". And you talk about the conditions in your book inside that salon, just give us a sense of what's going on in that salon.
LUCY ADLINGTON: So it's a very privileged work position. That much is obvious, and the book does make it clear that the women don't just swan off a train and into a life of luxury. That is not the case, all of the women had to endure hard labour and horrific circumstances before they had the opportunity to come to this haven, to this fashion salon. And they recognised absolutely that, you know, the only way to survive was to get privileged work. And I really wanted to evoke, as you've mentioned, there the noises and the sights in the salon, because to get a sense of not only of that the hiss of a steam iron or the whirring of machines, but also the fact that within this salon, they had unique opportunities to assert their humanity in a way that the degradation of the Auschwitz main camp or the Birkenau extension camp could not permit. They had clean surroundings because their SS clients did not want to be around dirt, and they were terrified of infection, and so the young women and girls in the dressmaking salon had clean garments to wear, which was amazing for them having worn the filth encrusted garments in Birkenau. They had opportunity to wash. They had access to running water. And I say these things, you know, they're everyday things for us, but for inmates in Auschwitz Birkenau, it was a miracle.
LUCY ADLINGTON: They didn't have to go to outdoor roll call. And many people will understand that these roll calls for many hours in appalling weather conditions caused the death or deterioration of many inmates. So the dressmakers lined up in the corridor outside the fashion salon and Hunya said they actually look like little, little geese, a flock of geese when they were sent off to work because they had white head scarves on. And then in the salon, although there we were under the watchful eye of a German guard, SS woman, Elizabeth Rupert, they had the opportunity to talk, not to shout at each other, not to bark orders, but to chat and to recall memories of home, to just, they even made jokes. You know, there was even that opportunity to remember that they were individuals, and all the while, however, they're working 10 to 12 hours a day. And if it seems very cushy this job, you have to remember there are bars on the window and all of the sewers were very well aware of what waited them outside, what have been the fate of their friends and families of the group of women who arrived. They arrived in Spring 1942 from Slovakia most of the dressmakers. Of their group, the mortality rate had been 80% so they knew. They knew absolutely. They carried in their hearts all of that grieving and the sorrow and the trauma, and then contrast that with stitching silk gowns and sewing buttons on baby clothes, there's so much I could tell you, I just want to keep talking. I'm sure, I'm sure I could talk for hours to tell you everything.
DR BREANN FALLON: We have plenty of time left, which is a good thing. This idea of chatting, this idea of the liberty to actually be able to connect with the fellow human in the salon. Often prisoners were not allowed to speak to each other when they were at work. What sort of connection do you think that had to this idea of resistance, resistance via hope that's occurring in that salon?
LUCY ADLINGTON: It's something that you've flagged up before when we've chatted. You know the many different ways that people, persecuted people, can resist, and it's something that I really wanted to draw out in the book, is that okay, living is a form of resistance, right? But to keep your humanity is extraordinary, and to keep a sense of who they are. They even managed, under Marta, under her aegis, they managed to smuggle messages out. There was a network of couriers that they could link up with, because the fashion salon was actually based in the SS administration building, next to the Auschwitz main camp. And so this meant there was a lot of coming and going, and with care, messages could be smuggled out and sometimes in. And so the women had an opportunity to contact, with caution, contact any loved ones who were still in hiding, and they didn't talk about the camp in these messages, they just sent love. The love running through this is actually quite remarkable.
LUCY ADLINGTON: But there were also opportunities for education. Many of these young women had had been thrown out of school because they were Jewish. In fact, one of them Irene Reichenberg, when she was kicked out of school back in Bratislava in Slovakia, she said we didn't know what to do or where to go next. And she said, on the spur of the moment, I decided to learn to sew a little. And so she got an education in sewing, for sure. But by talking to the other women, they learned different languages. You know, there was so much, so in that sense, they were defying the Nazi tactics, the SS tactics, of rendering them less than human, of calling them subhuman, you know, saying, "Oh, you're just vermin". They could assert their individuality. And I mentioned the joking and chatting, not because they were making light of their situation, but because they were defiant and in terms of actual resistance, yes, there's lots more we could discuss about that and perhaps we will come to it. But one of the things that struck me was an act of sabotage. And I did ask Bracha, the last surviving dressmaker, I said, you know, "did you sabotage the clothing?". Because I'd heard in in other workshops in Ravensbrück and elsewhere, the women would deliberately stitch things badly or put the buttons on uniforms, you know, they were making uniforms, they put the buttons on so they didn't align, you know, or the stitches would just come to pieces. And Braca just looked at me when I asked that, and she said, "No, we did not sabotage the clothes". And this wasn't only because their lives would be imperilled if they were caught, you know, in such a closed salon. It was also because of their pride. And again, that that comes back to what you're saying about humanity and dignity. Marta, the head of the workshop, was determined that they would work to the very best quality, and not just to save their lives, but to show that they had those standards, they had those skills and that integrity.
LUCY ADLINGTON: So it did tickle me a little to learn that in the SS administration block, I think it was, someone flushed rags down the toilet to block the SS women's toilets, you know. And it's a little thing, and it's a sort of thing, you know, stupid school girl joke, even, but to dare to do that and to get some sense of satisfaction. And there are other stories that Braca recounted, the surviving dressmaker, and also other women in their testimonies of quiet rebellion. And if I may, for one example, tell you there was a girl called Lulu, Lulu Gruenberg from Slovakia in the salon. And one day Hedwig Höss the commandant’s wife, had come for a fitting. She'd gone into the fitting room, leaving her little son, I think it was Hans Jürgen, she'd left him in the in the dressmakers, you know, the main sewing room with the Jewish inmates. You know, it's so surreal, isn't it? And one, one of the women this Lulu, she just snapped, and she took up her tape measure, and she wrapped it around the little boy's neck, and she said, "One day you're all going to hang you, your father, your mother, all of you". And then she pulled it off and went back sewing. And the next day, Frauhaus reported that her little boy didn't want to come to the salon with her for the fitting. And you know, listening to this story, we can at once be horrified. You know, this poor child, it's nothing to do with him. But then think of the pressure that the women were under. So these are the these, I would say, are some of the acts of resistance. Resistance through being human, through being humane, resistance through having your skills emphasised in work, but there was more to it, and Marta ensured that the fashion salon was actually a hub of the underground resistance movement.
DR BREANN FALLON: There's a wonderful line in your book. I'll never forget it. "Our needles were our weapons and our threads were our shields". And I love what you've done with the words there, because it would be so easy to look at this and miss the resistance, but you've brought it out so beautifully because that question of sabotage and saying, Oh no, but that idea of maintaining your dignity through your work, which is exactly what the Nazis did not want, and then this underground movement as well, I think what you've done so beautifully in the book is look at the utter complexity of what's going on there in terms of the human condition, in that sense of where is the line between sabotage, resistance, dignity, compassion and there is this picture you paint in that room, where it's almost a microcosm into itself, inside this camp that's kind of operating. And you mentioned there that Bracka, the last survivor. What was that like for you, having somebody that could speak to you and take you into that microcosm?
LUCY ADLINGTON: As you all know with your work that the importance of speaking to people, speaking with survivors, listening to them, hearing their testimonies, is the most fundamental element of work as historians the following generations. So when I first came across mention of the fashion salon and it was incredibly difficult to find out anything more than fragments. The Nazis had destroyed a lot of evidence. The big black order book was destroyed, and it seemed almost impossible to track down names such as Marta and Hunya and Bracka. And it was actually extraordinary serendipity that meant that my work, my research, became known in Israel, and from there, the families of the surviving dressmakers did get in touch via email, and that was extraordinary to see photographs and to have memoirs shared, and, you know, links to videos that otherwise I wouldn't have been able to access for these testimonies.
LUCY ADLINGTON: But then, when it was Irene, Irene's niece Talia in Israel, she was the one who said, "Well, you know, Bracha is still alive. You should, you should speak to her". And so I have to say, for all the number of people that I've interviewed over the years, as a historian, this was the most emotional, you know, actually thinking, you know, even thinking about it now, it hits me what it was like to, you know, fly from my little home, my safe home in England to go and visit her in California, and I spent a week with her and her family. And just the very first time I met her, she was an older woman. She was 98. Brilliantly alert, intelligent, healthy, very welcoming. Made great apple strudel. You know, those little details. It was just to meet her and think, for me, this has all been theory, you know, I'm third generation on now, but for her, it's lived experience, and it grounded me just seeing it in her bathroom, you know, and washing my hands at the sink and her lipstick. Her pink lipstick there, and I thought there's little precious personal things.
LUCY ADLINGTON: So to sit with Bracha and her family and to be able to ask questions is a huge privilege, because I was able to ask her, "Well, what was it actually like?". You know, I've got all of these documents that give hints about, you know, exploited labour in this way, but what was the salon actually like? And I asked her at one point, and the Commandant's wife, you know, I was thinking, well, I will get some insight into perpetrator psychology here, because she'd already talked a little bit about the German guard who was stationed in the salon. And I said, "Well, what was, what was the Commandant's wife like?" and she thought about it for a moment, and then she said, "Well, her figure wasn't so good", and she'd just gone into dress making mode. And that really, that really opened my eyes to the complexities that Bracha also talked about the other SS clients who came in. These were wives of mass murderers, of cruel, malicious men. And these women would come in, and I said, "Well, you know, how did it feel to sew for them?" And Bracha said "They were of the time, also". What an incredible thing to have to unpack trying to understand how the perpetrators, how the bystanders, how the enablers were, and later she did delve more into her feelings of anger and hatred, you know, at the loss of her family. So you know that is a very long answer to say what a privilege it was to speak to Bracha, and how very emotional for me to be in that position, but also so important to be able to centre Bracha's voice, to be able to centre all the women's voices, that has been the most important thing.
DR BREANN FALLON: There's something amazing in the multitude of women's relationships in the text, whether it's between the women in the salon or those bizarre relationships with the SS wives and women or with the guards. And not a survivor from this book, but a survivor I worked with who was in Auschwitz said to me once, not only was she angry and did she have hatred, but her greatest disappointment was the lack of kindness from the female guards to other women, and that shattered her understanding of how women should treat each other. There's another relationship in this book, though, and that's your relationship to the book, and I'm wondering, you keep referring to yourself as a historian, is there an element for you of resistance in writing this book, in giving these women a platform and a voice?
LUCY ADLINGTON: What an interesting question. Maybe it's radical to say, but I think anyone studying and sharing the history of women or any so called minority group, it is an act of resistance, when compared with centuries of more traditional history, which is centred elite people only, or which is centred very much a default male position. And it was something I was very keen to do in this book, was to have all the major architects of genocide, you know, the Hitlers and Himmlers and Eichmann, to have them off stage, because so much is known about them, so much is written about them, and to absolutely focus on so called ordinary people. And the women and girls of the fashion salon, Marta, Bracha, Hunya, Irene, they wouldn't be in a history book if it weren't for the Holocaust. And that's so poignant for any testimony, isn't it? Every voice does deserve to be heard, but ordinarily, their testimonies, their experiences would not be considered important. You know, they were "just" dressmakers. And I use that term just very sarcastically, but I think traditionally, skills such as sewing have been overlooked, and traditionally the fashion trade and clothing history has been dismissed as, "Oh, it's just clothes, it's just fashion, it's just vanity".
LUCY ADLINGTON: And it's very clear to me, you know, with my specialties a clothes historian, that clothes are never just clothes. They are incredibly powerful in a symbolic way, in a very personal, intimate way. You know, we're all wearing them. Our bodies warm them right now, but also economically and industrially, they're a huge factor for any country, any regime. So yes, in some ways, it was an act of resistance to say, 'I'm going to write this story about women', and it it's painful in a way that we're still having to fight to make space for that. It's getting a lot better. And it's amazing to see over the last 20 years, you know, new generations of academics and writers and researchers.
LUCY ADLINGTON: But I also - another act of resistance was to make it a factual book. There was a certain amount of encouragement from the publishing world to say, 'Well, could you write it as a novel?' rather like the immensely readable and successful Tattooist of Auschwitz. And I said, 'Well, it doesn't need fictionalising'. The truth is so interesting and so complex. And I felt very determined that it had to be written so every bit of dialogue in the book, everything mentioned, comes from a source. You know, I haven't made up dialogue. I haven't made up interactions. I can speculate at times, but they all come from testimonies and so on. So that was resistance.
LUCY ADLINGTON: And then I think the final thing was, and this is very personal, and may resonate with anyone who works on the theoretical side of Holocaust studies, but any one of second or third generations of surviving families that the impact, the emotional impact, it's significant, isn't it? And as I wrote this book, it was during the first lockdowns in the UK due to the start of the Covid pandemic. And so of course, we're seeing how communities fracture or come together, you know, which was very relevant when writing about 1930s Europe, but also those fears that we had at the time and the insecurities. But here I was writing about Bracha and her friends in the salon, and Bracha's friend Irene saying, 'There's no way out of here. The only way out is through the chimneys'. And Bracha saying, 'No, we are getting out of here, and we are having coffee and cake again, and we are going to tell our story'. And here I am with my keyboard, you know, with coffee and cake, oh and a cat, of course, writing her story thinking, you know, I needed that remembrance of resilience. And I needed that, you know, that that little nudge from Bracha to think, no, we have to, we have to keep telling the stories, and we have to keep appreciating the extraordinary blessings that we have, you know, in a free world with coffee and with cake, and that's definitely something I wanted to emphasise in the book, that form of resistance.
DR BREANN FALLON: You just mentioned a whole kind of list of names there. Hunya, Bracha, Irene, did you have a family connection with all the girls that you mentioned in the book? Or were there some that you didn't have that personal connection with?
LUCY ADLINGTON: As with anything, there are always so many more directions, so many more avenues of research, that it would be nice to go down and some were dead ends, and I couldn't find out more. From my research it seems that maybe 40 women and girls passed through the salon under Marta's aegis, and during that time, they were then given an extra chance of health and life. There was a core of 25 women at the at the height of the fashion salon's eminence, although it did just start out with Marta, you know, and it grew. And so of these, again, I've been able to hone in on fuller biographies, if you will, life stories of a core, you know, maybe five to 10 of the women. For others, there are little fragments, and for some I just didn't have time, you know, writing the book, there were two women from the French Resistance I would have liked to explore.
LUCY ADLINGTON: But one of the remarkable things about when the book was published is inevitably it found readers who had their own connections. And I'm thinking in particular of one of Marta's friends, Ella, Ella Neugebauer. And I, through testimonies, knew something of Ella Neugebauer's existence in Auschwitz, but a family member got in touch and said, 'Well, that that was our Aunty Ella, and we didn't know what happened to her'. And so we had a very powerful connection. Whereas I, you know, I have no familial connection at all. And here is a family member, and we were able to share, in my case, I passed on what I knew of Ella and what have had become of her. And the family member was able to share photographs of Ella before the war, which was beautiful, you know, to see, she was very much a fashion lover, very nicely dressed. And to see this woman that I'd read about, to see her as a person you know, visualize her. So there's more to know, but always more connections being made. And after the book was published, I also found out a lot more about the youngest member of the salon, 14-year-old, Rózsika, known as little chicken or little hen, and so it's been an incredible experience over the last few years, making new connections.
DR BREANN FALLON: The reason I ask is every time you name you're also resisting by remembering that person, and the names are forever in that book, and every time we speak those names, even if there's no family member to remember them, this book will always be an act of resistance, and I think there's something really powerful in that. We've spoken about your research and we've spoken about the impact of testimonies, and I happen to know that you also have some artefacts with you that are connected to this history. Now, when you and I chatted previously, we spoke about the fact that artefacts is a bit cold, rather they're belongings, because they belong to people, and they always will. Do you have any belongings on hand that you would be willing to show to us?
LUCY ADLINGTON: I do, and I would like to thank you for introducing me to that, this beautifully warm concept of belongings, rather than artefacts, and it's something that I am using a great deal. And just on your point about names while I rustle to the side here, Hunya did say that one reason she shared her testimony, and it was only done privately, was because she wanted the names of those who died to be remembered. I mean that to her was important, and it's something else that Bracha had mentioned, you know, that they had to live to tell their stories. And when folk have said to me about the book, "Oh, you know, there's a lot of footnotes, there's a lot of notes. And I thought, yes, because if I put in as much as I can, other researchers and maybe even family connections, those names are there, even if they're in the footnotes, and it might spark off someone else".
LUCY ADLINGTON: So in terms of the belongings, I have a collection of vintage and antique garments and textiles spanning 300 years now. I've been collecting for many decades. It's my job, but the most precious things are those garments that have stories and hold memories. And so I'm going to show you two things, if I may. And the first one is, this is so ordinary and so domestic and yet so rare because of that. This is a tablecloth. It's such an ordinary damask bit of fabric. You know, not everybody uses tablecloths anymore. You can see from the styling, perhaps from these stripes, that it's a very Art Deco style in blue and yellow stripes, the little diamonds woven through the fabric. And we've also got two initials embroidered, H.S. So a little ordinary textile like this, and to me, it's amazing it survived. This is from Slovakia, and it dates to late 1920s, 1930s so the interwar years, and it's Jewish. So already we're thinking, well, we know that so many Jewish belongings were stolen, if not all you know, it was so hard for Jewish people to hold on to anything thanks to the Nazi plunder and plunder of their neighbours. So an ordinary tablecloth, but a tablecloth with a personal connection. The HS is for Hermine Storch. Hermine shortened is Hunya. So this is Hunya’s tablecloth, remarkable that it survives, given the war, but it has even more of a story than that. And I think intergenerational stories can be bound up in textiles.
LUCY ADLINGTON: When it's open fully, you can see a rather bizarre pattern in the middle of four squares. And these are four table napkins. You know, people at an elegant dinner, maybe a Sabbath meal would sit with napkins and a tablecloth matching and when I turned it over, I saw that it had been mended on the back, so it's had this patch added. And I asked Hunya's niece Gila, and Gila donated it. And you'll be hearing a little bit more about Gila next. I said, you know, 'Why have you sewn four napkins?' She said, 'Oh, we were having a Friday night meal, and the candle burnt the tablecloth. It burned a hole'. They had to cover it over. So for me, this tablecloth, it could be anonymous. You would never know the story with it, but the story is there that intergenerational connection, but also the element of survival.
LUCY ADLINGTON: So may I now show you another garment?
DR BREANN FALLON: Yes, thank you.
LUCY ADLINGTON: This is the most precious thing in my collection, and believe me, I have 18th century embroidery. I have Dior, but this is a garment that has no label. It was not made in a Parisian atelier. This is, this was not made in Auschwitz. And the garments made in Auschwitz, they didn't have labels in you know. Why would Magda Goebbels want to label saying a Jewish inmate made this, you know? So who knows what survives. Hedwig Hurst didn't keep any of her fashions from that era. So this is a homemade garment, and it tells a story of time and place. It was made in the 1950s in Israel, a time of, very beleaguered time politically and also a time of great austerity. And it's a suit converted from a dress. So there's a jacket and a very smart pleated skirt with this really modern, geometric fabric from the 1950s and this was made in Tel Aviv by Hunya, Hunya Storch. That was her maiden name, one of the survivors of the Auschwitz fashion salon, a really remarkable woman. And she continued sewing after her emigration, and she made this suit out of one of her own dresses for her niece Gila. So again, that generational connection, she stitched it with love. And as Hunya was sewing this suit, she told stories of her experiences before the war and of her time in the fashion salon. And as Hunya talked and sewed, Gila wrote her testimony. And so that way that memories and stories and stitching are bound together is really, really powerful. So thank you for letting me share that with you.
DR BREANN FALLON: I think it's really interesting. I didn't know what belongings you were going to share with us today, but it's really interesting to me that you've shown us something prewar and post war, and that you mentioned that there's nothing in between, because that gap speaks volumes. Because when we think about the textiles that Hunya would have had during that period of the uniform that she was wearing, it is the polar opposite to what you've got there in your hands. And there's something really powerful in Holocaust history, in really fully sitting in those gaps and thinking about what it means that those gaps exist. And as you say, that makes those objects all the more rare that they do exist, because we can understand what they actually encapsulate in that gap in the middle.
LUCY ADLINGTON: And we relate to them, don't we? You know, we've all used tablecloth, we've all worn a suit, but they're so human, they touch us. And I know that many remembrance centres and archives and museums that it's the objects and photographs that draw people to make those connections.
DR BREANN FALLON: I'm wondering, as a historian, was there ever a didactic element to this book? You've put so much work into it, you've collected these belongings. We've spoken about how it was, how it is an act of resistance. But for us as readers, you know, you pass on the baton of resistance, to us when we read it, and we become holders of that memory. But is there something else that you want us to take away from this text?
LUCY ADLINGTON: Well, I suppose every reader will come to a book with a different experience, and every reader will leave with something different. But I've never thought of writing as objective. And I've never tried to be objective myself. I know that my work is suffused with my, I guess, my own heart. I think it's very, you know, the heart and brain together. I suppose, for it, to make it a little more simple to answer, when people ask me, you know, questions at the end of a talk, what do you think is important about this book and about community? There are so many ways I could answer, you know, thinking about how Bracha dragged her friend Irene from the edge of despair and kept her going. You know, that way that we all must look out for each other, that we need to bring communities together. We can think about how easy it is to assume that there's good stuff and the evil stuff happens somewhere else and it's other people. And I would like to drag us all back and say, 'No, this is us'. We're the sort of people who are making tiny decisions each day that either build a community or separate and encourage tribalism.
LUCY ADLINGTON: And I am going to show you another garment that I have tucked away to answer this, because one question that people do come back to me with is that they've read about exploited labour in Auschwitz, in the fashion salon and in multitudes of ghetto workshops and factories, for example. How is that relevant now? And of course, this is something that you and I have discussed, the exploitative nature of the fashion trade generally. So I'm going to show you a swimming costume from my collection. There we are. It's not really warm enough in England right now to go swimming unless you're fairly sturdy. This is from, I would say, the early 1960s, a swimming costume. But what's interesting about it, for me is the label. We've talked a little bit about labels, and this label is it's a company called Gottex. And Gotexx was set up by Lea Gottlieb in Israel after the war, and Hunya, Hunya of the Auschwitz fashion salon, went to work for Gottex and essentially doing factory sewing, very different from bespoke, elite sewing. And this made me think of all those women and men and girls labouring rows and rows and rows and rows and rows of sewing machines. And Hunya got very disillusioned with sewing. In fact, she told her niece Geela, she said, 'Don't become a seamstress'. She said, 'I know it saved my life, but you just sit there and sew', and then this in turn, does bring us to think about our own clothes now, our own fashions, our own choices and the labels that are in our clothes, you know, where are they from? Who made them? And so that's something that, in addition to immortalising people's lives and sufferings and experiences of the Holocaust, also to relate it to ongoing conditions in different communities now, and the way that fashion is woven together with that. That was a long, convoluted answer. It's such an interesting topic. I'm sure you have many interesting things you could say yourself on that.
DR BREANN FALLON: We did speak on Zoom about the nature of human trafficking, and unfortunately, we don't have time to go into it today. But years ago, working on the topic, I found some statistic that over 85% of goods for sale in Australia are tainted by human slavery and human trafficking. And you know, as you say, there is an importance in those little decisions we're making every single day, alongside the great resistance and memorialisation that this book is as well.
LUCY ADLINGTON: And if I may just add to that, I know we're probably running out of time that I still want people to celebrate their clothes and appreciate them. You know, clothes are amazing. They keep us warm or cool. They keep us modest or flaunting. They they show our identity. They're so personal. They can be incredibly joyful. They can be very comforting and so clothes themselves, you know, I really like clothes. And yes, we can make choices about where we buy them and and where we can try and find out where they're made as much as possible. But I suppose ultimately, if we can come back to a kind of respect for the makers, and this would be respect for people now, whether exploited or not, who are making these, these wonderful textiles that we wear, and also linking in with respect for the makers of the fashion salon, so I think we can hold the two together.
DR BREANN FALLON: Yes, very much so. That’s at the core of it, the respect for your fellow human being. I have the privilege of knowing what you're writing next. And several people have already asked me, and I told them that they had to wait for this question. So tell us, what are you working on next?
LUCY ADLINGTON: Oh, I hope you've got three hours so I can tell you. The book will be coming out. My new book will be coming out in March, and I have a lovely, lovely Australian publisher, Ultimo Press, who will be will be releasing the book in Australia, March next year. And I wanted to follow very much the idea that clothes hold memories and clothes tell stories. And while I'd been researching the Dressmakers, I'd come across a lot of references to knitting, which is perhaps even more overlooked in general histories than sewing, because knitting, you create garments that are incredibly humble, perhaps, you know, just an everyday jumper, a pair of socks, I have come across knitted bras, actually, they're not big favourite for me. So, I was looking through, coming across snippets about knitting, and knitting is a form of resistance, for sure, knitting in places where you could not even imagine, where are you going to get needles from, let alone wool. So I've written a new Holocaust history, and it began with a belonging, an object in a museum, in the Holocaust gallery of the Imperial War Museum, a red jumper and another garment in the archives of this museum that had a name and a place and no story. So I thought I would use this little red sweater to try and find out, well, who, who did it belong to? What happened to her, what happened to her family? Where did it come from? And eventually, I collected four stories all based around four red sweaters. And that is what the book is called, Four Red Sweaters. And I think it's, it's the most beautiful and the saddest thing I've ever written, very bittersweet. And I'm really so pleased to have done it, and so pleased that I'll be able to speak about the book and share it next year.
DR BREANN FALLON: Very much looking forward to that one, another audible gasp in the audience. So you already have a lot of readers ready for Four Red Sweaters, but Lucy, we're almost out of time before I thank you, I just want to I have a book here of my favourite quotes from the Dressmakers of Auschwitz, and there's one I just wanted to leave the audience with, because it encapsulates everything we've spoken about in terms of the importance of women's history, the act of maintaining humanity through taking pride in in the work that went on, in the salon, in the resistance, in the belongings, in the connections that we've spoken about over the last 50 minutes, and the quote is 'they tried to silence us, but our voices rang out in the stitches of our garments' and the voices that you've given these women in this book will ring out for the rest of history. Thank you for putting your heart and soul into it, and as I said, before giving us the baton of memory to carry as well, thank you so much, Lucy.
LAURA THOMAS: We hope you enjoyed this recording, and if you'd like to attend one of our events live, head to the shrine website for all the details.
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