The Dressmakers of Auschwitz

Lucy Adlington

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063030947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps. 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.

This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant's wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin's upper crust.

Drawing on diverse sources—including interviews with the last surviving seamstress— The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers' remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.

1

One of the Few Who Survived

After two years I came to the Auschwitz headquarters building, where I worked as a seamstress in the sewing room for SS families. I worked 10–12 hours a day. I am one of the few who survived the hell of Auschwitz.

– Olga Kovácz¹

A day like any other.

By the light of two windows, a group of women in white headscarves sat sewing at long wooden tables, heads bent over garments, needles in, needles out. It was a basement room. The sky beyond the windows did not represent freedom. This was their refuge.

They were surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a thriving fashion salon; all the tools of their trade. On the tables, coiling tape measures, scissors and bobbins of thread. Stacked nearby, bolts of every kind of fabric. Scattered around, fashion magazines and the crisp tissue of dressmaking patterns. Next to the main workshop was a private fitting room for clients, all under the aegis of clever, capable Marta, who not long since had run her own successful salon in Bratislava. Supporting Marta was Borishka.

The seamstresses did not sew in silence. In a jumble of languages – Slovakian, German, Hungarian, French, Polish – they chatted about their work, their homes, their families . . . even joked among themselves. Most of them were young, after all, late teens, early twenties. The youngest was only fourteen. Little Hen, they called her, as she darted about the salon fetching pins and sweeping up snipped threads.

Friends worked together. There was Irene, Bracha and Renée, all from Bratislava, and Bracha’s sister Katka, who stitched smart wool coats for their clients, even when her own fingers were frozen with cold. Baba and Lulu were another two seamstresses who were close friends, one serious, one mischievous. Hunya, in her mid-thirties, was both friend and mother-figure, and a force to be reckoned with. Olga, a similar age to Hunya, seemed ancient to the younger girls.

They were all Jews.

Sewing alongside them were two French communists, corsetière Alida and resistance fighter Marilou, both arrested and deported for opposing the Nazi occupation of their country.

Twenty-five women working in total, needles in, needles out. When one was called away from work and never seen again, Marta would quickly arrange for another to take her place. She wanted as many female prisoners as possible to join this refuge in the basement. In this room they had names. Beyond the salon they were nameless, merely numbers.

There was certainly work enough for everyone. The big, black order book was so full there was a six-month waiting list, even for very high status clients in Berlin. Priority for orders was given to their local clients, and to the woman who had established the salon. Hedwig Höss. Wife of the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.

One day, a day like any other, there was a cry of dismay in the basement salon and the horrible smell of burnt fabric. Catastrophe. While pressing a dress, the fabric had been scorched by a too-hot iron; the burn mark was right at the front, no way of hiding it. The client was due for a fitting the very next day. The clumsy dressmaker was wild with anxiety, crying, ‘What can we do? What can we do?’

The others stopped work, feeling her panic. This was not simply a question of a ruined dress. The clients of this fashion workshop were wives of high-ranking men from the Auschwitz SS garrison. Men notorious for beatings, torture and mass murder. Men with total control over the lives and fates of every woman in that room.

Marta, in charge, calmly assessed the damage.

‘You know what we’ll do? We’ll take out this panel here, and insert this fresh fabric here. Quickly now . . .’

They all rallied.

The next day the SS wife arrived for her appointment in the fashion salon. She tried on her new dress and looked, perplexed, in the mirror of the fitting room.

‘I don’t remember the design being like this.’

‘Of course it was,’ answered Marta smoothly. ‘Doesn’t it look nice? A new fashion . . .’²

Disaster averted. For the time being.

The dressmakers went back to their work, needles in, needles out, and lived to see another day as prisoners in Auschwitz.

The forces that converged to create a fashion salon in Auschwitz were also responsible for shaping and fracturing the lives of the women who would eventually work there. Two decades earlier, when the dressmakers were young girls or mere infants, they could have no concept of how their fates would converge in such a place. Even the adults in their lives would have struggled to comprehend a future that included couture sewing in the midst of industrialised genocide.

The world is very small when we are children, yet rich with details and sensation. The itch of wool against the skin, the fumbling of cold fingers on stubborn buttons, the fascination of threads unravelling from a torn trouser knee. Our horizon is first within the walls of a family home, then spreads to street corners, fields, forests and cityscapes. There is no foreboding of what will happen in the future. In time, memories and mementoes are all that remain of lost years.

Irene Reichenberg as a child

Amy Kanka-Valadarsky

One of the faces looking out from the past is that of Irene Reichenberg as a child, date unknown. Her features are pale among shadows; her clothes indistinct. Her cheeks are rounded from a hesitant smile, as if wary to show too much emotion.

Irene was born on 23 April 1922 in Bratislava, a beautiful Czechoslovakian city on the banks of the river Danube, barely an hour from Vienna. Irene’s birth came three years after a census that showed the city’s population was mainly an ethnic mix of Germans, Slovaks and Hungarians. Since 1918, all had come under the politcal control of the new Czechoslovakian state, but the Jewish community of nearly 15,000 was centred in one particular quarter of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the northern bank of the Danube.

The hub of the Jewish quarter was the Judengasse, or Židovská ulica – Street of the Jews. Before 1840, Jews had been segregated to this single, sloping street of Bratislava, part of the local castle estate. Gates at each end were locked at night by municipal wardens, essentially creating a ghetto road, which made it clear that Jews were to be considered separate from other Bratislavans.

In the decades that followed, antisemitic laws were relaxed, allowing more prosperous Jewish families the freedom to move away from the street and into the main part of the city. The once proud baroque buildings of Židovská Street were subdivided into cramped tenements housing populous families. While the area had a reputation for being down-market, the cobbled streets were swept clean, and the stores and workshops were busy. It was a close-knit and supportive community. Everyone knew everyone. They knew everyone else’s business too. Residents felt a special sense of belonging.

This was the happiest time in my life. I was born there, I grew up there, and there I was with my family

– Irene Reichenberg³

Židovská Street was a wonderful place for children, who tumbled in and out of friends’ houses and colonised the road and pavements with their games. Irene’s home was at number eighteen, up on the second floor of a corner building. There were eight Reichenberg children. As with any large family, different alliances and loyalties formed between siblings, as well as a certain distance between the very oldest and youngest. One of Irene’s brothers, Armin, worked in a sweet shop. He would eventually leave for the British Mandate of Palestine, and be spared the immediate trauma of the Holocaust. Her other brother, Laci Reichenberg, had a job with a Jewish wholesale textile company. He was married to a young Slovakian named Turulka Fuchs.

There was no thought of war for the family during Irene’s early life. It was hoped all that horror was done with after the Armistice of 1918 and the birth of the new country Czechoslovakia, where Jews were citizens. Irene herself was too young to appreciate the world outside the Jewish quarter. Her path, like most girls of the era, was to become proficient at domestic work, with a view to marriage and motherhood, following the example of her older sisters. Katarina, known as Käthe, was courted by a handsome young man named Leo Kohn; Jolanda – Jolli – married electrician Bela Grotter in 1937; Frieda was the next to marry, becoming Frieda Federweiss, leaving only Irene, Edith and Grete.⁴

Financially supporting this large family fell to Irene’s father, Shmuel Reichenberg. Shmuel was a shoemaker, one of many artisans on Židovská Street. The skill and poverty of shoemakers has been immortalised in fairy tales. There truly was a kind of magic in the way Shmuel cut and moulded supple leather pieces onto a wooden last, stitched seams with waxed thread, and hammered in each nail with care, bent over his work from seven in the morning until late in the evening, all without the help of machines. Money was tight and sales uncertain. For many residents of Židovská Street, new shoes or even shoe repairs were a luxury. The hard inter-war years saw the poorest people go barefoot, or keep their failing footwear tied on with rags.

If Irene’s father was the breadwinner, her mother Tzvia – Cecilia – was bread-maker and homemaker. Her working day lasted longer even than her husband’s. Housework was hard graft with no labour-saving machines and no servants to help, only her daughters. Every second year Tzvia was pregnant, which meant extra cooking, laundry and cleaning. Despite a large family and a small income, Tzvia did her best to make each child feel special. One year little Irene received a special birthday treat: a whole boiled egg all to herself. She was delighted with it, and her friends on Židovská Street heard about this wonder.

One of this special group of friends was a girl from an Orthodox Jewish family – Renée Ungar. Renée’s father was a rabbi and her mother a housewife. A year older than Irene, Renée was bold where Irene was quiet.⁵ A portrait of Renée from 1939 shows a calm and intelligent demeanour, off-set by two-tone pom-poms dangling from a Peter Pan collar.

Renée Ungar in 1939

Private collection

Ten years before this photo was taken, when Irene was seven years old, Irene gained a new playmate who would become a lifelong friend, and a brave companion during the most harrowing journey of her life.

This was Bracha Berkovič.

We had good times there – Bracha Berkovič

Bracha was a country girl born in the village of Čepa, in the highlands of Carpathian Ruthenia. Away from core industrial centres, this part of inter-war Czechoslovakia was mainly agricultural. Rural towns and villages were distinguished by their own local speech patterns and customs, and even local embroidery designs.

The landscape of Bracha’s childhood was dominated by the seemingly endless ranges of the Tatras Mountains, which softened down into fields of clover, rye, barley, and sprouting green tops of sugar beet. The fields were worked by gangs of young women wearing bouffant-sleeved blouses, wide layered skirts and colourful headscarves. Goose girls tended their flocks; labourers hoed, gleaned and harvested. Summer was a time to wear cotton prints and lighter colours – checks, springs and stripes. Winter needed heavy homespun fabrics and woollens. Clothes were dark against the snow. Warm fringed shawls were wrapped over the head and pinned beneath the chin, or crossed and tied at the back. Bright bands of floral embroidery flashed at cuffs and sleeve seams.

Bracha’s later life was bound up with clothing, and, coincidentally, so was her birth. Her mother Karolína had to continue with the labour of clothes-washing even late into her pregnancy. In rural Carpathia, dawn’s first light saw women carrying bundles of laundry to the river, where they worked barefoot in the cold water, while children played along the river bank. Other washing was done at home, heaving soapy clothes in tubs, scrubbing them on boards, wringing them with chapped hands, then lugging them to a line for drying. Bracha’s mother Karolína was climbing a ladder to hang heavy laundry to dry under the eaves of the roof on a cold, rainy day, when she felt the first pangs of labour. This was 8 November 1921. Karolína was only nineteen at the time. It was her first baby.⁶

Bracha was born at her grandparents’ house. Although it was small and crowded, with...