Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust

Historian Adlington follows up The Dressmakers of Auschwitz with a moving account of four Jewish girls persecuted during the Holocaust whose fates were intertwined with a simple article of a clothing—a red sweater—that bore outsize significance in a bleak time. Jockewet Heidenstein, a Kindertransport survivor sent from Berlin, treasured for decades a red sweater that her mother, who later died at Auschwitz, had bought for her before she departed. Chana Zumerkorn was a young seamstress in the Lodz ghetto who, though she was spared longer than most because of her knitting skills, was transported to Chelmno extermination camp and murdered. Her brother, who survived the war, later remembered the moment when, on the icy train platform where he last saw Chana, she impulsively pulled off her red sweater and gifted it to him—it would become for him a “talisman of hope.” Regina Feldman, an escapee in the Sobibor uprising, was likewise kept alive for her knitting skills, and later recalled conspiring with fellow seamstresses while being forced to knit a red-striped sweater for an SS officer. Another survivor, Anita Lasker, who was a cellist in the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, years later recounted a powerfully symbolic act of resistance: stealing back her red angora sweater from the camp’s massive piles of stolen clothing. Novelistic and wrenching, this serves as a poignant testament to the unconquerability of the human spirit. (Mar.)