The Dressmakers of Auschwitz

Title: The Dressmakers of Auschwitz

Author: Lucy Adlington

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Year: September 2021
Pages: 317 (excluding notes)
Genre: Non-Fiction
Reading Time: 14 - 25 July
Binding: NetGalley arc

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Stars:
★★★★☆

Blurb:

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.

Review:

 Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton for providing me with an early copy of this book via NetGalley. I want to preface by saying it was extremely unlike me to request this kind of book. I'm not a big reader of non-fiction unless it's my studying. I am not a history fan and especially likely to avoid any subject of the second World War. I moved schools and ended up studying it three separate times, all of which were desperately boring and ended up putting me off the subject of history completely. So the fact that this pulled my attention is, quite frankly, a small miracle!

 I love how this book came in to being with Adlington's other non-fiction and fiction previous publications. It's certainly plenty of time to research and build the span of knowledge shown on the Upper Tailoring Studio and it's attendants.

 Adlington doesn't just give us the view of Auschwitz but takes us from the beginning of the Nazi's impact on the fashion industry. How businesses were uprooted and handed over, how the armbands came in to being and how Jews were stripped of all they had before they even reached the concentration camps. There is so much more to the build up towards the concentration camps than I realised.

 Adlington has done extensive research in to the dressmakers as well and gives us plenty of insight to their lives before the Upper Tailoring Studio. Their families, their plans, their skills. It's truly impressive how much she's found.

 When we reach Auschwitz it is some time before the Upper Tailoring Studio is formed, the dressmakers arrive at different times for different reasons. They experience horrors and talk of the general life of Auschwitz and the various other horrible work they endured there. I was also shocked to see mentioned that the idea of the gas chambers came from the treatment of lice. I do question this as I tried to look it up later and found very little answers, the only mention of the same method being conspiracies that the Holocaust never happened. Not a great source to have any kind of connection to but a fantastic insight all the same.

 There are chapters post-Auschwitz, not for all the dressmakers and not all that make it fully through the chapters. It's fascinating to see how their experiences differed after the war.

 There is a real load of interesting information about a largely unexplored detail of Auschwitz here however. I feel like we really didn't hear very much about working in the Upper Tailoring Studio. It's formed, part of the resistance and then over very quickly. I would have liked to hear more about their working conditions and any further stories it feels like there are. True to the title however this is about the dressmakers and their story rather than the studio itself.

 I really enjoyed Adlington's writing, informative but still interesting. Well paced within in each chapter and an excellent introduction.

 This renewed my interest in one day making a trip to Auschwitz, I'm convinced it's an experience we should all have given it's still such recent history. I'll be glad to have the nuggets of information from this book when I do.