A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, sewing beautiful clothes in an extraordinary fashion workshop set up in one of the infamous death camps of World War II.
Twenty-five young female prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp - most of them Jewish women and girls - were chosen to design and sew fashionable clothes for women from the Nazi elite in a fashion salon established in the camp. They hoped that work would save them from the gas chambers. The establishment of the fashion salon - called the elite tailoring studio - was initiated by Hedvig Hess, the wife of the commandant of the Auschwitz camp. The salon's customers were the wives of SS men and camp guards. The seamstresses who worked there created elegant, high-quality clothes worn at social events by SS women in Auschwitz and the wives of senior Nazi officials in Berlin.
The Seamstresses of Auschwitz is based on diverse sources - including interviews with the last seamstress left alive at the time the book was written - and traces the fate of the brave women who worked in the fashion salon of Auschwitz. Thanks to family ties and friendship they not only survived but also participated in the underground activity
