Four Red Sweaters
Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz tells the true stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly linked by everyday garments in this unforgettable work of WWII history, revealing how the ordinary can connect us in extraordinary ways.
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives.
Adlington immortalizes these young women whose resilience, skills, strength, and kindness accompanied them through the darkest events in human history. A powerful reminder of the suffering they endured and a celebration of courage, love, and tenacity, this moving piece of narrative nonfiction illuminates moments long lost to history, now pieced back together by a simple garment.
Four Red Sweaters is illustrated with more than two dozen black-and-white images throughout.
Based on meticulous research, this powerful work of Jewish history pieces together four remarkable lives that were unknowingly intertwined:
Kindertransport Journey: Follow Jock Heidenstein’s escape from Nazi Berlin to England, clutching a suitcase containing the red sweater that tied her to the family she was forced to leave behind.The Auschwitz Orchestra: Discover how Anita Lasker, a talented cellist, survived Auschwitz by playing in the camp’s infamous women’s orchestra, a life saved by music in a place of unimaginable horror.Ghetto Resistance: Witness Chana Zumerkorn’s struggle in the Lodz ghetto, where knitting became an act of survival, and gifting her own red sweater to her brother became an act of enduring love.The Sobibor Uprising: Uncover the story of Regina Feldman, forced to knit for SS officers in the Sobibor extermination camp, who became one of the few to survive the camp’s daring and historic mass escape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
