Four Red Sweaters

October 1, 2024

Adlington, fashion historian and bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, offers another deeply researched book about women during World War II. Here she recounts the stories of four Jewish girls facing the Holocaust who were strangers to each other but each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. With a 150K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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March 1, 2025
Four Jewish girls and their sorrowful connection. British novelist and clothes historian Adlington, author ofThe Dressmakers of Auschwitz, begins her engrossing account with a portrait of a happy Jewish family in 1938 Berlin. Few readers will doubt that unspeakable horrors await them, but there remains a readership for such stories, and Adlington tells hers with skill. None of Adlington's subjects knew the other, yet all acquired a red sweater that symbolizes their shared experience. Western democracies deplored Nazi abuse of Jews; all, however, enforced strict immigration laws, accepting only small numbers who had money or jobs awaiting them. An exception occurred when activists persuaded Britain to accept children. There followed the famous Kindertransport, when nearly 10,000 arrived in 1938-39. A bill for a similar plan was introduced in the U.S. Congress but was defeated. Adlington describes Kindertransport member Jochewet ("Jock") Heidenstein, age 12, who arrived in 1938; two sisters later joined her. Two brothers remained behind with her family; all were killed. Anita Lasker, a 12-year-old from a musical family, traveled from Breslau to Berlin in 1938 to take cello lessons. Later sent to Auschwitz, she became a member of its women's orchestra and survived. Chana Zumerkorn, daughter of a shoemaker in Lodz, Poland, was 19 when the Germans invaded. Ejected from their home, the family was crammed into the Lodz ghetto, where she labored as a knitter, until 1942, when all were shipped to the Chelmno camp and killed. Regina Feldman's family was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp in 1942; chosen to labor in a knitting workshop, Regina was the only family member not killed on arrival. Amazingly, in October 1943, Sobibor's prisoners rebelled; many, including Regina, broke out and survived. Tracking wartime horrors, and resilience, through cherished garments.

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March 1, 2025
Adlington (The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, 2021) examines the lives of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust. Three of the girls, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman, lived under Nazi occupation and were then moved to concentration camps. The fourth, Jochewet Heidenstein, escaped to England via the Kindertransport and was later joined by her sisters while the rest of her family perished. All four girls either owned or made red sweaters, and Adlington uses this thread to look at the various roles played by clothing during the Holocaust: as a remembrance of family members, as an act of love and care, as evidence of crimes, as a status symbol, and for practicality and warmth. Adlington particularly emphasizes the ways in which the atrocities of the Holocaust were normalized or ignored by non-Jewish Germans, and she contrasts the comfortable lives of the Nazi officers with the lives of the Jewish prisoners that they exploited. A stirring account of survival as told through clothing.

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