In June 2020, the family of Marta Minariková came across a collection of papers never seen before, from the 1940s. Among them were postcards written in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Marta had been a prisoner since April 1942. These were smuggled out to her family, through Marta’s connections in the camp underground. Her pencilled words are heartfelt, such as this message from June 5th 1943 : ‘I received your card from April 28th with infinite joy (…) I kiss you a thousand times and my thoughts are always with you.’ It was too risky for Marta to keep any clandestine replies, but their worth was priceless: they connected her with the world beyond the barbed wire. After their discovery in 2020 the postcards communicated across time.
Marta’s actions in the concentration camp also resonate across the decades. As head inmate-seamstress of an elite fashion salon established in Auschwitz by Hedwig Höss — the camp commandant’s wife — Marta created a haven for other prisoners among the sewing machines. She began with a friend’s niece, then a cousin, then her sister’s sister-in-law, then this girl’s best friend, then the best friend’s sister… and so it continued until a core of 25 women were at work in the salon, saved from brutal outdoor labour and the gas chambers. Marta’s team of mainly Jewish dressmakers created fashions for the wives of SS men who were working diligently to degrade and exterminate them.
When I first began exploring the links between antisemitism and the clothing industry in Hitler’s Third Reich very little was known about the grotesque anomaly of a fashion salon in Auschwitz. I gleaned a scant list of names, including ‘Marta’, ‘Bracha’, ‘Irene’ and ‘Hunya’. Who were these women? Where were they from? What had happened to them? At first it seemed impossible to uncover more. I underestimated serendipity — and the magic of worldwide communication.
In 2017 my Young Adult novel The Red Ribbon was published — a creative response to what little I knew of the fashion salon. It found readers worldwide, and it found the families of the real dressmakers of Auschwitz. Relatives reached out to share stories, photographs and memoirs. Instead of postcards, we had emails and video calls to communicate. Now, through these extraordinary new connections, I had a chance to move from fiction to fact; from a novel to a history book. The meagre list of names in my database became people: Marta Fuchsová (later Minariková) , Bracha Bercovich, Irene Reichenberg, Hunya Volkmann.
It is a mistake to think of history as being ‘in the past.’ I often felt overwhelmed at how personally the research affected me. The past impacted the families of the dressmakers too. Irene Reichenberg’s son Pavel Kanka undertook the harrowing task of translating her Shoah Foundation video testimony from German into English. Among Pavel’s papers was a postcard Irene sent from Auschwitz to inform her family — via a code to elude censors — that all three of her sisters had been murdered. The SS deliberately permitted some inmates to write such postcards, to flush out Jews still in hiding.
It has been hard for Pavel to be so immersed in his mother’s trauma, and yet he also feels deep gratitude for the immense power of connection: that Irene had been saved from despair in the camp through the loyalty of her dear friend Bracha Bercovich. I was staggered when Irene’s niece Thalia Reichenberg-Soffair — a brilliant behind-the-scenes networker — calmly wrote to me, Of course you know Bracha is still alive…?
In 2019 I flew from the UK to San Francisco for a whole new level of connection, meeting the last surviving seamstress of the salon. 98-year-old Bracha — married and widowed as Mrs Kohút — welcomed me to her home. Thalia joined us, with other relatives. Listening to Bracha talk, past and present blurred. It truly hit home that what I studied as history, she had suffered as reality.
Although she spoke freely of her camp experiences, of her work for Hedwig Höss in the Auschwitz salon, and of friends such as Irene, Marta and Hunya, Bracha’s main intention was to honour the memories of loved ones murdered in the Shoah. Her son Tom Areton gained fresh impetus to trace the fates of relatives still unaccounted for. During digital archive searches one of Bracha’s postcards from Auschwitz was discovered, including these words: ‘My mind dwells always and eternally on my home.’
It is heartening to realise that long after Marta’s postcards were written, threads of connection are weaving together the lives of strangers. This seems especially appropriate given Nazi policies of separation and discrimination. In a hellish world designed to divide and destroy normal human connections, the seamstresses of Auschwitz chose community and resilience. We can too.
In their later lives, both Bracha and Irene spoke of the vital importance of ensuring the past doesn’t stay past: that new generations learn Holocaust history, even when survivors are no longer with us to testify in person. I now know that in addition to postcards, at least four of the Auschwitz dressmakers left short written testimonies. Which brings me to Hunya.
Hunya Volkmann — née Storch, remarried as Hecht — has the longest written legacy. While in San Francisco I asked Bracha about Hunya. She broke into a big smile: “I liked Hunya.” Like Marta, Irene and Bracha, Hunya was from Slovakia. She eventually moved to Leipzig in Germany, to run a successful dressmaking business. When ghettoised and pushed into forced labour at a fur factory, Hunya showed considerable courage and ingenuity helping others. She survived deportation to Auschwitz thanks to luck, sewing skills and connections: a cousin spotted her passport on a pile in the Auschwitz sorting sheds and sent word to Marta at the fashion salon asking, can you find space for Hunya to join you?
Thanks to word spreading about my research, I was in touch with Hunya’s niece Gila Kornfeld-Jacobs. After the war Hunya told her life stories as she sewed, and Gila wrote them down. Last year Gila sent me a silk suit sewn for her post-war by Hunya. It had been made with love, not under duress like the fashions of the SS salon. The stitches may have outlasted the seamstress, but they also bind together then and now.
Hunya’s niece Gila read my book. ‘Thank you for giving us a hero aunt,’ she said. No. Hunya had always been a hero. Now her history – and that of all Marta’s dressmakers – will be more widely known. New connections will be made. Marta’s postcards will have new readers.
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz by Lucy Adlington is published by Hachette
