Author Event - Lucy Adlington Talk & Signing
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz
Venue: The Collection Auditorium
Ticket Prices: Standard: £7 Single including book: £23 Couple including book: £27
Date: Tuesday 21 September 2021
Time: 7pm (doors open at 6.30pm)
A pre-event bar will be available.
We will be joined by historian Lucy Adlington with her new history title The Dressmkers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive.
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. Drawing on diverse sources - including interviews with the last surviving seamstress - The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them
endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers' remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington
exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust. Written with an exquisite focus on the garments created by the dressmakers, this is a chronicle of the horrors of Auschwitz like no other. It also provides an uniquely female perspective of life in the concentration camp: sewing was disregarded as a pastime of girls and women, yet it was by exhibiting skill with a needle and thread that these women were able to survive an experience that so many others sadly did not.
Lucy Adlington is a British novelist and historian with more than twenty years experience researching social history and writing fiction and non-fiction for YA and adult readers. Adlington also runs History Wardrobe, a company which makes costume-in-context talks across the UK, with some 100 presentations a year and a hugely loyal fan base. She is the author of seven novels including the Carnegie-nominated, critically acclaimed The Red Ribbon. Her non-fiction publications include: Women's Lives and Clothes in WWII: Ready for Action and Stitches in Time - the Story of the Clothes we Wear.
Lucy Adlington lives on a farm in Yorkshire.
Tickets are non-refundable unless the event is cancelled or postponed by Lindum Books.