Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust

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.

Lucy Adlington is a British novelist and clothes historian with more than twenty years’ experience researching social history and writing fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Yorkshire, England.