Four Red Sweaters

Powerful true stories of women and the Holocaust

By: Lucy Adlington

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Paperback | 1 April 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
336 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.3

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The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz weaves together the stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly intertwined by everyday garments.

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 and original work illuminates moments long lost to history, now pieced back together by a simple garment.

About the Author

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

Industry Reviews

'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.'

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