First published 2020
Fourteen-year-old Ella reports for her first day of work at Birkenau-Auschwitz. She enters a workshop filled with fabric, needles, and thread. Ella will make dresses, but her clients are Nazi officers and their wives. Each garment she creates might determine whether she lives or dies. The sewing room becomes her escape from the camp's horrors and her painful past. Ella loses herself in the textures of silk and the precision of seams. She faces impossible choices about survival. Does her skill with needle and thread make her a collaborator with her captors, or does it keep her breathing? Ella must decide whether to focus only on staying alive or to trust her growing bond with Rose, another seamstress. A red ribbon threads through her story, connecting the luxury gowns she stitches to the mud and misery outside the workshop door.
Genres: holocaust, historical-fiction, 20th-century, world-war-ii
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, survival
Setting: Birkenau-Auschwitz
Period: 20th-century
304 pages · Hardcover · Columna CAT
Content warnings: death, violence