This book caught my eye on NetGalley because of the title and cover - sweaters? knitting? history? sign me up - even knowing that it was going to be heartbreaking and I usually avoid heartbreaking books. I am very glad I read it.

Adlington initially discovered these women because of two red sweaters displayed in Holocaust memorial museums, wanting to find out who they were and where the sweaters came from. She did that, and more, although the other two sweaters have vanished into the post WWII void. Besides the narratives of the four women associated with the sweaters, she focuses on the role that clothing played in the events of the Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jews. And clothing was central to everything that happened, in ways you might not guess.

One of the women was lucky enough to flee 1930s Germany on a Kindertransport to England, along with her two sisters and her red sweater, not finding out until after the war that her parents and brothers were killed. One was a cellist in the Auschwitz orchestra made famous by the film Playing For Time, concealing beneath her uniform a salvaged red sweater. One was a participant in the escape from Sobibor, who was saved from immediate death by being able to knit; her red sweater was made for one of the camp guards. The fourth one gave her red sweater to her brother as he was fleeing to Russia, before being murdered herself.

So often, our knowledge of the Holocaust is abstract - large numbers thrown around. In this book, it's not abstract. Through the documented memories of these individual women, it becomes horrifyingly specific. As they knitted or played the cello in the camps, they saw trains come in carrying thousands of people every day, who were marched off immediately to the gas chambers and crematoria (often to the sound of marches from the orchestra) unless they were identified as able to work. Women who had skills in knitting and sewing were valued because one of the main products of the camps was secondhand clothing, mountains of it. The people who were being killed left all their clothing behind, and it was all taken to be sorted and repaired (or in the case of woolens, unraveled and reknitted) by the women, and then given to guards or shipped off to Germany to provide clothing for German citizens, so that there would not be shortages that would lead to Germans complaining about the war. One of the women was sorting through piles of clothing on her second day in the camp, and came across her sister's distinctive shoes; it was her first inkling of what happened to the members of her family who had arrived with her. Her sister also could knit, but declined to declare this because she wanted to stay with her mother.

Even Germans who were complicit in the effort to exterminate Jews were happy to acquire and use their used clothes.

There is the occasional textual mannerism I find annoying: Sentences that tell you about a thing. A serious thing. A common and yet unusual thing.... you get the idea. But that does not detract from the achievement of this book. It deserves to be widely read, because when you know how it happened, you know it's entirely possible, even likely, that it could happen again. I wondered throughout, who will be the six million who die before the US comes out of its latest fever? and will anyone come to save the survivors?

This is a well researched book not to be missed about a time in history nevrr to be forgotten. Thank you to the author.

The Holocaust is one of my favorite history subjects. I am really into memoirs, and true accounts on the subject. This book did not disappoint. It was really emotional, and made you have so much empathy and feelings for the characters. This is definitely in my top 5 Holocaust books of all time. I highly recommend.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.