Lucy Adlington

Nominated for the CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL 2019. For fans of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Rose, Ella, Marta and Carla. In another life we might all have been friends together. But this was Birchwood. For fans of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. As fourteen-year-old Ella begins her first day at work she steps into a world of silks, seams, scissors, pins, hems and trimmings. She is a dressmaker,...

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, the Upper Tailoring Studio, was established by the camp commandant's wife Hedwig Hoss, and patronized by the wives...