Title: The seamstress
First published: 1997
Description: From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, and managed to survive. She tells this story with style and power.
Subjects: Auschwitz (Concentration camp), Biography, Courage, Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), Jews, Personal narratives, Holocausts survivors, Biographies, Defying bigots, Juifs, Judenverfolgung, Holocauste, 1939-1945, Récits personnels, Holocaust, jewish (1939-1945), personal narratives, Jews, romania
Places: Romania
People: Sara Tuvel Bernstein (1918-1983)