York author Lucy Adlington weaves together a moving tale about the seamstresses at Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz

FASHION and fascism are not two words you often see side by side, but Lucy Adlington sews them together seamlessly in her new novel The Red Ribbon.

Historian and author Lucy has spent the best part of 20 years reading about the Second World War. Besides a career as a writer, she runs the History Wardrobe and travels the country bringing the past to life through the clothes and fashions of yesteryear.

It was during her research into historical fashion that Lucy uncovered a footnote that lead to a remarkable story – and became the focus of The Red Ribbon.

She discovered that Hedwig Hoss, the wife of the commander at Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, loved fashion so much that she demanded a tailoring workshop be established, to be staffed by female prisoners. These prisoners were tasked with making beautiful clothes for Frau Hoss, as well as the wives of other male officers and female guards.

Lucy said: "I knew there were slave workers needed to make uniforms for SS guards at Auschwitz, but this was a fashion workshop. I followed it up and found survivor testimony of women who had worked there and it was incredible that in the middle of Auschwitz there were all these women doing fashion sewing to save their lives."

The novel is written for the young adult market, but Lucy expects it be be read widely by all ages.

The Red Ribbon begins with its heroine, Ella, a 14-year-old prisoner, racing against others to the fashion sewing workshop. She learns there is a job going there. She is a good seamstress. And she knows that if she can secure that job, if she can prove she is useful, she is more likely to survive.

In the novel, Lucy stitches fact and fiction together. The camp is called Birchwood, but is based on Auschwitz-Birkenau, the vast labour and extermination camp complex near Krakow, Poland, where an estimated 1.1 million people died.

For a historian with a passion for clothes and fashion, The Red Ribbon was a novel she just had to write. Lucy was struck that in the midst of the horror of a concentration camp the frivolities of fashion could flourish. Hedwig Hoss is recast as Madame H in the novel. In real life, she employed prisoners to make her clothes, first at a room in her house (a villa near the camp), but by 1943 this was moved into a workshop at Auschwitz. She had 23 staff, making beautiful clothes for herself and other Nazi women.

Shockingly, much of the material for these clothes would come from prisoners themselves. The Nazis plundered all sorts of goods from the people they interned, not just jewellery and other valuable items, but also clothes.

"The took whatever they wanted," says Lucy. "Toys, perfume, luxury goods – they took it all."

Often, people arrived at Auschwitz in their finery – and many of the best garments would make their way into the fashion tailoring studio to be worked on by the prisoner seamstresses.

The consequences of taking people's clothes from them was de-humanising, states Lucy.

"People came from all over Europe. Some would be dressed in everyday clothes, others in their best clothes. But they would all be stripped and humiliated and given either a striped uniform or random clothes to wear. Suddenly you are a different person without your clothes. It was a deliberate way to make you feel not human."

In this context, her character Ella has a simple goal. "She is determined not to be a number. Her project is to make her own dress, the liberation dress. When she is free, she will have real clothes to wear and will feel human again."

Lucy is having Ella's "liberation dress" made and will wear it during her book tour, which will include a date at Dunnington Library Reading Room on October 28 at 7pm (tickets cost £5 from the library).

Lucy hopes the book will be read by schoolchildren learning about the Second World War. However, she says the story is not just about the past. It is a story about people being displaced and trying to survive – which has clear resonance today.

"It could be us," says Lucy. "It is happening now, with refugees, discrimination and displaced people. The book just puts a human face to it."

Through her research, books, and History Wardrobe presentations, Lucy uses fashion as a way to bring the past to life. An English graduate from Derbyshire, she moved to York for an MA in Medieval Studies. She lives on a farm outside the city with her partner.

She said: "I love to look at people's lives through clothes." In the History Wardrobe, she has everything from Georgian dresses from the 18th century to shell suits from the 1990s. "It is a way at looking at changing cultures."

Lucy loves fashion but is not a seamstress herself. However, her grandmother Ella Rose was a dressmaker, and lends her name to the main character in The Red Ribbon.

Lucy says she does not follow trends, and is happier spending money on historic fashion pieces than modern-day items. "Historic clothes have stories they tell – or don't tell. I have a German dress from the 1940s and I have no idea who made it or who wore it. I can only imagine and wonder: 'what are your stories?'."

The Red Ribbon, by Lucy Adlington, is published in hardback by Hot Key Books, priced £10.99

Find out more at: historywardrobe.com