The Dress: Theater of Remembrance

“The Dress” sheds light on practices of exclusion through the example of “The Dressmakers of Auschwitz,” a true story by Lucy Adlington. The story centers on Hedwig, the wife of camp commander Rudolf Höss, who ran the so-called “Upper Sewing Room” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Using the belongings left behind by millions of deportees, she had haute couture garments made for high-ranking Nazi officials and their wives. Each dress symbolizes the fate of life and death: the dressmakers of Auschwitz sewed in order to survive. The immense scale of this morally perverted society has left its mark to this very day.