The seamstress
About this book
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)
- biographies
- biography
- courage
- defying bigots
- holocauste, 1939-1945
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945)
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945), personal narratives
- holocausts survivors
- jews
- jews, romania
- judenverfolgung
- juifs
- personal narratives
- récits personnels