“Fashion in Warsaw ghetto” (Moda w getcie warszawskim)

The most haunting material regarding fashion I have come across was the interview with Polish academic and journalist Karolina Sulej who tries to shed more light on aspect of fashion in such extreme oppressive environments as Jewish ghettos in Poland during WWII. She is acknowledging that in the big wheel of history, women who still wanted to dress up nicely and smiled despite the horror that surrounded them are not having a space in the collective memory and narrative. She’s searching for individual stories, unpublished photos that convey that image. In the newspaper printed in ghetto she found a column about fashion that starts with words : “Even if the war was to last 100 years, even if the world was turned upside down - nothing is going to change us, women, the better half of humanity”. The war was marginalized as unimportant period in the fashion history. The women resisted chaos and suffering through their “female frivolity”. Cultivating everyday rituals and looking after the presence helped to survive in hell. Sulej reclaims these female patterns of behaviour as important resilience and survival tool.

Women in ghetto, Kutno, 1940. Photographer: Hugo Jaeger.

Karolina Sulej in her PhD takes the step further and researches garment right in the heart of horror - in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. She came across the journal of Auschwitz survivor Maria Jezierska titled “The fashion in Auschwitz”. This material was uncovered for 70 years, because no one dared to search for such phrase before. There are also other sources, as such diaries of Seweryna Szmaglewska, Janina Bauman, Alina Margolis , Mary Breg , where we can find memories related to fashion and the need to look beautiful against the odds. The main point of Sulej’s research is to give a space the voice of women from ghettos and concentration camps, their own voice not the official one, politically correct, condemning the horrors of war.

Fashion was important to women in these places. The survivors use actual word “fashion” in their memoires. The survivor profesor Anna Pawełczyńska said that together with her girlfriends in the concentration camp in Auschwitz they sat and looked at the smoke from the crematorium imaging that women just burned are going to heaven in beautiful and colorful dresses. We need to hear these voices, we need to hear these stories.