The Red Ribbon

Gr 8 Up—Fifteen-year-old Ella enters the Upper Tailoring Studio hoping for a better job. As a talented seamstress, Ella hopes she can use her talents to survive at Birchwood, aka Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Ella designs and creates fine garments for her captors. Focusing on her sewing doesn't hide Ella from the toils of prison life: the hours-long roll calls, meager meals, and cruel mistreatment of prisoners, or Stripeys as she has dubbed them. One Stripey, Rose, an expert embroiderer who spins stories to entertain her fellow prisoners, becomes Ella's bunkmate, best friend, and possible romantic interest. The girls' bond is indestructible and they vow to survive their time at Birchwood and, should they become separated, meet in the City of Light to open their own dress shop after the war. This promise is sealed with a red ribbon Rose smuggles from the camp's stores and gives to Ella. After the girls are expelled from their positions at the Upper Tailoring Studio, their new jobs at the washery are not as forgiving, and they are seemingly doomed to never fulfill their promise of opening a shop together or even surviving. The author's choice to "not dwell on specific countries, regimes, or religions in the story" is a deliberate one, noted in the afterword, and readers will need to have a working knowledge of the Holocaust and concentration camps in order to grasp the apparel metaphors at work.