The Shirtmaker: A Young Woman's Journey through the Holocaust and Beyond - Olga Bleier

Even before the outbreak of World War Two, Olga Bleier's life was far from easy in the Czechoslovakian city of Kosice. Her father and mother separated shortly after she was born, and she lived with her mother, sister, and brother together with her grandparents and two unmarried aunts.

It was a struggle to put bread on the table, and everyone in the extended family toiled in all the steps necessary for making shirts. At a very young age, Olga developed her sewing skills and her talent as a shirtmaker. She only remembers seeing her father once in all that time.

In "The Shirtmaker," Olga tells the story of her difficult childhood and a youth that was brutally cut short shortly before her 16th birthday when she was deported with the other Jews of her city. From August, 1941 until May, 1945, she was taken from one concentration camp to another, including Auschwitz and ending in Bergen Belsen where she was finally liberated.

Most of her family had perished, and the world she had known before the War had been destroyed.

This remarkable story is not only about how a world was destroyed. It also reveals Olga's indomitable spirit and her strength to rebuild her life first in Sweden, then in Eretz Yisrael, and finally with her husband Tzvi Bleier in Australia.

From the tiny cottage industry in her childhood home, her profession as a shirtmaker helped to sustain her throughout all her journeys. Would she have ever imagined amid the stench of death in the concentration camps that one day she would be surrounded by her loving children and her generations?

Life Stories Publishing, Jerusalem 2013, hardcover

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