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    The Seamstress
    The Seamstress
    The Seamstress
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Seamstress

    Written by Sara Tuvel Bernstein, Marlene Bernstein Samuels and Louise Loots Thornton

    Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Growing up, Sara (Seren) Tuvel was the smartest, most ambitious girl in
    her Romanian mountain village. When she won and accepted a scholarship
    to a Gentiles-only Gymnasium, she was forced to make a decision that
    would change her path forever. At thirteen, faced with a teacher's
    anti-Semitism, Seren walked out of her classroom and into a new
    existence. She became the apprentice to a seamstress, and her skill with
    needle and thread enabled her again and again to patch the fraying
    pieces of her life. As the Nazis encircled the country and bombs rained
    down, Seren stitched her way to survival, scraping together enough money
    to provide for her family. When she, her younger sister Esther, and two
    friends were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, the
    four girls became one another's shelter.

    Told with the same old-fashioned narrative power as the novels of Herman
    Wouk, The Seamstress is the true story of Seren (Sara) Tuvel Bernstein
    and her survival during wartime. A story of tragedy told in raw,
    powerful language, it is also a dramatic tale of courage, intimate
    friendship, romance, and startling good fortune that will have listeners
    cheering.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 30, 2011
    ISBN9781452675985
    The Seamstress

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    Reviews for The Seamstress

    4.5/5

    92 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A truly terrible true personal story yet containing touching & heartbreaking elements of suffering, pain, privation, love & survival.
    • 5/5
      An extraordinary, unsentimental story by an extraordinary woman. This is powerful truth, akin to horror at some points and heartwarming at others, with a strong female hero. Seren is a hero by any account. She's a tough woman who shouldn't have survived but did using intelligence and determination.

      Although Seren's young life involved the Holocaust, the book is about her family and her own wisdom and grit in every situation. It's part of Seren's journey to a life she must have cherished every day. Although she surely had post traumatic stress disorder, she was a loving and loved person who gave her best to her family and friends. Out the other side of trauma, Seren made choices. Perhaps there are lessons here for all of us.

      The Seamstress is a compelling story with some photos scattered throughout. The story should lift any reader above their own trials. It's also a history lesson with some details I'd never read before. Here Seren recounts her early life with family, how insidiously changes happened, how much people didn't know or understand, and events that happened to her and some of her family and friends.

      Highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      Recommend. Great narrator; well-told story. This book is about the life of a Jewish Hungarian woman in the mid 1900s, before and during WW2. It's a raw, unvarnished, tale of her years in concentration camps, mainly Ravensbruck. Although I don't doubt she told the book as she remembered it, and certainly is was the most horrible time in recent history, there are a few items that give me pause... for example, not eating or drinking for 14 days under the harsh conditions of camp life. I would like to have heard more about how some of the stories were corroborated. Again, I don't doubt it was an awful period in life, there are just some things in the story that don't add up. Still, I loved the book and highly recommend for WW2 buffs and anyone else that wants to read about the concentration camps. Also, I thought was incredibly interesting to hear about someone living as a seamstress, making ever piece of clothing - this is something we tend to forget in modern life: that someone, just a short while ago, made a living out of making dresses for others, as an every day routine life job. Great book.
    • 3/5
      Sara Tuvel was a survivor. Not only did she strike out on her own at age thirteen, but she survived prison, forced labor, and the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp. In addition, her force of character and resourcefulness helped other young women survive as well. Seren was born into a large family comprised of her father's seven children from a previous marriage as well as her four siblings. Although her father was strict, she had a happy and adventurous childhood. The only shadow was the antisemitism she experience at school. Despite her father's demand that girls remain at home, Seren accepted a scholarship to school in Bucharest and moved there on her own. After suffering more antisemitism, she leaves school, and without telling her parents, rents a room and apprentices herself to a dressmaker. This self-sufficiency and independence may have frustrated her family, but proved to be invaluable in the coming years. As Nazi persecution increases, Seren and her family are separated by new borders between Romania and Hungary, by family members' forced relocation into ghettos, and by imprisonment. Seren not only fends for herself, but frequently takes care of her mother and sisters as well. Despite imprisonment, loss, forced labor, and incredible journeys by foot or rail, Seren remains determined to see things through and to protect others as best she can. Her strength and spirit are quite remarkable. Having read a fair number of Holocaust memoirs, several things in The Seamstress stand out for me. It is one of only a handful of Romanian survivor stories that I have read, and she is also one of the few Jewish survivors of Ravensbruck who have shared their stories. Her testimony is invaluable. The book was written by Louise Loots Thornton based on hours of interviews and tapes that Seren (Sara) made and edited by Seren's daughter Marlene after her mother's death. Ms. Thornton says that she tried to imitate Seren's style of speaking which was unemotional and direct. As a result, the book is a bit flat in tone and is lacking the interpretation of events that might occur with an author is writing their own story. Nowhere is there commentary on what happened, rather simply the facts of what did happen. As a result, any philosophical or moral reflecting is left up to the reader.
    • 5/5
      A deeply moving memoir from the author Sara Tuvel Bernstein and her survival in the Nazi concentration camps. This is one of the stories that will stay with you for awhile. It made me wonder once again how humans can be so cruel towards one another. However, reading these accounts of survival will also leave you in awe of the strength of the human spirit. Despite all the abuse the author and her sister had to endure they survived and they did so with an unbroken spirit. Highly recommended read.
    • 4/5
      The Seamstress is the memoir of author Seren (Sara) Tuvel Bernstein, a Romanian Jew who came of age during the rise of the Third Reich, was expelled from Romania, arrested and beaten by Hungarian Guard, forced into a temporary labor camp where her sister was shot and killed before her eyes, and eventually ended up on a concentration camp before escaping/liberated by American forces while being transported, likely for execution. What was somewhat unique about The Seamstress is that the book was about Ms. Bernstein's entire life, not just her experience with the Holocaust. To me, it made her experiences much more personal, because they were happening to a person a felt I knew. She talked of her premature birth, childhood, family, schooling, and how she learned her trade. Knowing that make Ms. Bernstein much more real. My only complaint about the book was that although Ms. Bernstein was very descriptive about the atrocities of others during her experience, she seemed to minimize her own ordeal. Don't get me wrong: she starved, was abused, she was nearly killed and witnessed awful things. But in the forward her daughter-in-law, who helped write the book, spoke of her being beaten so badly her leg was broken and there were other permanent deformities, but none of that appeared in the book. I don't think it is out of character for survivors of that time to minimize their experience, and perhaps that's what happened here. The Seamstress is a well told story of a woman who lived, and survived, as a Jew in Eastern Europe during the build-up and Second World War. It and similar memoirs should be required reading for young people around the world.
    • 5/5
      I am so glad Louise Loots Thornton ultimately took on this project. I wish I could hug Seren, Esther, Ellen and Lily. This story will stick with me for a long time.
    • 4/5
      This memoir is a gripping story of a young Romanian Jew in World War 2. She survived through determination and friendship and luck and wrote this memoir in her later years in the United States. It was published after her death by her daughter. It is fascinating very readable.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book, by turns charming and horrifying. Written in the first person we hear the life of Seren growing up Jewish in Romania, Hungery and Germany. Any one who doubts the holocaust or wide spread malevolent behavior of the Nazis should read this book.
    • 5/5
      The Holocaust is one of the darkest moments of human history, if not the darkest moment. The Seamstress by Sarah Tuvel Bernstein is poignant coming-of-age memoir showcasing the indomitable human spirit. Sarah Tuvel Bernstein, herein referred to as Seren Tuvel, was a Romanian Jew. Much of Seren’s story is shaped around her large family; she was one of nine. Her father was a lumber mill manager and was what we could consider lower middle class today. Her formal education ended at elementary school, yet she continued to learn as she became an apprenticed seamstress. Tuvel’s memoir opens with the story of her birth and closes with an epilogue by her daughter, Marlene Bernstein about Tuvel’s life in America and her subsequent death.As with many Holocaust survivors, Seren Tuvel did not emerge from the Holocaust without emotional scars to bear. As Romania is an Eastern European country, and Seren’s family is Jewish, the Tuvel family has had to endure a long history of persecution, from pogroms to accusations of being “Christ-killers.” Seren, with blonde hair and blue eyes is able to achieve much success through her sewing because many perceived her to be Gentile. Without her Gentile features, she would have been barred entry from the homes of those who were among the upper echelon of society. In 1941 Seren and her father, Abram Tuvel were arrested by the Hungarian Government for being spies, their only true crime was being Jewish and living very near the Romanian-Hungarian border. In the early World War II years, the Romanian-Hungarian border was elastic, which presented a problem for the Tuvels. Seren was eventually released; her father never procured freedom and was ruthlessly shot for losing his mind during an air raid. Upon return, Seren and her remaining family are forced into ghettos. Seren sneaks out and continues to sew for Gentile households. She is then conscripted into a women’s labor army with friends and family. The army brings Seren to a labor camp Ravensbruick. In Ravensbruick, Seren, her best friends and niece survive by sheer cunning. When liberation forces come too close to Ravensbruick, Seren and her group are brought to Auschwitz. Eventually they were liberated from Auschwitz, Seren stayed in a hospital for a few months because of her poor health. She went to a refugee center, taught a sewing class, and met her husband. The Seamstress, gracefully showcases Seren Tuvel’s wide spectrum of emotions within its pages. Empathy for Tuvel naturally occurs while reading her story. Perhaps most surprising of all of Seren’s emotions was her bitterness towards the Polish-Jews within Auschwitz. She describes them as a ruthless, motley group with compassion only for their own. I had a hard time understanding why Seren felt such disdain for the Polish-Jews because with all the persecution and hate she suffered, why continue the cycle of hate. Perhaps the most recurrent emotion throughout The Seamstress was optimism. By retaining hope through the horrors heaped upon her, Seren emerged from the Holocaust physically and mentally intact. Many were not as lucky as Seren, as evidenced by the grief she describes from losing a vast amount of loved ones. By learning about the Holocaust one may feel pity for the victims, but perhaps not empathy. “A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic .” Reading a Holocaust memoir puts a human face on the catastrophe, allowing for someone with no personal connection to the event to feel compassion for those who survived as well as those who did not. As someone who has never experienced anything even close to what Seren endured, it is hard for me to understand the Holocaust. Through Tuvel’s words I learned of the plight of the Romanian Jew before and even directly after the Holocaust. My eyes were opened to the existence of camps beyond Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, and Chelmno, and that each of these camps destroyed the lives of millions real people with real lives and real families. It was and still is hard to comprehend the amount of destruction Hitler and the Nazis wrought upon the Jews and the other “undesirables”. Even more shocking to me was how the Jews were treated directly afterwards. I had always believed that following the Holocaust, the Germans treated the Jews with kindness because they felt guilty about what had happened, such was not the case. Tuvel writes about post-war Germans feeling that because the Fuhrer was so adamant in destroying the European Jewry, there must have been some sort of logical reasoning behind it. However, it seems that so many years of ingrained antisemitism, it was probably a hard thing for the Europeans to let go of. Seren wrote this memoir as a testament to the existence of her family as well as to tell her story in its entirety. The Seamstress is intended for young adults. There are graphic descriptions of the violence inflicted upon the Jews, including one section where Tuvel describes observing prominent Jewish men hung on meat hooks. Sexual violence is alluded to as well. The book is not suitable for a younger reader. The Seamstress isn’t Pulitzer Prize quality, but it is not a book to be easily dismissed. This is an eloquently written memoir, a fluid read. The grace, dignity, and perseverance shown by Seren Tuvel during the Holocaust moved me. The Seamstress is perhaps best suited for a rainy or snowy day free of distraction where one may be transported to Seren Tuvel’s world.
    • 5/5
      Seren Tuvel's story is one of strength, courage and determination. She was born into a well-to-do, yet rural, Romnian Jewish family. From birth she showed considerable will and determination as she fought back against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. At 13 she won a scholarship to a school in Bucharest and defied her father's orders not to go. After hurling a bottle of ink at a priest/teacher's vicious lecture against the Jews, she was expelled. Rather than returning home, she apprenticed with a dressmaker and quickly learned everything she could.As a blond-haired, blue eyed Jew, she was able to pass as a Gentile and quickly moved through the highest reaches of Romanian society as a dressmaker. As the war progressed, tension grew in the city. A slew of anti-Semitic laws and the open persecution of well-to-do Jews lead her to leave Bucharest and return to her family home.Seren's story continues as she and her father were arrested and taken on a forced march to a prison. Once released, she reunited with her mother and sisters. Despite the restrictions against Jews, Seren was able to find work and she strives to support and provide for her family. Captured trying to help her pregnant sister, she spent a year in a forced labor detachment before ending up in Ravensbruck, a woman's concentration camp in Germany. Seren, her sister, and two other friends worked together to survive the brutal conditions.Powerfully written, the reader roots for Seren and her friends as they navigate the treacherous life of World War II Europe. This is one of the best Holocaust survivor books I found and I highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      There are so many books written by or about the survivors of the Holocaust and all share similar elements. But each one is also unique, describing how an individual manages to survive the unimaginable. In this book, Seren (Sara) Tuvel is a young Roumanian Jewish girl, working as a seamstress in Budapest, who is arrested and taken from her home. She is transported with her sister and niece and the young daughter of a family friend and ultimately end up in Ravensbruck, a concentration camp near Berlin. The four of them band together, led by Seren, and gain strength from each other. The reader can't help but wonder at what traits are needed for survival, not just youth and good health, but being observant and taking advantage of luck. This is a wonderful book , very moving and thought-provoking.