Dress

Held by

Montreal Holocaust Museum via Canadian Jewish Heritage Network (incl. Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives)

Dates

1943-1945 (indexed as 1943–1945)

Level

item

Extent

Dress : sewn : blue, grey ; Ht: 39 1/2 in. x W: 25 in.

Scope & content

This dress is made of blue and grey stripes material with 2 black buttons at neck (1 missing), collar, 12” slit at front bottom. It was the uniform of a female concentration camp prisoner. Narrative: This dress belonged to Sonia Aronowicz born in 1915 in Vilnius, Poland (today Lithuania). Her family had lived in Vilnius for many generations. She was married to a lawyer named Misha Aronowicz and studied to become an accountant. In 1941, after the Nazis invaded the region, Sonia and her family were sent to the Vilnius ghetto. The ghetto was liquidated in September 1943 and men and women were separated. This was the last time Sonia saw her husband Misha and her younger brother Ariye. Her parents went into hiding. Sonia was deported along with her friend, Miriam and Miriam’s sister-in-law, Minya. The three of them made a pact to always stay together. This gave them strength. Together they worked successively in the concentration camps of Riga-Kaiserwald and Riga-Strasdenhof in Latvia, and Stutthof and Bromberg-Ost (in Bydgoszcz), Poland. Their work was very demanding, they built rails for trains and hauled wood to build barracks. Sonia was then sent on a death march and was eventually liberated by Soviet soldiers in Pomorze, Poland.

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Genre / form

object

In the picture

CostumeDressMuseumUniformTagged automatically by a vision model; may contain mistakes.

Harvested

2026-10-19T03:21:16Z · source datestamp n/a · andornot

Digital objects at the source

• imageOpen original at source ↗2011X_330_03a.jpg
• imageOpen original at source ↗2011X_330_03b.jpg