Creative Alterations

Sewing was to be a survival skill for Susan Karas (Zuzana Kardos). Born in 1920 in Czechoslovakia, she was 24 when she was deported to Auschwitz. She was selected as a slave labourer in Lorenzwerke factory in the Sudetenland. It was at the factory that Susan was issued with this blanket. Inmates had no access to sewing implements so when she received a pair of scissors and a needle to sew a bra for one of the guards, she seized the opportunity to improve her own ill-fitting clothes. Stitching was removed from around the edges of the blanket and used as thread.

She received an extra piece of bread for every item of clothing sewed for the guards, working at night after her work shift ended. In 1949, Susan, her husband Theo and young daughter, arrived in Australia. Her sewing skills landed her a job with the Sydney dress manufacturer John J. Hilton.

Susan slept with the blanket, using it as an under blanket on her bed. It was a tangible reminder to her of what she had gone through. Every night before she went to sleep she would recite to herself the names of all her immediate and extended family who were murdered in the Holocaust, well over 60 people.

Her nightly recital of their names and her sleeping on the blanket was an act of memory in the face of what she had endured during the war.

After pressure from her daughter, she finally donated the blanket to the Sydney Jewish Museum in 1991.