Lina (left) and her sisters, Betty
and Anna, Oct. 1945 |
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The bra that Lina made in Stutthof |
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Lina Beresin
"In the less than one percent hope that my daughter is alive, and in the event
that she will visit the Yad Vashem Museum and will encounter my name, even if it
happens years later, I would like you to call me ‘Lina Beresin of Kovno.’" Thus Lina wrote in Yiddish in a letter in 1968.
Lina was born in 1910 in Lithuania. She married Jacob Beresin in 1933 and moved
to Kovno. Her daughter Shulamit was born in 1935. In 1941, all the Jews were
closed in the ghetto. In the March 1944 children’s Aktion, Shulamit was taken to
Auschwitz, where she was apparently murdered. When the ghetto was liquidated in
July 1944, Lina and her two sisters were deported to Stutthof Camp, where Lina
made the bra for herself. Her husband was sent to Dachau and perished.
Lina and her sisters survived. She immigrated to Mexico, where she remarried.
They dressed us in prisoners’ outfits—men’s
striped pants and a man’s shirt or jacket.
I couldn’t walk around without a bra. As a professional seamstress, I began to
dream about how to make myself a bra and of what to make it. As they say, “Seek
and ye shall find.” My two sisters received men’s jackets that had linings in
their sleeves. I removed the lining from the sleeves and now had some fabric.
From my man’s shirt I removed three buttons. A woman who found a needle in her
jacket gave it to me in return for a full day’s food ration. From the ribbon
around the blanket I unraveled thread and I then had everything that I needed to
sew the bra. But then the most complicated problem of all came up: where does
one get scissors? But since “necessity is the mother of invention,” I had the
idea that if I had a shard of glass, I could do the cutting with it. After
searching all over the barracks, I found a broken window and removed a shard of
glass it from it. I lay down on the ground with my fabric and the shard of glass
and I did the cutting for the prized item. Then I sewed it. I wore the bra for
almost seven months until the liberation, on January 23, 1945. I was the only
woman among thousands who had such a piece of clothing. The others envied me and
dreamed about a bra.
Lina Beresin
From: Lina Beresin’s Testimony, Yad Vashem 1968 |
