Sara Tuvel Bernstein (1918–1983)

Sara Tuvel Bernstein, originally Seren, was born to a large Jewish family in a rural mountain village in Romania. She was a good student and left her village at the age of 13 with a scholarship to attend gymnasium (high school) in Bucharest. However, she was unhappy at the school and eventually quit. She decided to become an apprentice to a dressmaker rather than return home. She was a well-paid seamstress of high fashion, able to assist her family financially. When World War II began, she fled to Budapest, Hungary, but there she and her younger sister Esther were captured and sent to a Hungarian forced labor camp. In 1944, they were deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbrück. Their conditions got worse as they were transported from camp to camp near the end of the war. Sara and her sister were finally rescued by the Red Cross. After the war, she went to recuperate at a convent in Germany that had been turned into a hospital, and then volunteered to teach sewing to displaced women at an ORT school in the next town. There she met Meyer Bernstein, a fellow Holocaust survivor who was teaching tailoring. They married and emigrated to Canada, then later to the USA. Her memoir The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival was published posthumously in 1997. A final chapter written by her daughter Marlene Bernstein Samuels provided information about the later years of her mother's life.