(From my article in NYCITYWOMAN.COM)
How the discovery of a pack of dress designs in a basement in Milwaukee is keeping the spirit of Hedy and Paul Strnad alive.
It’s the stuff of fiction—a Milwaukee man cleans out his mother’s basement, discovers an old, unlabeled box, and inside finds an envelope sealed with red wax, stamped with a swastika, and marked “Inspected by the German Reich.”
But this isn’t fiction; it’s the true story of a Prague couple in the 1930’s—a 43 year-old bank clerk and his 39-year old wife, a dress designer—and the tragically unsuccessful efforts to save them from the Nazis. It’s also about the spark of life that lived on in the wife’s dress designs after the couple’s deaths.