ST. LOUIS - Using thread and fabric, a powerful story has been woven together inside the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

The museum's newest exhibit, called "Stitching History," details the story of Hedy and Paul Strnad, who had a shop in Prague in the 1930s before Czechoslovakia was controlled by the Nazis.

“Hedwig and Paul Strnad lived in Czechoslovakia,” said Myron Freedman, executive director of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. “She was a dress designer and thriving in her business there and she had lots of clients. She also saw that things were changing and that they needed to get out. In order to make that happen, they sent her dress designs to the family in America, hoping they could find work for them to facilitate leaving Czechoslovakia. The dress designs got to America, but they did not. They ended up perishing in the Holocaust.”

Paul and Hedy were sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed by the Nazis.

Years later, Hedy’s family in Milwaukee held on to the drawings and worked with the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and a theater company to turn the colorful dress designs from paper into reality.

“This printed fabric doesn’t exist,” Freedman said. “They worked with artists to create silk screens and then silk-screen the pattern onto the material, so they were able to recreate precisely what it was Hedy was after.”

The museum tells the true stories of the Holocaust to fight bigotry and antisemitism.

The exhibit includes artifacts from the St. Louis garment district and the 50,000 Jewish immigrants living in St. Louis and the 160 individual businesses working on Washington Avenue in the 1920s and 30s.

Robb Nelson, exhibitions coordinator of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, says these tactile items connect visitors to the past.

“I don’t think there’s anything more powerful in history than material culture and seeing things for yourself," Nelson said. "You can read about things and see the numbers and get a sense of how horrific or how triumphant an event was depending on the situation. But until you actually see something from it, I don’t think your brain quite comprehends it in the same way.”

Stitching History from the Holocaust is open now through Oct. 19 at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

“We don’t necessarily say history is repeated,” Freedman said. “But it has echoes.”