The matching dresses Kor and Miriam wear represent the inseparable bond of their twinship and the maternal love that is violently severed by the Holocaust. In their childhood, the dresses are a source of pride for their mother, who has them custom-made to showcase her “perfect little dolls” (3). This act of dressing them alike simultaneously celebrates their unique identity and shared experience. The final pair of burgundy dresses embodies a tragic irony when Kor reflects, “The last dresses she made would save our lives” (3). This statement is double-edged: The dresses save them from the immediate finality of the gas chamber but condemn them to the ongoing suffering of Josef Mengele’s experiments. The garments, intended as expressions of love and individuality, become the very markers that make the twins vulnerable targets, transforming a symbol of their cherished connection into the instrument of their tragic selection on the Auschwitz platform.

The meaning of the dresses shifts the moment a guard spots them in the crowd, shouting, “Zwillinge! Zwillinge!” (iii). It is specifically “because of those matching burgundy dresses” that they are torn from their mother’s arms, never to see her again (iii). In this instant, the symbol of their familial bond becomes the cause of their family’s destruction. This cruel reversal underscores the theme of The Importance of Relationships in Survival, as the twins are thrust into a world where they have only each other. Their survival no longer depends on parental protection but on their own resourcefulness and mutual devotion, a bond once celebrated by the dresses but now tested by the very circumstances those dresses created. Eventually, the dresses wear out and are replaced by ill-fitting women’s clothing, symbolizing the final, forcible stripping away of their childhood, innocence, and former identity.