When Jewel Wolk, Cut Bank, quilts, it’s more than sewing fabric together to create a piece of art. It’s about the stories they tell.

Quilters representing guilds in the MonDak region gathered Nov. 21 at the Missouri-Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center to listen to Wolk retell stories of women survivors of World War I and II through her spider web quilt.

“I’ve travelled many, many miles to interview those women who survived a war, and through those travels I learned many things about myself and about women in general,” said Wolk, who began the project around 1956. The spider web symbolically connects the women who are invariably related through a common experience. There are various scenes representing each story. Wolk had her audience of quilters on the edge of their seats as she recounted the events the women of the quilt experienced. She began with her neighbor, a German girl at the time, who was given chocolate bars by an American soldier and the lengths she went to to make sure they weren’t poisonous after German authorities said American food would be.

She told about a survivor in Reno, Nev., from World War I who, at the age of 14, signed up to be a nurse in the Red Cross with her sister. She served with other young women in France and was eventually responsible for a group of soldiers because the doctors had been killed. She vowed to treat everyone in her camp, and she saved the lives of two officers in Russia’s red army.

Another one survived Auschwitz after being led into the gas chamber. The woman was told the group would be deloused, and they must take off their clothes. So they did, and it was then they heard the screams from other chambers, and she knew they weren’t being deloused. She was saved, however, when German authorities told them to put their clothes back on because the chamber wasn’t full enough. She nonetheless survived to tell her story.

There was yet another survivor interviewed by Wolk who saved her sister after the American soldiers had arrived. They, unknowingly, killed many would-be Holocaust survivors because their food was just too much to digest. The woman told Wolk she could tell by her sister’s eyes she had 24 hours to live, and she wouldn’t let her eat the food she wanted except for a few morsels.

Wolk said if there was one thing she’s learned it’s that war is not romantic as many men see it. It’s brutal.

Her spider web quilt, which was years in the making, began with her neighbors’ stories of their survival. She couldn’t get their stories out of her head, and “it was so interesting that I set out to find more.” And so she did, traveling hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to interview survivors. It took many interviews to each gripping tale. Her favorite part she says was the research, hearing the women’s stories.

Wolk made nine themed story-telling quilts. She doesn’t quilt anymore due to her failing eyesight, but that hasn’t kept her ideas from coming. “I have a fabulous one in my head, but I can’t do it anymore,” Wolk said. On Monday, the veteran quilter taught a class on “Appli-J,” a self-taught applique technique in which scenes are sewn onto a hand-pieced background.

Wolk’s work has been featured in Simon and Schuster’s First Prize Quilt; 50 Award Winning American Quilts 1984; The Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine January 1988 and The Great Falls Tribune.

reporter@sidneyherald.com