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3 The Holocaust Graphic Novel

While Art Spiegelman’s raises many questions about the religious and other dimensions of theMaus Holocaust, more issues remain. The Holocaust (or in Hebrew, the Shoah, which means “catastrophe”) is fraught with unresolvable questions about how this tragedy can or should be remembered in artistic works. Given its enormity, with six million Jews and many, many other people killed in the Nazi concentration camps, can any form of art ever recapture this experience? And should artists even try, or is doing so a type of irreverence toward the dead? These questions have been debated in numerous works, with scholars such as Elie Wiesel and Theodor Adorno stating that it is impossible to deal with the Holocaust in words and images, try as one might; and Bruno Bettelheim and Alvin Rosenfeld countering that silence would give the Nazis a victory. My1

response to this controversy is that the Holocaust is a human experience (in that it did happen and was caused by humans), and that as such it is going to be written and thought about because it is also human to reflect on events, whether positive or, as in this case, horrible. And in fact, as was pointed out during the discussion of , art has indeed been created about the Holocaust in graphic novelMaus format, not to mention film, theater, fiction and nonfiction writing, and painting. The unique contribution of the graphic novel whether it deals with fiction or nonfiction (as in the case of ),Maus is that it offers a reading and viewing experience together. With the graphic novel, one can turn back or forward or linger on a particular panel or page. And unlike during a film or theater production, one can meditate carefully while one is experiencing the work of art, instead of being forced forward every second. As Scott McCloud and Marshall McLuhan before McCloud have pointed out, the leap between panels offers a process of closure or completion, in which the reader/viewer is able to use his own imagination all the time to fill in the gaps. Moreover, like film or theater, the graphic novel offers characters that one can see. In the case of , which remains the most powerful and theMaus deepest reflection on the Holocaust in the graphic novel genre, the characters are animals and the contrast between them, the people they represent, and Disney and other animal cartoons sets up a special resonance. In other graphic novels, the reader can see the human characters, as in a film or the theater, and so the graphic novel combines both reading and viewing, and the advantages of prose texts and visual media, in a special way. The graphic novel therefore offers its own very powerful portrayal of this devastating event, one of whose main themes is the seeming absence of God.

Although occupies a place of its own, especially in terms of religious reflection, andMaus therefore has an entire chapter in this book devoted to it, there are several other very worthy graphic novel Holocaust representations, and I will deal with them in this chapter. Each one is moving, and each one adds something to the accurate knowledge of and reflections about this event. All involve questions of personal identity and belief. Martin Lemelman’s and MiriamMendel’s Daughter Katin’s are both very moving and extremely well-done true memoirs of theWe Are on Our Own Holocaust. Unlike , they use people rather than animals as characters and are completelyMaus straightforward and realistic in their depiction of the characters and events that they describe. But they take opposite positions on the religious issues raised by the Holocaust, with Lemelman’s book testifying to positive supernatural events and Katin denying the existence of a caring God. Because they both are convincing and because, to a certain degree, seeing is believing, these two memoirs, like , are among the most powerful depictions of the Holocaust in any medium. They do notMaus rely upon physical horror but rather on mental horror, which is all the stronger for being visually

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depicted on the faces of the sufferers. Similarly, the graphic portrayal of Anne Frank’s life by Jacobson and Colón is an excellent visual and written rendition based on an extremely powerful written work, Anne’s diary. Because Jacobson and Colón’s work is a biography, in which Anne is often called “Anne,” rather than “I” as she always calls herself in her diary, their work conveys a less intimate tone than her first-person account. Despite this disadvantage, which is true of almost all biographies in comparison with autobiographies, the graphic novel genre adds a visual, diagrammatic element missing from the original textual version of her diary, while the extra life events provided by the Jacobson and Colón biography fill out her story. Most of all, the realistic visual rendering of her appearance and those of her companions and of their condition gives a wonderful concreteness to the people and events described in Anne’s diary. Trina Robbins’s Lily

also tells the true story of a young girl who was caught up in the Holocaust, but with a muchRenée happier ending than Anne Frank experienced: Lily es-capes from Europe and becomes a known comics artist. Joe Kubert’s is an imaginative rendering of the last days of a young artist in theYossel Warsaw Ghetto, based on both imagination and historical fact, while Pascal Croci’s , aAuschwitz powerful fictional work, brings the past and present together. Pak and Di Giandomenico’s X-Men:

, like , is another powerful fictional work recounting a boy’s experience inMagneto Testament Yossel the Warsaw Ghetto and in Auschwitz. Pinkus’s and Morad’s reflections on being Israelis in Germany bring the Holocaust’s reverberations into the present, as Trina Robbins’s and Sharon Rudahl’s adaptation of the Holocaust theme (in their “Zog Nit Keyn Mol” in Arie Kaplan, From

, 200–201) does to broad issues of social justice in their graphic rendition of aKrakow to Krypton Holocaust partisans’ song. Finally, Alan Moore’s use of the Holocaust in shows the widerWatchmen applicability of this event in a work of science fiction. All are powerful Holocaust dramas or make use of Holocaust themes, in the form of the graphic novel, but each has its unique style and attitude toward identity and belief.

Mendel’s Daughter, Martin Lemelman’s memoir of his mother, Gusta, transcribed from a video and told in her own voice, uses a very realistic style of drawing and privileges words as much as text. Instead of using speech balloons, it has separate panels for the words. This is a unique feature of Lemelman’s style, and it gives the book the feel of an illustrated book as well as that of a work of sequential art. One could say that it is midway between both genres. Also, the panels are of differing size on every page; sometimes a face will take a whole page if a momentous event is happening, or someone explodes in anger, and sometimes the pages will have many small panels. These features help focus the reader on the story itself, and particularly on its characters.

The narration is very important here, since the story is entirely a narration by Gusta, with no dialogue between characters except as reported by her. As she narrates the story, Gusta looks like any older American woman, with glasses, a standard haircut, and tasteful but not unusual clothes. Yet her story is anything but the usual one an older American woman might tell. After Lemelman had a dream about his mother after her death, he found a videotape he had made of his mother talking about her life and decided to transform it into a graphic novel. Since he is an illustrator by trade this is a natural choice.

Unlike Spiegelman’s story, which has three narrative lines—the kunstlerroman, which tells the story of Art’s making of the book itself, the bildungsroman, which gives Art’s autobiography as the son of survivors, and the epic, which includes Anja’s and Vladek’s story of survival —this story has2

just one narrative line and (apart from the introduction) is told without any intervention or commentary by the artist. This gives gravity and a solid testimonial feel to the story, which details how Gusta and her two brothers and one sister lived in the woods in a hole in the ground for three years and escaped the Nazis, unlike Spiegelman’s parents, who experienced the concentration camps.

Lemelman’s book has three main themes, which emerge gradually from Gusta’s narration: the religious theme, in which a supernatural agency sometimes functions; the theme of anti-Semitism, in which non-Jewish friends and neighbors turn on Gusta’s family once the Nazis arrive; and the theme of redemption, in which righteous gentiles help the Jews, and even the dead seem to have found some sort of peace.

Like Lemelman’s memoir has a religious dimension to it, this time involving an overtMausC op yr ig ht ©

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supernatural agency. In Vladek’s dream about when the Jewish prisoners would be releasedMaus, from the work camp, which comes true, leads the rabbi in the camp, who is also freed, to call Vladek a prophet; and, indeed, this event cannot be explained in rational terms except as an enormous coincidence. In Lemelman, however, the supernatural agency seems to be more tangible than a dream. On the first page, Lemelman himself appears, saying that “I’ve always felt that my mother lived in a world of magic. She always claimed that her father, Menachem Mendel, spoke to her in dreams. And then there was Aunt Yetala. . . . Until the day she died, she spoke of an Angel of God who saved her from the Nazis. Needless to say, I was skeptical” (1). Here Lemelman speaks as a logical professor used to raising questions, and as a secular Jew. But in his artistic capacity both as a writer and an illustrator, he has reported the story as it was told to him, so that it all becomes more believable. At a vital moment, Lemelman shows Yetala’s shoulder being touched by a hand—which the reader assumes is the hand of the angel about which Yetala told Gusta (124). And at the end of the book, when he has each of the dead members of Gusta’s family speak for themselves, a hand is placed over their faces, and this also seems to be the hand of an angel (217). But this is Lemelman’s own artistic device, and is clearly different from the hand that Yetala insists was placed on her shoulder.

Gusta’s account of her sister Yetala’s encounter with the angel (122–24) is reported as Yetala told Gusta about it later. As she was running from the Nazis, an angel called to her and told her to stop running. As a result, she witnessed her father being shot. According to Yetala, the angel tapped her on the shoulder and summoned a woman who took her to shelter. Gusta comments, “Did the Angel really touch her? I am not sure. I only know she was saved” (124). Lemelman shows Yetala looking backward at the hand on her shoulder in the first panel and looking sideways at the angel in the second panel (124), and therefore the reader assumes that it was indeed a supernatural agency, since Yetala seems to have viewed the angel. (The reader however sees only the angel’s hand, fig.

.) Nowhere in does an outside supernatural agency overtly intervene, and yet the events3.1 Maus Vladek recalls about the priest’s prediction and his own dream of being set free from the labor camp seem to indicate divine intervention in his and Anja’s salvation. And as in Yetala has a dreamMaus, in which her father tells her to go with two Christian women who will come to her. And this happens: her brothers pay two women to get Yetala and take her from the cellar, where she is hiding, to them in the forest (137). Lemelman reproduces a page from the prayer book for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in Hebrew (55), and translates part of it into English; it is the passage about “who will live and who will die,” and how, in the coming year. At the end of the book, Lemelman shows another part of the same prayer book page: “Man’s origin is dust and his end is dust. He spends his life earning bread. He is like a clay vessel, easily broken, like withering grass, a fading flower, a fugitive cloud, a fleeting breeze, scattering dust” (191). And on the last page, he quotes the Passover Haggadah: “In every generation, one must look upon himself, as if he personally came out of Egypt.” Moreover, the chapter containing the “Action” in which the Nazis seized and killed many of the Jews in town, is entitled “Sh’ma Yisrael,” from the prayer that starts “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” In essence, his book shows the miracle of his mother’s salvation, the fragility of life, and the trials that his mother had to undergo, which were not less onerous than slavery in Egypt, and he does so on the basis of Jewish prayers. Clearly Lemelman wants to show a connection between the events and the prayers.

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Part 1 is about Gusta’s life in Germakivka, a town that was sometimes in the Ukraine, and sometimes in Poland, depending upon the political situation. When she lived there, it was in Poland. Gusta speaks with a Yiddish accent, and her English grammar is not perfect. This creates a gap in the narration that the reader must fill in. A theme that emerges early on is the relations between her family and the non-Jews in the town, which appeared at first to be good—everybody used the well in their yard to get water and was allowed to do so. Their family was fairly prosperous, and they would hire as many as twenty non-Jewish women to come pick the fruit in their orchard. Everyone liked to eat the prune butter that the Jews made. The girls had Christian friends, and even wore the local, native clothing that they had been given. They went to school with the non-Jews too. She describes life in the town, which was quite pleasant for the most part. Her sister Jenny had lots of friends, both Christian and Jewish. She describes her studies in the Polish public school and her after-school religious studies. She also tells about the general store they had in her house (41–52).

In school there is one boy who does not like Jews (42), a sign of anti-Semitism under the surface of what are for the most part pleasant Christian-Jewish relations. But when the Nazis come, things become much worse. The Nazis are not only merciless but actually sadistic. They wound Chantze, her relative, and then shoot her to death in front of her mother and father before also shooting them (147). The question is how to explain this and how God could permit it. Lemelman never attempts to answer this question, and perhaps that is the smartest choice, since many other excellent artists and thinkers have found it unanswerable, too. However, Gusta mentions that “the rabbis and the religious say our trouble is from God” (94), as if the Jews are somehow responsible for their fate by having angered God, but no one comments on this assertion.

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Gusta’s words, “And then the Germans come. The Ukrainians are so happy. The Nazis promise them the freedom. No more will Germakivka be for the Poles or for the Communists or for the Jews. Hitler promises the Ukrainians their own nation” (70). But this is a political explanation. It does not explain why the wife of the family’s next-door neighbor tries to steal from them (72). And, as Gusta remarks, “So we started to give away our things to good Christian neighbors, to hold for us. We gave them away with the trust that we will live over the war and we will get them back. But, you know, these people were friendly before, but after . . . These Christians became greedy. They just wanted to keep what we gave to them. . . . They think they will get rid of the Jews and they will be left over the things! They will be rich” (73). So nationalism and greed—very human factors—explain some of it.

But not the cruelty that prevailed. The Nazis come after the Jews, and Yetala’s (and Gusta’s) father runs from them, along with Yetala. But even worse than that, perhaps, is the reaction of the people with whom Gusta has grown up, the people who patronized her store and with whom she went to school: “The Ukrainians watch. Such a good show!” (122). They enjoy seeing the Jews hunted by the Nazis. Moreover, her father lay by the bridge, wounded, the whole day, asking for water and nobody gave him any. Yetala reports that the Ukrainians say that they were afraid to help him, but they were not afraid to steal his shoes. Much later, after the Germans retreat and the Russians come, Gusta and her brothers and Yetala return to their house to find that a Christian family has taken it over. And “the lady is not very happy to see us” (181). They could not get their house back, and they were afraid to stay because, even with the Germans gone, “Ukrainian bandits was still killing Jews” (186).

And from there, the girls went into a displaced persons (DP) camp and the boys were in the Russian army. From both places, they managed to get out and come to the United States. Anti-Semitism is an ever-present theme from the time the aforementioned schoolboy expresses his dislike for Jews, but until it is openly approved by the Nazis, it does not become all-pervasive. And there were also Jewish police who did the Nazis’ bidding in order, they thought, to save themselves. From all this, it seems that when a government agency approves an action, no matter how heinous, people will do it. And some people will do anything to survive, like the Jewish police. But Gusta’s family never did any of these things, according to her testimony. The faces of Yetala, Gusta, and others are drawn very compassionately, and Lemelman’s soft charcoals have the dual effect of softening facial expressions and giving the entire story a dream-like and melancholy feeling, even when its stark reality is very clear. Because of this softness, it is startling and moving when someone shows a fierce emotion. For instance, when Gusta tells her story, regardless of the horrors she relates, her face is kind and objective looking rather than hard and bitter. But suddenly she is shown as a young girl exploding in anger against the Christian family occupying her house after the war, when they blame her for bringing lilacs from what was her own garden to the nun who had helped her during the war years (184). Also, because of Lemelman’s use of photos (as early as page 13) and his drawing of his mother in old age (4, 9), the contrast between how she probably looked (photos are not always accurate, and he must imagine many of her facial expressions that he portrays) as a young girl when these events took place and her older age in America is always there; and the reader wonders how this ostensibly calm, older woman could have endured the loss of her youthful innocence in the sea of hatred that surrounded her. The reader also learns (once again) that he cannot know from exterior appearances what history people harbor inside of themselves.

But the third, much more positive, theme of redemption is also very strong. There were some righteous gentiles who helped Gusta during the war. These were true Christians, and in almost every case they were identified as such—the Catholic nun and the Seventh-day Adventist couple. Because of their faith and good hearts, these people showed humanity when everyone around them was demonstrating the opposite. The nun’s face looks benevolent and her gesture is positive as she touches Yetala’s hand (166). The husband of the Seventh-day Adventist couple was the director of the fields of a rich man. He takes an active role in helping Gusta and her family, even providing them with semilegal paperwork and allowing them to hide in the woods on the rich man’s farm. He also talks another man into sheltering them. Gusta comments, “They are good peoples. They are good Christians” (102). When the Nazi “Action” begins, this man comes and tells Gusta and her brothers about it. He frequently comes to the woods to tell them who was being taken away, and heCo

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covers up their hiding place with leaves (148). But these were the exceptions, and Gusta unfortunately does not have many such stories of kindness to tell. Her narration calmly comes to a close with a recitation of how she married in the DP camp, how she and her husband got from the DP camp to America, and how her brothers also managed to do that, one after living in Uruguay for two years because America would not let him in at first.

What remains after all this is Gusta’s calling Martin “Mattaleh,” a Yiddishism indicating endearment, and Martin’s pained and thoughtful face at the end of the book and in the photograph on the back cover flap. The reader understands Martin’s quiet anguish as the son of survivors and his inability to believe that divine intervention may have saved his aunt Yetala and perhaps his mother as well. He makes no overt comment about the nature of humanity and whether he regards it as good or evil. What also remains is the Gusta whose spirit shows through her photographs as well as Martin’s sensitive drawings of how she might have appeared in different times and situations at a young age. Her (and Lemelman’s) honesty can be appreciated when she says that her life with Martin’s father, Tovia, was not that easy, and Yetala divorced the man she first married after the war and then married Kalman (210). Lemelman portrays a family marked by suffering and tragedy that continues into the present, which is not spelled out as much as in (even though it is still there).Maus

Lemelman concludes with the thought that in every generation Jews have to remember the passage from slavery in Egypt and to feel that all Jews have gone through it (219), which is indeed what Jews do during Passover and which probably accounts for much of the Jews’ political liberalism. Lemelman leaves open the question of divine intervention. But he gives evidence for it, just as Spiegelman has, and in the even more direct form of the angel’s hand on Yetala’s shoulder. Reading Lemelman’s work, the reader feels that he too has been touched by the family’s tragedy—and even, through the act of reading the book, by an angel—and remembers the good people who helped the family and the possibility of God’s presence even during these terrible events.

Miriam Katin works as a background designer for film companies in the United States and was a graphic artist in the Israeli Defense Forces as a young woman after she and her parents left Hungary in 1956. She came to the United States in 1963. She has illustrated children’s books. Her Holocaust memoir, , unlike and essentially makes her caseWe Are on Our Own Maus Mendel’s Daughter, against belief in God, but at the same time it includes some positive elements. The title gives a clear indication of her point of view. God did not intervene, and as Vladek in says about Auschwitz,Maus there God didn’t come; the prisoners were all on their own facing Nazi barbarity. Perhaps surprisingly, Katin draws in a soft, slightly cartoony style while still retaining a realistic basis. Only a few interspersed pages, set in the present, are in full color; almost all of the other pages are in black and white.

Budapest in 1944, when the story begins, is still an elegant city of culture, and the women, Miriam’s mother and her apparently non-Jewish friend, Eva, are dressed elegantly. But the Nazis are ruling, and the atmosphere from the beginning is horrible, even heartbreaking. Katin writes in her afterword that her only regret is that she “could not give this kind of comfort, a comfort of faith in the ‘existence of God,’ to my children. I was unable to lie.” In an interview with Samantha Baskind, she also confesses to anger “against the faithful.” Although she does not explain that anger, her3

work does explain her lack of belief. She follows in her father’s Socialist and atheist footsteps. And her mother’s story shows that at least as far as Miriam is concerned, if people are made in the image of God, then God must have two faces, one kind and one completely horrible—as in Blake’s poems “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image.” But unlike Blake she does not ultimately try to explain this duality, only to show it as proof that a good God simply does not exist. She has said that “the atheistic aspect of the book would turn off many Jews—except those ready for an argument”4

because she apparently feels that most Jews are agnostic or believers, but not atheists. Yet she makes it easy to understand her point of view.

Katin’s memoir agrees with Lemelman’s in terms of anti-Semitism. The superintendent of her building, who was once nice and got along fine with Esther, Miriam’s mother, is now hostile, saying “dirty Jews” when her back is turned (13). When he thinks that she has committed suicide, he worries only that he has to make a list of her property for the Nazis. Outwardly, he says that she and

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her daughter were a nice family but privately he again calls her a dirty Jew (28). On the other hand, Esther’s friend Eva—who seems to be non-Jewish—remains loyal, and the non-Jewish servant girl Anna is willing to work for Miriam’s mother for no pay and cannot understand the hatred driving the Nazis. Anna even gives Esther her St. Anthony’s pendant as a protection and is willing to lie to hide her departure by telling Esther’s made-up story that she committed suicide (23). Anna is obviously religious and hopes that God will forgive her for her lie. Her tears show genuine love of Esther and her daughter.

Despite these good people, it is understandable why Miriam would question God’s existence. In the first chapter, Esther must give up Miriam’s dog, Rexy, to the Nazis, by their command—Jews must give up their dogs. This was just one of the hundreds of small and large ways that Nazis systematically tried to demoralize and dehumanize Jews. Rexy does not want to go, but Esther must bring him in anyway. When the child Miriam comes home and finds Rexy gone, her mother tells her that Rexy died suddenly. Miriam wants to pray to God for his return (10–15). All of this raises the question of God’s existence in just a few pages in the most heartrending manner imaginable. If God allows a child’s dog to be taken away, then where is God? And they must face more trouble: the building superintendent tells Esther that she must move out after making a list of all her goods—another Nazi demand. And her husband is in the Hungarian army, at the front, so she must do all of this alone. Her anguish shows clearly in her face in the drawings (13–14).

Miriam’s mother promises that God will be everywhere helping them as they leave with false papers declaring Miriam a bastard and her mother an unmarried servant (23). Yet one sees no evidence of God’s presence. As Esther moves through a crowd of German soldiers, they address her in sexual terms, and she, playing her new role well, replies saucily (25). Miriam eats a pork sausage offered by a woman on the train, and Esther does not object to this nonkosher food in her new role as a Christian servant. After a German officer, who suspects Esther may be a Jew, forces her to become his mistress, she cries but she has no choice but to continue (43). Esther tells Miriam that God is in the wine barrels (50)—so while wine seems to be godly in that it makes one feel good, this statement also seems to imply that God Himself seems to be hiding from trouble. Miriam in the meantime has adopted another dog that she names Rexy after her first one. Katin clearly does not think that God may indeed be present in all of this: when the second dog befriended by Miriam is found dead—shot by a Russian soldier—the child Miriam understandably starts to think that maybe God is not watching and helping her after all. Yet despite the horrible pain caused the child Miriam by the loss of her two dogs, and though her mother was forced to have sex with a Nazi and to abandon any outward Jewishness, people perceived her mother’s beauty, intelligence, and goodness, and her mother was wise enough to survive, and so she and Miriam got through the war. Someone reading this story might think that there is indeed a God who was watching over them, despite Miriam’s overt views about this as both a character and an artist.

A good-hearted peasant man saves Esther and Miriam, even though his wife objects. Although Esther gives the wife her wedding ring as payment for living with them, the husband returns it to her when she leaves, along with some money (78). And the Russian soldiers she stays with turn out to be good men, in contrast to those who first invaded the village she was staying in who wanted nothing but vodka and women. Also, her friend Eva and the people in the first village in which she stays tell her husband, who is searching for her after leaving the Hungarian army (96–99), where she went and wish him well. Their hearts are good. A Russian soldier even cries as he points Esther’s husband David the way to the train so he can find his wife (105). Yes, there are the Hungarians who say that the Jews are getting by without working, as always, and call them “Christ-killers.” But there are, surprisingly, only a few of them, compared to the many good ones. Yet in the colored pages indicating the present, Miriam wants to prevent her child from going to Hebrew school because she learned from her experience only that God is hiding in a wine bottle (84). As a character, she refuses to see that God may have been in the good people she met—but despite herself, as an artist she is showing those good people and asking questions about her own position, even though she reaffirms that position in the afterword. True, some of these people do not know that she is a Jew—but some, like Esther’s friend Eva, do, and help her nevertheless.

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When Esther and her husband, David, reunite, Esther thanks God and it is David who says, “Esther, God has nothing to do with any of this” (117). He is also the one who says, “We are on our own, Esther. That’s all there is” (118) ( ). Later, Miriam notes that he was always an atheistfig. 3.2 and that she has absorbed his philosophy. But Esther is upset that Miriam has heard this discussion, and Miriam never indicates that Esther ever gave up her belief in God despite her husband’s atheism. In the afterword she notes that her mother “is still living in New York” and “graciously hosting all the Jewish holidays.” So despite her horrible experiences, Esther apparently remains a believer. However, Miriam comments on her feelings as a child when she says “I prayed and I prayed. And Rexy did not come back” (119), so the seeds of her own future disbelief are sown. The last scene in the story (before the afterword) shows her plunging a knife into a doll and asking, “What if mommy burned that God after all,” as she thought her mother did when she burned all of their personal belongings and photos in Budapest (122). But, again, David did come back and the family was reunited. Was it entirely because of their own efforts? Katin the artist leaves this open for the reader to judge, although unlike Lemelman, who as a character in his story cannot decide on this issue of God’s existence, Katin as a person remains unable to believe. However, there is the fact that Esther, who has gone through even worse experiences than Miriam did—such as being forced to sleep with the Nazi officer—and was conscious of them with an adult’s consciousness, never seems to lose her faith in God. As always, the reader must find his or her own position after reading Miriam’s book, whose story is very affecting and whose overt championing of disbelief—despite her mother’s continuing belief—is disturbing.

Anne Frank’s diary, on the other hand, is full of references to God and to prayer. She clearly believed and continued to put her trust in God despite all difficulties. After a particularly scary incident in which burglars break into the warehouse near the annex and the hiders including AnneCo

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are almost discovered, Anne writes on April 11, 1944:

God was truly watching over us. . . . We must put our feelings aside; we must be brave and strong, bear discomfort without complaint, do whatever is in our power and trust in God. The time will come when we’ll be people again and not just Jews. Who has inflicted this on us? Who has set us apart from all the rest? Who has put us through such suffering? It’s God who has made us the way we are, but it’s also God who will lift us up again. In the eyes of the world, we’re doomed, but if, after all this suffering, there are still Jews left, the Jewish people will be held up as an example. Who knows, maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason, we have to suffer. . . . God has never deserted our people. Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they’ve gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger. The weak shall fall and the strong shall survive and not be defeated!5

Whether she continued to state this when she was at Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus, cannot be known. But certainly she showed belief and courage during her two years in hiding.

Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic is true to the diary’s honesty, tone, and contents, including this incident (108) in whichBiography

they show her belief. Jacobson and Colón are also known for their graphic novel based on the 9/11 report, in which they are also a model of accuracy. For their Anne Frank work, they used maps and other material provided by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and their work has been edited for accuracy by staffers from the Anne Frank House. What do they contribute to the diary and why should people read their graphic novel in addition to the diary itself?

The issue of graphic novel adaptations of works in other formats is a complex one. The visuals add a new, viewing dimension to a strictly textual work, while the act of reading a graphic novel transforms cinematic works that have been adapted into graphic novel format, such as Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s , which is analyzed in the chapter on Israel-centered graphicWaltz with Bashir novels. Here Jacobson and Colón have added a visual dimension not only to Anne’s diary but also to the story of her entire life, including periods before and after the diary was written. As noted earlier, a biography usually conveys a less intimate tone than a first-person autobiographical account, and in small sequential art dialogue and narration bubbles Jacobson and Colón cannot capture the full range of Anne’s prose style in her diary. But their work also contributes a great deal to our experience of reading Anne’s diary and to understanding her life and circumstances. So what do they add in intellectual, emotional, and spiritual terms? First, the information about Anne’s life before and after her period of hiding fills out her story from beginning to tragic end and enables the reader to understand her personality more fully. Second, their illustrations fill in difficult-to-visualize portions of the diary, such as the layout of the place in which she was hiding for two years and the course of the “Final Solution” that Hitler planned for the Jews. A timeline at the end of the volume enables readers to envision all of the events of her life. Third, the reader can see Anne, her parents and sister, and all of the other people with whom she was in contact and that changes the way in which the diary is read and how she is thought of. She is portrayed as happy, sad, defiant, ill, and, again, seeing is believing. No matter how well readers may have tried to visualize her and her surroundings from her diary itself, unless they are visual artists, they are unlikely to have visualized anything like the clarity of the drawings in this graphic novel. Some editions of the contain photos of some ofDiary the people and places involved, including of course Anne herself. Such photos are obviously irreplaceable in conveying a true vision of these people and places, but what Jacobson and Colón, basing their work in part on these photos, contribute is a convincing view of the many emotional states through which Anne and others momentarily passed, which cannot be reproduced in the available photographs.

Anne Frank’s life in the annex as she hid from the Nazis and their Dutch sympathizers, worried about being struck by Allied bombs and confined as if in a prison without being able to go out, makes her diary a great testimony and probably the most-read work about the Holocaust. Beyond the striking events recounted there, Anne’s amazing maturity as well as her typical teenagehood, with its brutal honesty about her parents, co-dwellers and possible boyfriend, give the diary an amazing reality. This is not a work of hype. It is the straightforward truth of what a thirteen- toCo

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fifteen-year-old girl felt as she matured under distressing conditions, rendered in very clear and thoughtful terms. Despite some eyewitness testimony, it cannot be known what Anne thought when she was in the concentration camps or how that changed her point of view. But as the testimony of a person in hiding and forced to live under difficult circumstances with seven other people, this work cannot be bettered. Anne wanted to be a writer and she possibly would have been a journalist had she survived.

So this is a difficult work to compete with in an adaptation, and even in a biographical adaptation that goes beyond the diary itself. Despite the impossibility of quite capturing all of the qualities of the original—including having all of the text available rather than the necessarily abridged narrative passages and speech bubbles in the adaptation—Jacobson and Colón have done a very good job. Their work is not simplified for children, it does not scant the Holocaust itself, and it does not try to achieve a pop-cultural sentimentality. Rather, they remain very close to the truth of the original and their work has a documentary feel to it.

It helps to know about Anne’s father and mother before she was born because the reader needs some understanding of their personalities and how they came to be in business in Holland although they were born in Germany. The fact that Otto, Anne’s father, served as a German officer in World War I reveals not only that many Jews were loyal German citizens but that, before the loss of WWI and the rise of Hitler, the Germans were reasonable people on the subject of Jews—no crazier than any other nation. Jacobson and Colón show that at the end of the war, Otto returned horses he had commandeered from a farmer, demonstrating Otto’s positive character and morality. He and his wife both came from wealthy families and were eventually forced by the Nazis to leave Germany and to accept a much lower socioeconomic status. But they do not complain about that, which again seems to testify to the positive characters of both of Anne’s parents. Jacobson and Colón, however, juxtapose Hitler’s warm reception by the German crowd with Anne’s loving reception by her family after her birth (15). It almost seems for a time as if the Franks could ignore the Nazis but of course they could not ignore them forever; they probably never imagined that the country would be ruled by someone like Hitler. At first, life goes on as normal, but the threat is ever present and grows. Every few pages, signs of increasing Nazi power in Germany are revealed. Finally, after the Reichstag fire, the Franks move to Holland. The style of drawing is very realistic: the drawing of Hitler (23) looks like the widely familiar photos of Hitler, and the drawn renderings of Otto likewise look like the photos of him. The colored panels impart an almost cartoon-like sense of liveliness but also a clear sense of dangerous reality.

Otto’s brothers left for America but he remained with his immediate family in Holland. Then Germany conquered Holland, and started imposing onerous anti-Jewish laws. Jacobson and Colón provide a map showing this conquest (49), and they show the countries to which Jews fled from Germany (44). This points up the usefulness of the graphic novel format and their style in particular. Everything is clearly diagrammed. When reading Anne’s diary, the layout of her hiding place is not quite clear. This book makes it so. Jacobson and Colón show the main building of Otto Frank’s business, and then the annex, as a cut-away illustration (51). Similarly, the illustration of the annex, where the family hid, marks the rooms in which each person lived (72) ( ). This is informationfig. 3.3 that it is very hard if not impossible to derive from the diary itself. Otto has daily lunch meetings with Christian helpers, including Miep Gies and Victor Kugler, two particularly sympathetic and helpful individuals. The supportive atmosphere of these meetings might be difficult to discern while reading Anne’s diary, but it shows clearly on the people’s faces in the graphic novel (79). A map shows the locations of all the concentration camps, with Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and Margot her sister died, particularly marked (126). Jacobson and Colón give careful attention to these important places and events, even depicting Anne’s last days based on eyewitness testimony from friends who survived: she develops scabies and then typhus, and does not have food for days. The effect of this extra detail, going beyond the diary, is to undercut its optimism. Anne’s statement from July 15, 1944, that “it’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart”6

is not quoted in the graphic novel. Perhaps Jacobson and Colón felt that Anne could not still have believed that once she was interned in Bergen-Belsen. Although Jacobson and Colón do not inventC

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any retraction of this belief on Anne’s part, and wisely restrict their depiction of these last scenes to Anne’s starved looks, memories of the past, and strained situation, those very details undermine any idea that she could have continued to believe that people were good. At the least, this idea is called into question. The one positive event they show is Anne and Margot celebrating St. Nicholas’s Day and Hanukkah even at Bergen-Belsen, and singing Dutch songs. But there is no statement of Anne’s belief then, and it cannot be known what it was, although her celebration of Hanukkah shows that she continued to identify with the Jewish people.

The graphic novel provides both more visual details and a fuller understanding of Anne’s life than are available in her diary. Anne and her school friends look perfectly happy in a drawing copied directly from a photo (47). Anne’s mother and father look justifiably worried while Anne goes about her happy and unaware way (48, 49). The famous photo that adorns most copies of her diary shows a smiling Anne seated at her desk with a book in front of her (64) and demonstrates how good Colón is in his use of her face to show happiness and sadness throughout the work. She is shown as thoughtful, worried, sad, and angry—just as she is at different times in the diary—and always with a good deal of fidelity to that photo. Colón must imagine how she looked from an angle, or in profile, or with a certain expression on her face, and he does so very well and convincingly. When she isC

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angry, she is not very pretty (98), so Colón is true to reality and has not tried to sugarcoat Anne. Only sometimes, for instance in one panel where she is crying, does he miss the mark and seem to portray Anne in a less than convincing way, because her profile does not seem to resemble her appearance in the rest of the work (111).

From the renderings, then, the reader gains a fuller understanding of Anne’s circumstances and can visualize them better than from her diary alone. Anne’s diary remains the basis for Jacobson and Colón’s work, but in the diary’s apt and honest expression, it will always be a work of writerly achievement that surpasses any adaptation, largely because of her first-person voice in the diary, which poetically captures her individuality beyond any recounting of the events that befell her; throughout, she simply has her own style, which cannot be fully duplicated in the biographic graphic novel’s relatively brief excerpts and statements. In spiritual terms, Anne shows a persistence of faith and a steadfastness of belief. Why did she maintain that spirit while Miriam Katin could not do so? But, again, perhaps in Bergen-Belsen she finally lost that faith. The answer simply cannot be known. What is true, though, is that Anne continued to identify as a Jew and wished to be a writer and to do good in the world, and through her diary she has done so, perhaps more than she ever could had she lived a normal life. So perhaps God was listening to her plea after all.

Another biographical graphic novel that tells the true story of a young girl whose life was affected, like Anne Frank’s (if not to the same extent) by the Nazis, has a happier ending: Lily

by Trina Robbins (writer),Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer Anne Timmons (illustrator), and Mo Oh (illustrator). This is the biography of a girl, Lily Renée Wilhelm, who fled Nazi-occupied Vienna to England and eventually to the United States, where she became a known comics illustrator. Robbins’s story is especially suitable for teen-aged readers because it is very straightforward and clear, but adults can enjoy it, too. It is very appropriate for Robbins to tell this story, since she herself is a famous comics creator, and here she pays tribute to a predecessor, who was also a woman. In an interview with Alex Deuben, Robbins comments that “her story is so incredible. It’s like a positive alternative to the Anne Frank story. Both of them are true, but this one has a happy ending and how great to tell this story. I couldn’t have done this if it had a sad ending. Obviously I wouldn’t have known about Lily if she had been killed, but if her parents had not survived, I don’t think I would have had the heart to do this.”7

The story is very well written, the visuals are clear, colorful, and striking, and the book makes a good point: persistence in the face of persecution and tragedy, combined with some luck and some help from others, will enable a person to survive. The first few pages are especially beautiful and striking, as the high culture of Vienna in 1938 to which Lily was exposed by her parents is illustrated—elegantly dressed women, old buildings, and the ballet. A photo of Lily as a beautiful child in a pretty dress is juxtaposed with an old building (4) and is especially effective at showing how she would have fit into the elegance of the city ( ). But then the Nazis come, andfig. 3.4 everything changes. No matter how well dressed and sympathetic she is, Lily, like her parents, is subjected to numerous humiliations and scares. It does not matter that her father was the head of the Holland America Line of ships, a major company. Finally she gets the chance to leave for England on the Kinder-transport. She must leave her parents, which is not easy for her as a teenager, but she does manage to do so, and she lives with a friend who sponsored her. But the friend’s mother is not very sympathetic, and Lily who is now almost eighteen, gets a job minding children and then another one in a hospital as a nurse’s assistant. She bitterly misses her parents, but her intelligence and persistence enable her to continue, even when she, like many other European Jews who came to England at that time, is classified as an enemy alien. Throughout all this and during the Blitz, Lily’s face shows her emotions very well and the faces of the other characters, including the police, are also convincingly portrayed. Panels are widened to attract attention during significant moments, and there are also whole-page spreads that show, for instance, Lily engaged in her many activities at the hospital (45).

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Finally despite all difficulties, she learns that her parents, who had stayed behind in Vienna when she left for England, are safely in America, and that a Kindertransport ship will take her there, too. When she lands in New York, her parents look older. Her father works as an elevator operator even though he managed a huge ship line before the war. Her mother needs an operation because she was kicked in the stomach by a Nazi before leaving Vienna. Lily cries as she embraces her. But the operation is successful, and her father has tears running down his face (68–69). This conveys emotion very well, and the reader throughout is sympathetic to Lily and her parents.

Lily works hard in New York but still has little money. Then her mother suggests that Lily try drawing comics. She had always been a good artist, and in Vienna even had some works exhibited. She gets a job in the comics industry and eventually illustrates comics about female pilots and spies

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who fight the Nazis. She is best known for Señorita Rio, a counterspy fighting Nazis in South America. Lily loves drawing her high-end clothes, as well as fighting the Nazis vicariously. In an interview with Alex Deuben, Robbins comments that

One thing that I have always found is that you can tell the difference between a man’s and a woman’s comics by the detail in the clothes. Lily’s characters have great clothes. “Señorita Rio” has a fabulous wardrobe. A lot of guys, when they draw comics—well, nowadays they give women tiny little ridiculous outfits, but in the ’40s they would tend to give the women your basic feature-less, knee-length, red dresses. They didn’t have an eye for fashion. Not always, of course, but very often you can tell when something is by a woman by the details and the eye for clothes. Lily had this great sense of style. It’s been commented to me that there’s a lot of Viennese expressionism in her work. I see hints of Egon Schiele. There’s a hint of that kind of expressionism in her work, especially in the “The Werewolf Hunter,” which is her most moodiest and design-iest and most expressionist work.8

In the end she gave up comics drawing in 1949 but created textile designs and jewelry and even wrote children’s stories and plays, in addition to getting married and raising a family. It’s an inspiring story, and well supported by appendices showing photos of Lily and her parents as well as historical notes on political events and on comics characters who were women fighting in World War II. Lily and her parents do not comment on religion, but they are disturbed when the Nazis burn their synagogue in Vienna, and Lily seems to display a faith that somehow she will survive, despite all discouragement. So, while Trina Robbins cannot be said to emphasize religion, she does show a strong sense of Jewish identity in Lily, and she does seem to allude to the importance of faith, if only faith in oneself. This is an important book for younger readers, and even older ones will enjoy it. It does not have the depth or complexity of Anne Frank’s diary, but it presents a parallel true story of a young girl forced to deal with one of the worst horrors the world has known, the Nazis.

Because of the reference to younger readers, I will briefly mention here a book for even younger readers even though it is not a graphic novel per se: award-winning playwright Tony Kushner and writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak’s children’s book adaptation of the 1938 opera . TheBrundibar music for this opera was written by Jewish composer Hans Krása, who died in Auschwitz. The opera was staged fifty-five times at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the children who performed it were subsequently sent to die in Auschwitz. Strictly speaking, Kushner and Sendak’s work is an illustrated book rather than a graphic novel. However, although there are no gutters between panels here, as there are in most children’s books, each page may be considered a panel in itself. Essentially the book, which is beautifully illustrated and well written, tells the story of two children who are sent to the market to get some milk for their ailing mother but have to confront the wicked, Hitler-look-alike organ-grinder Brundibar (meaning “bumblebee” in Czech), who tries to steal their money. The book, unlike the opera, includes the infamous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” under a staircase and Star of David armbands on many people in the marketplace, as well as on the doctor who treats the children’s mother. The children, helped by many people and animals, defeat Brundibar, get their money back, and are able to buy milk for their mother, singing, “Tyrants come along, but just you wait and see! They topple one-two-three.” But the last page of the book ends with a chilling, sarcastic, and prophetic note from Brundibar stating that “though I go, I won’t go far. . . . I’ll be back. Love, Brundibar.” Kushner and Sendak have composed a “semigraphic” novel (as it were) for contemporary American children, most of whom (fortunately for them) will see this only as a story of some children fighting against a wicked organ-grinder and will not understand its allusions to the Holocaust. But the adults who read it will understand these allusions and then will have to decide whether or not they should explain them to their children.

Joe Kubert is a distinguished American comics creator whose work was honored with a lifetime achievement award and a show at the Israel Cartoon Museum in 2011. His is9 Yossel, April 29, 1943 an entirely fictional tale about a boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike the other four Holocaust graphic novels discussed here so far, it is not a true memoir or biography, although it takes the form of a memoir, with Yossel narrating it. But it could have been true; for instance, the date April 29, 1943, is ten days after the uprising of the Jews against the Nazis began. As the cliché goes, there is fiction in all autobiography and autobiography in all fiction. Moreover, as Brad Prager has remarked, this is aC

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form of “allohistory,” or imagined history, in which Joe Kubert, who escaped the camps and therefore escaped an inked, tattooed number on his arm, uses his ink to imagine what it would have been like if he had been caught. But, according to Prager, the ink drawings are not entirely clear,10

because Kubert was not there, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and therefore is imagining the settings and characters. Kubert points out in his introduction to that if his parents had not come toYossel America, he could well have ended up in Yossel’s situation—hunted by the Nazis, living in sewers in the Warsaw Ghetto. Kubert also recalls that his parents always called him Yossel rather than Joe.

Moreover, Kubert, an outstanding comics artist, began working in comics at the age of11

eleven—around the same age as the Yossel in the story. Therefore, he is well suited to create a young character who draws and whose models are those American comics to which his character has access in Poland of the late 1930s, much as Kubert had access to them in America then. It is ironic to think that the American Jews Shuster and Siegel invented Superman in part as an imaginative answer to the rise of Hitler, while here the young artist Yossel can draw Superman-like figures but must make them Nazis, since he is forced to draw flattering portraits for the Nazi secret police.

One aesthetic puzzle for the reader, however, is that Yossel does not emerge alive, and yet he tells his story in the present. This work doesn’t seem to be structured as a diary, and his last moments are recounted as he dies, so in reality he could not have transmitted this memoir and the reader must suspend disbelief to imagine the story. Why Kubert chose not to make it into a memoir that is found after the action, or even a diary that is being written as the events are taking place and is then found later, is not clear. Perhaps this is another autobiographical feature tying Kubert to Yossel—Kubert identifies so fully with Yossel that he felt he was experiencing these events as he drew and narrated them, and he has put the reader directly into Yossel’s mind and thoughts. Also, the advantage of this type of narration is that seeing the story as it happens as if watching a film, allows the drawings and the events narrated to bring the reader into the story with a striking immediacy, and perhaps that is what Kubert had in mind when he did not make it a written memoir or diary.

Yossel’s family is sent from his small village to the Polish capital Warsaw and from there to the camps. He alone is allowed to remain in Warsaw because of his drawings, which the Nazis like. They love to see themselves portrayed as supermen (94), and Yossel draws them as such whenever he goes to the secret police headquarters, just to stay alive. The Nazi soldiers give him bread as well as drawing supplies. But in reality he is part of a resistance group, led by one Mordecai, undoubtedly named for Mordecai Anielewicz, who was in fact the major resistance leader in the ghetto. Yossel and his resistance group listen in shock to Yossel’s former rabbi who has escaped from a death camp and tells the group what goes on there and what awaits anyone from the ghetto who is sent there. The group plans and mounts resistance, although the odds for success are minimal.

Over and above the story of the resistance, both Kubert’s religious statement and his insight into the development of a young artist make this work particularly striking and unusual. The pencil drawings and their placement on the pages are very striking. These drawings, including the drawings of Yossel himself, could have been by Yossel, and here again are signs that Kubert considers himself a potential Yossel whose parents luckily made it to America on their second try. Yossel develops as a boy in a small town. He is lively and mischievous—and gets in trouble for drawing a caricature of his rabbi (11)—the same rabbi who will reappear in the ghetto to tell the horrifying story of the death camps. While impressionistically and vaguely drawn, the drawings are still precise in many ways. They give the reader a sense of a face but also more than that. The reader sees fear, bewilderment, superiority in the faces of the victims and the Nazis, and yet each face, whether of Yossel’s father or mother, or Mordecai, retains its unique characteristics. Most of all, the drawings give an unrelieved sense of the Jews’ pain and difficulty, since they lack color and also seem to have been drawn hastily as if under the pressure that Yossel has to contend with. In the interview on YouTube, Kubert says that the drawings were meant to convey the idea that the artist is seeing the scenes depicted happening in front of him.

The scenes of greatest horror, however, are recounted indirectly. The Auschwitz scenes are reported by Yossel’s former rabbi, who escaped and now relates them to the resistance group in the ghetto (39–73). The crematoria are seen from a distance (61), but on the facing page (62) are the

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saddened faces of the rabbi and other Sonderkommandos, whose job it was to cremate the dead bodies, and their faces are more horrifying than the crematoria themselves. A beating is shown vaguely (43). Kubert, while dealing with horrors, has not exploited them beyond what is necessary for the telling of his story. But everything that transpires is understood all too well, and the vagueness—like Robert Louis Stevenson keeping Mr. Hyde’s face vague in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —may have the effect on the reader of making the horrors all the stronger.

Throughout this work, the difficulties and hardships facing Yossel grow and grow. At first even the Nazis have some appearance of humanity, while treacherously telling the lie that the Jews must relocate for their own good, rather than simply expelling them (14). But the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto—twelve people in a room, people dying in the street, orphans with no one to help them—soon become clear. Before long, Yossel’s family is deported from even the squalid conditions of the ghetto to a camp (the camp is not named, but most Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Treblinka). While he undergoes the pain of separation from his family, he lives with a resistance group but never betrays them.

Then Yossel stumbles upon an old man who he brings back to the group. This turns out to be his rabbi, who as noted earlier, narrates the horrors of the death camp where he had been interned and from which he has escaped. He was determined to survive despite being emotionally shattered; he had been given some of the most odious tasks, such as shepherding people into gas chambers and then disposing of the bodies afterward. Kubert shows his shock and horror when the rabbi witnesses atrocities (59, 62). Then, however, he reveals the rabbi’s determination as he prepares to escape. This, the rabbi manages to do, and he is therefore able to relate the tale to Yossel and the group. But the most telling moment comes when he asks Yossel if he recognizes him and Yossel is amazed that he is the rabbi who he once caricatured. Of course, his beard has been shaved off, but his face is also transformed by suffering. The most pointed moment in this story with regard to religion comes when in response to Yossel’s disbelieving “You? The rebbe?,” the rabbi responds, “Rebbe no more. No more Torah. N-no more teaching. I have seen things . . . d-done things. I have learned there is no God” (72). Earlier, the rabbi had also said, “There was no God” (46). Coming from the mouth of a rabbi, this is a particularly powerful statement, and Kubert does nothing to contradict it in the course of the narrative. No one answers the rabbi, and in the end he is caught and hanged.

Yossel himself goes on to take part in resistance training. When the group knows that the Germans intend to liquidate the ghetto, they begin resistance. Yossel leaves two armed grenades in the Nazi police headquarters and walks out before they explode. But Yossel and his group are finally eliminated by Nazi soldiers with flamethrowers (120). Yossel feels no pain. But at the very end, his last piece of paper is thrown away by a Nazi officer. So nothing comes of Yossel’s drawing talent as he is eliminated like the rest of his family.

In drawing this work, Kubert has used photos as well as his own imagination. He draws a widely published photo of a group of Jews marching out of the ghetto with Nazi soldiers at their sides (90) (

). Mordecai Anielewicz’s last letter is dated April 23, 1943, and the book is entitled fig. 3.5 Yossel , the day the uprising broke out. In Kubert’s work, Mordecai appears religious, alwaysApril 19, 1943

wearing a black, Hasidic-style hat. He is not particularly handsome, but he is always determined (84), and he always seems to have an idea of what to do, even in the worst circumstances. Kubert’s Mordecai is considerably older than Anielewicz was. And Anielewicz was a member of Hashomer Hatzair (the leftist Zionist movement), and therefore he was presumably not a very religious person. So Kubert has transformed Anielewicz into a believer in Judaism. Is Kubert deliberately contrasting the rabbi who denies God with Mordecai, who does not comment on that but seems to remain dressed religiously in order to show that religious ideas can indeed provide strength in adversity and produce leaders? Mordecai dies fighting and at least takes some Nazis with him.

It might be said that Kubert’s real religion is art. That is what sustains Yossel and that is what gives him a special status among both the Jews and the Nazis. Moreover, American superheroes are glorified in the book, and their strength to provide inspiration and sustenance to Yossel is highlighted. As Christopher Knowles and Joseph Linsner would have it in the title of their book, Our

, Kubert has uniquely turned to the American gods to help the Jews of theGods Wear Spandex Warsaw Ghetto through Yossel’s drawings. Kubert has written a superhero story about the resistanceCo

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heroes Yossel and Mordecai much like Yossel’s own drawings showing superheroes who could overcome the Nazi supermen (19), and in Yossel’s and Mordecai’s and the superheroes’ failures to do so lie much of the power of this work. But there is also a historical irony here: according to Arie Kaplan, Shuster and Siegel, who created Superman, based this name on Nietzsche’s ,Ubermensch which was adopted by the Nazis as a model for their own ideology of superiority. So the American12

superheroes who give Yossel special status and inspire him were based on an ideology that also inspired the Nazis. And there is of course even more irony, of which Kubert was undoubtedly aware: in a 1998 Superman comic book by Louise Simonson and John Bogdanove, Superman actually intervenes to save the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. The idea that Shuster and Siegel’s creation, which has much of the Golem in him, as Kaplan and Larry Tye point out, fails in the end to help Yossel makes the story even sadder than it perhaps already is. It should also be noted that Kubert himself, along with Robert Kanigher, wrote many Sgt. Rock stories in which various American heroes battled the Nazis.

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The graphic novels by Lemelman, Katin, Jacobson/Colón, Robbins/ Timmons/Oh, and Kubert are all about past events. Those that I will now discuss, beginning with the work of Pascal Croci, are about bringing the Holocaust into contact with the events of the present. They show the Holocaust’s lessons for the present time. Pascal Croci is a non-Jewish French editorial illustrator, also known for his adaptation of Bram Stoker’s , whose fictional is inspired by the films Dracula Auschwitz

and and is based on interviews with survivors. It took five years to complete.Schindler’s List Shoah But his relationship to the Holocaust is less personal than Kubert’s and he has drawn more of a philosophical and religious lesson from it. His haunting drawings feature “huge, desperate eyes” because they show “Unbearable fear” according to Croci, an interview with whom ends the book. A horrific drawing shows a room full of gassed bodies (44), and such scenes are repeated in more of Croci’s intense, black-and-white drawings (48, 49). But this story of a couple who lost their daughter in Auschwitz and then fall prey, many years later, to the violence in the former Yugoslavia, brings the story of the Holocaust right into the present. The couple does not tell each other their full experiences until a short time before they are caught and executed in the Yugoslavian conflict. The narration begins with discussion between the husband and wife and then moves directly to what happened at Auschwitz to them and to their daughter; the story is a memoir in that it is based on their eyewitness testimony and remembrance of events. So the Yugoslavian civil war and the Holocaust are brought into contact in this work and the lessons seem the same: human groups just do not get along; they hate. So for Croci identity with a group or religion is not good and stands in the way of human relationships.

Croci has declared that for him the gas chambers are the worst of all the atrocities committed by the Nazis, and perhaps the most shocking narrative moment in his book is his description of people dying in the gas chambers and then his illustration of the remaining dead bodies, which look as if they are between dead and living because they have so recently been killed (44) ( ). The storyfig. 3.6 is very shocking as it shows Kazik, the protagonist, working as a Sonderkommando, or a prisoner who puts the bodies into the crematoria, and finding his daughter alive among the gassed bodies but then losing her when the Nazis take her and do not tell him what they will do with her. His wife, Cessia, fills in the mystery of what happened to Ann, their daughter, who it turns out died of typhus just two days before the Russians arrived at the camp.

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It is here, toward the end of the work, that Croci has the characters state the points that he has wanted to make. Ann is standing before the gas chamber destroyed by the Nazis as they flee the Russian advance. She says the prayer for the dead in Hebrew but adds, “This is the place where I died” (60), making it clear that she is praying for herself, and that she can never return fully to the land of the sane and normal because of her experiences. Her mother says that “we shall bear witness” but Ann answers, “But who is going to believe us?” (61). Then she says, “Thank you, God,

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for having made us your chosen people! But please, couldn’t you have chosen someone else?” Her mother angrily comments that “blaspheming won’t help!” Ann asks her mother, “What is it that makes them act this way?,” and her mother answers, “Hatred.” Ann asks, “Couldn’t we just hate each other in peace?” (63). A fellow survivor, Clara, who accompanies them as they walk around the deserted camp, says, “And just use words for weapons. . . . The little one is right.” To which Ann’s mother answers: “That’s the utopian dream of an adolescent who’s run out of arguments. Violence will always reign supreme.” She goes on to say that “love one another” is more of a Christian ideal than a Jewish one (64) but continues, “Who can accept his neighbor wholeheartedly, without difference, without suspicion? We can’t be infallible. And in extreme times like this, problems are always solved in the same way! Through silence or violence.” When asked “but where does this hatred come from?” Cessia answers, “From our frustrations.”

The talk moves to Hitler, and Clara comments that “all human beings started off as children, and no child is born a tyrant . . .” (65). So groups will never stop hating one another and teaching hatred to their children, but idealists hope that people might somehow learn to live together without actually killing one another. In answer to the interviewer’s question about a philosophical message in the appendix to the work, Croci responds that “the persecution of the Jewish people throughout history has led me to think about religion. Christianity teaches people to ‘Love one another.’ In my opinion, this is a delusion! To avoid another Auschwitz, we have to face up to the contradictions at the heart of human nature. It isn’t utopian to think that we can ‘hate each other in peace.’ When I make Ann say this, the words are not hers but mine” (77). However, the end of the story, showing Kazik and Cessia executed in Bosnia in 1993, almost half a century after the Holocaust, demonstrates that despite Croci’s personal hopes the killing never ceases and that groups will not learn to live in peace with one another. And although Cessia believes in God, as her comment about blasphemy to Ann informs the reader, this is a God who seems absent from our affairs. Croci states in his interview that “my story tells of the power religion has to separate people. Members of each side think they own the truth, and they want to convince the other side that they are right—that is what is so dangerous!” (77). And his view of humanity and of God’s failure to help people move away from violent tendencies, therefore seems just as pessimistic as Miriam Katin’s stated views. Clearly, he is at one extreme end of the identity spectrum in thinking that identity, whether religious or ethnic, is not good and that humanity will remain tribal in its hate because of it.

From Spiegelman’s assertion of a supernatural element in Vladek’s survival, to Lemelman’s faith amid doubts to Katin’s doubts, to Anne Frank’s definite faith (at least until she was in Bergen-Belsen), to Robbins’s assertion of belief in oneself and the possibility of survival despite all difficulties, to Kubert’s rabbi’s loss of faith versus the reassertion of faith via Mordecai and to Croci’s hopes for mankind contradicted by mankind’s actions and group hatred, the writers of these Holocaust narratives have attempted to confront the greatest tragedy the Jews have known in recent times and to draw conclusions from it. The full spectrum from faith to atheism and from group identity to denial that group identity is good is on display here, and the power of each of these works convinces the reader, at least while he or she is reading them, of the validity of each author’s point of view.

Beyond these memoirs and fictional memoirs, the Holocaust continues to reverberate in the contemporary world of the graphic novel and to serve as a metaphor for events in the present. Yirmi Pinkus is a member of the Israeli Actus Tragicus comics group. His “Black Milk” in —anCargo innovative joint publication (edited by Tom Dinter and others), which includes Israeli and German graphic artists and shows the German view of contemporary Israel and the Israeli view of contemporary Germany—is a graphic adaptation of an abridgement of Romanian Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s great poem, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), about the death camps (Pinkus uses a translation by John Felstiner). Celan, who later committed suicide, begins his poem:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink

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But instead of a concentration camp, the background in “Black Milk” is a present-day guesthouse in the Black Forest in Germany, and the owner of the guest house takes good care of Pinkus as he has his breakfast, which probably includes milk. The style is casually drawn, cartoony rather than realistic, and not at all horrible or worrisome. The poem (and the graphic adaptation) continues:

we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped

And Pinkus gives a view of the fields and woods from his window, all very simple and peaceful, with a small animal eating. The poem continues:

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland

And Pinkus shows his pleasant guest house and comments that he loves his “Zimmer,” or room, as he shows the shadow of a man in a room, presumably himself, possibly writing. It becomes clear that he is putting together the horrible past of the death camps, memorialized in the poem, with the very positive present, in which he enjoys being in Germany. But he cannot forget the past or get it out of his head, even as he is enjoying himself.

The poem continues “your golden hair Margarete,” and Pinkus’s panel shows a pretty girl with the caption “On the 29th of April, the Bild newspaper published a list of the 50 most beautiful people in Germany. Model Heidi Klum only rated fifth place.” The mundane contemporary world of celebrity and physical beauty here contrasts with Celan’s invocation of the Nazis’ ideologically approved blondness as a contrast with the dark hair of Jewish victimhood, but as always in this story Pinkus does not bring this out in his panel at all. He leaves it to the reader to make the connection. Similarly, the line “your aschenes Haar Shulamith” appears when he mentions his own mother and meets the Israeli and fellow Actus Tragicus group member graphic novelist Rutu Modan—the creator of , which is analyzed in another chapter in this book—somewhere in Germany.Exit Wounds The mixture of English and German makes the translation more authentic sounding. The dark-haired Jewish women are contrasted with the golden-haired present-day German women but not to anyone’s detriment, unless one contrasts the past and the present and understands that Shulamith’s hair in the poem is ashen because she has been gassed and cremated. “Aschenputtel” is the German title of “Cinderella,” and the ashen-haired Shulamith of Celan’s poem is also implicitly contrasted here with the fairy-tale Cinderella, who slept near cinders because of her wicked stepmother but who at the end of the story was happily married to a prince. Unlike Cinderella, there was no happy ending for Celan’s Shulamith, whose hair turned to cinders.

The graphic novel’s short story continues in a sad and yet sweet vein with Pinkus himself in the position of or on the side of the victim but without his being at all victimized. Rather, he is clearly enjoying his stay in Germany. At the end of the story, to the line “your golden hair Margarete,” a little girl comes over to listen to Pinkus play the harmonica as he sits on a bench. Earlier, a line from Celan’s poem, referring to the Nazi overlord, “He shouts play death more sweetly,” appears in a panel; what does not appear in any panel is an earlier line from the poem, “he shouts . . . you others sing up and play / . . . play for the dancing.” Pinkus is not “playing death,” or death-like tunes, but amusing himself, and the little girl likes his music and asks him to play more when he stops. She is being compared to the Nazi asking the Jew to play but obviously everything is completely different and more innocent now. She has no idea of the sordid past, although he does. Also, to the line “he looses his hounds on us,” Pinkus has a panel showing a little pug dog on a leash, probably held by the mother of the little girl. It starts drizzling, and rain closes the story, with the famous statue of a golden deer in the park, the Volkspark Schoeneberg, in the last panel—which may symbolize the older Germany, before the Nazis, or simply nature itself and the way in which the natural worldCo

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prevails in the end. Yet the rain could be black milk, covering the deer, rendered in black-and-white drawing, as the older Germany is in effect covered by the black milk of the Nazis and the present cannot escape the memory of the black milk. Pinkus’s work is a casual-seeming yet poignant testimony to the way in which the Jewish-German past, while passing away, cannot be erased even by pleasant circumstances in the present.

A second story in , by Guy Morad, a member of the Dimona, Israel, comics group, doesCargo not confront the Holocaust directly but references it at important moments in his “Memories,” in which the present is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into juxtaposition with his historical knowledge of the Holocaust, showing how this catastrophic event is ever present in the minds of Jews, even when their thoughts are focused elsewhere.

The story begins with the unnamed Israeli protagonist lamenting his estrangement from his Israeli girlfriend, with whom he planned to go to a concert in Berlin. He boards a plane, commenting that he “can’t believe” that he is going to Berlin without her. In Berlin, he goes to the hotel room that he had reserved for them both and sleeps alone in a double bed. Soon he begins sightseeing, starting with the zoo. But that is no diversion from his feelings of loss because a previously unknown couple asks him to take their picture and he sees them happily together in the camera’s window, which clearly reminds him of a photo of himself and his former girlfriend. This is melancholy, but a more ominous note creeps in when the protagonist sees a stone on the sidewalk that is dedicated to a Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz.

He sets out for the concert on the subway but inadvertently leaves his bag on the train when he gets off at Alexanderplatz, the station near the concert venue. Told he cannot try to reclaim it until tomorrow, he is sitting dejectedly on a fountain bench when a girl asks him for a cigarette. He decides to go with her to a party to which she invites him rather than to attend the concert for which he came to Berlin. It turns out that the girl is Turkish and that she and her parents first came to West Berlin in the 1970s and then moved to East Berlin when her father became a Communist but then were able to move back to the West when the Berlin wall came down. The party, it turns out, is a birthday party for a former boyfriend with whom she had gone out for a few years, just as Itay, the protagonist, had with his former girlfriend. As they leave the party and ride together to a lake on the train, Itay sees factory smokestacks spewing and he grows silent, leading the girl to ask if he is okay. Again the Holocaust overshadows the present, even when he is with this new girl who makes him happy. He does not tell her what is bothering him but to the reader it is clear.

When they arrive at their destination, the girl shows him her name—Sofie—that she carved on a tree there when she was younger. Again the theme of memory is struck. He adds something to the carving. Then they kiss. As they leave hand in hand, he has added his name to Sofie’s so it is clear that they are now a pair. Here Morad shows that good things can come out of a troubled past. Just as Itay and Sofie can be friends and he and she get over their former relationships, so his trip to Germany, which began badly, is ending well. The message seems to be that Jews and Germans—including Muslim Germans—can be friends, and that good things can happen now. Itay remembers the horrible German past but Sofie and her parents, as Turks, had nothing to do with it. As in Pinkus’s piece, the past is not forgotten but it does not keep positive events from blossoming in the present. Morad’s style is very straightforward, with equal-sized rectangular panels almost throughout, and a shadowy drawing style allows detail to show through, including changes in Itay’s face from troubled to peaceful. Belief in a new relationship replaces despair and doubt. This piece ends the collection, which undoubtedly draws its name from the cargo that Jewish-GermanCargo relationships must always carry.

Another adaptation of the Holocaust to present-day concerns, albeit far removed from Germany itself, is on display in the work of Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl, both of whom are pioneers in underground comics of the 1960s and 1970s. They have adapted Hirsch Glik’s (1922–44) “Zog Nit Keyn Mol” (Never say that you have reached the final road), the partisan’s song from the Vilna Ghetto, to the graphic novel format and have applied it to American leftist political demonstrations.

Both Robbins and Rudahl are “Red diaper” types, committed to left-wing causes, and this shows13

up here. In an interview with Rabbi Adam Grossman, Robbins commented that “I will always be culturally Jewish, and I will always be Jewish as long as a son of a bitch wants to stick me in the

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oven.” They follow in the tradition of the Vilna and Warsaw Ghetto partisans, in that those14

partisans were affiliated with a left-wing Jewish Socialist movement, the Bund. In their work, a woman stops by her grandmother’s house to leave her books and looks at a sign for a rally “For Jobs and Freedom” and another sign urging the “US out of Central America” as she goes into the building. As she speaks to her grandmother, family pictures can be seen, including a couple in Palestine (obvious from the camel) and from Europe (obvious from the clothes and building outlines). The grandmother was herself a Holocaust survivor. The protagonist hugs her grandmother when the grandmother cuts her finger, thereby mirroring a line from the partisans’ song: “And wherever falls a droplet of our blood, there our courage and our strength will surely sprout,” which15

is juxtaposed with the panel showing that event. The girl comforts her grandmother and then says that she promised her friends to go to the demonstration. The grandmother waves goodbye from a window as the girl joins her friends, signs in hand, with the line “A people sang this song in burning, war-torn lands, and we will sing it now with weapons in our hands!” appearing below the panel in which this is shown. The implication is that the Jewish partisans’ spirit is alive today among the Jewish-American Left but whether the partisans would have liked this implication is open to question. Whether the mixture of the Holocaust with a contemporary demonstration against America, the country that defeated Nazi Germany and that has given the Jews a freedom that they have rarely possessed in other places, is truly suitable or appropriate must be left to the political convictions of each reader. Also, whether or not the barbarism of the Nazis can be compared to America’s role in fighting the Sandinistas again must be left to the political convictions of the reader. But Robbins and Rudahl’s short feature shows the application of the Holocaust to a contemporary political theme.

The feature is written and inked by Robbins, and penciled by Rudahl. The style that they have chosen is very simple. It is not very precise in its portrayal of faces but one can make out a Jewish store where kosher meat is sold and then a Jewish bookstore where the sign about the demonstration is on the window. The heroine’s grandmother speaks in broken Yiddish-accented English, and pictures of family members in Europe and in Israel are on the table, along with Jewish ritual objects, including a memorial or Yarzheit candle. The closest view is in the next–to-the-last panel, in which one of her friends calls to the heroine, and for the first time they both look very pretty. The grandmother, in waving goodbye to the girl on her way to the demonstration, shows a tattoo on her arm. The panels are for the most part rectangular, but there is one circular one, and one cut at an angle. There are a lot of words in and around all the panels. The piece has an older-style newspaper feel to it, which was probably thought by the artists to represent the grandmother’s world and which is also used to represent the world of the present demonstration, which will be reported in the newspapers. So it has an old-new accent to it.

Robbins and Rudahl’s work, like in which it first appeared, is clearly restrictedWimmen’s Comix to an educated, left-wing audience interested in political demonstrations. A place where the Holocaust and the broader American popular culture come together in a very powerful way is Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s , which attempts to explain theX-Men: Magneto Testament origins of Magneto. Magneto is a major figure in the X-Men series, which was originally conceived of by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, both major comics creators and both Jews. The X-Men are an international group of mutants whose unusual powers sometimes put them at odds with ordinary humans. In fact, one group of disaffected mutants—the result of a special gene caused by the atomic age—wants to destroy the human race, although the others do not; the mutants who wish to destroy are treated as outcasts. (Here as with Superman, one sees the outsider theme strongly referenced by the Jewish creators, with the mutants occupying the position of the Jews.) Cheryl Malcolm carefully traces all the Jewish implications of the mutants, which have been inherent since the beginning of the series. She pays particular attention to Magneto, who was conceived of by Chris Claremont, a16

British-born artist and writer whose mother is Jewish, and who was deeply influenced by his work on a kibbutz at which he saw the film , which moved him deeply. When heJudgment at Nuremberg came back to the United States, he got a job working on and then supervising the production of the X

series of comic books. In April 1977, Claremont produced a backstory about the character-Men

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Magneto, which makes clear that he is not only a Jew but a Holocaust survivor. This backstory17

explains Magneto often being at odds with the human race (as in the 2011 film ),X-Men: First Class because he is committed to save his group—in this case, the mutants—from annihilation and is motivated by the epigram “never again.” And according to Claremont himself, Menachem Begin,18

who began his career as a terrorist against the British occupation of Palestine and ended it with the Nobel Peace Prize because of his peace treaty with Egypt when he was prime minister of Israel, is the model for Magneto’s complex psyche. In one story in the series, Magneto meets fellowX-Men mutant Professor X while working at a hospital in Israel helping Holocaust survivors; and Magneto also serves in another story as a double agent for the CIA and the Mossad. Claremont also introduced the character Kitty Pryde (in 129, 1980), shortened from Prydeman, who is anX-Men American Jew who can walk through walls (and whose name is a possible inspiration for the title of Robert Heinlein’s 1985 sci-fi novel ). Kitty overtly celebratesThe Cat Who Walks through Walls Jewish holidays and reflects on her Jewishness. And as Cheryl Malcolm writes about the X-Men as a whole, “By eluding easy classification, mutants resemble Jews. Looking like anyone else, yet perceived as different, they are similarly misunderstood. They experience only provisional acceptance and a precarious sense of belonging. The language of those who persecute them is similar to Nazi rhetoric against Jews. The link is made throughout the comic books” (136).

While these inferences about the mutants mark their situation as similar to that of the Jews, at least by implication, Magneto, as a Holocaust survivor, makes these inferences very concrete. Pak and Di Giandomenico’s 2009 graphic novel reveals for the first time Magneto’s real name, Max Eisenhardt, family history, and full Holocaust experience. It concentrates solely on Max’s history during the Holocaust, with no mention of his later association with the mutants. Therefore, their rendition can be treated as a standalone work, the powerful story of a boy—albeit one with exceptional intelligence and skill, if not yet an awareness of his supernatural powers—in the Holocaust. But because this is part of the X-Men series that deals with present events, the presence of Magneto throughout reminds the reader of the connection between Magneto’s past and his present.

There is no supernaturalism or superman prowess in Pak and Di Giandomenico’s rendition because Max was not yet aware of his power (he is like a magnet and can bend and attract metal). He is forced to be a Sonderkommando, responsible for burning dead bodies in the crematoria, making him a slave laborer forced to perform the most gruesome and humiliating tasks. Given this lack of supernaturalism, Pak and Di Giandomenico’s work treats both Max and the Holocaust so realistically and at a sufficiently high emotional level that it can be called an historical graphic novel rather than a work of popular culture. It is not profound, but it is moving and intelligently done, and demands thought and the willingness to absorb historical fact on the part of the reader. The audience is also as wide as the audience for the X-Men is.

As Pak explains in his afterword to this work, Magneto’s origins had never before been quite clear, although the idea that he was Jewish was always present. Although neither Pak nor Di Giandomenico appears to be Jewish, they have put together a very powerful and indeed emotionally compelling work that transcends the usual formulaic popular culture fiction. The work could easily be used in the classroom to help document the Holocaust. Not only does the work have footnotes but it also includes a final feature about an artist who worked in the concentration camps, as well as a fine teacher’s guide by Brian Kelley. These features help bring this work into the present. If anything, this volume is concrete proof that the Holocaust has become part of the artistic consciousness and that it has affected not only Jewish artists and readers.

Di Giandomenico’s panels include many facial close-ups, and these have the effect of bringing the reader into the story. It is difficult to ignore a worried face staring at you from the page. And as the story is told of the tightening of the restrictions on Magneto’s—or Max Eisenhardt’s—family, the coloring in the background of the panels seems to grow progressively darker. Indeed, even in the beginning of the tale there are not many bright, cheerful colors. His skill in delineating facial features, clothes, shadows, and backgrounds is usually very clear, but sometimes the darkness overshadows the faces and one cannot distinguish between the characters clearly enough, which causes momentary confusion in following the thread of the story. There are many different visual

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angles (equivalent to camera angles in a movie), so the reader is sometimes positioned above the action or on a level with it or witnessing events from a corner.

The story is tightly written and maintains the reader’s interest, and the dialogue is clipped and short rather than lyrical. Pak, who studied at Yale, Oxford, and the NYU film program, has gone out of his way to ensure the accuracy of the story, including special thanks to Mark Weitzman of the Wiesenthal Center for his help with details. And indeed every chapter is footnoted extensively, and every reference is backed up by fact.

In parts One and Two, the Eisenhardt family is introduced, including Max’s father Jakob, mother Edie, sister Ruthie, and uncle Erich. Max suffers at school despite his excellent grades and the help of a teacher named Kalb, and even when he excels in sports, his award is taken away from him. He is unjustly accused of cheating and expelled from school, since a Jew should not be able to beat Aryans. Soon the other students turn on him, and he gets into many fights. Already Magneto’s exceptional qualities are clear when he can see better than anyone else, think very well, and outperform the other students at the javelin throw. But the noose continues to tighten. His uncle is beaten for consorting with non-Jewish women, and a man whose life his father had saved when they were in the army together is powerless to help him even though he now has a government job, which his father had too before he was kicked out of it by the Nazis. The man’s reaction shows that he is reluctantly going along with the Nazis and has no choice. This is also a major theme of the excellent novel (1947) by Hans Fallada, which shows that not every German was anAlone in Berlin enthusiastic Nazi. However, the happy faces and raised hands at the Nazi rally are all very ominous despite the party-like atmosphere surrounding this event. The bombing of the family’s synagogue and Kristallnacht, the night of the torching of synagogues and breaking of windows in Jewish businesses and houses, prove the final outrages. These panels are very dramatically done, as the reader witnesses the family’s fear and the brutality of the Nazis attacking other families. The one bright spot in this entire picture seems to be Max’s attraction to the Gypsy girl Magda, who reciprocates his interest. The drawing of her face as she witnesses his triumph with the javelin, as well as the headmaster’s angry face caused by that success, are powerfully portrayed. Di Giandomenico especially emphasizes eyes—either the wide-open eyes belonging to the witnesses to the Nazis’ brutality or the eyes full of viciousness in the Nazis’ faces. Max gives her a piece of jewelry he has made, another testament to his superior talent in many areas. The father does not want to leave Germany, but the family nonetheless plans to go to Poland to be with relatives. In all this is a somber chapter, with ugly and worried faces dominating.

In part Three, the Nazis invade Poland, and Max and his family are forced to run for their lives. Making another mistake, the father decides they should go to Warsaw, and there they face the agonies of the Warsaw Ghetto, which Kubert’s work showed, too. Here, however, Di Giandomenico’s color gives a sense of realism to —for example, when MaxMagneto Testament returns a piece of bread to a hungry boy, who wolfs it down. Max’s family is betrayed by a woman who promises to help them escape the ghetto. She betrays them because the Nazis were holding her mother. Max’s father jumps in front of Max, saving him from a firing squad of Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi executioners, at the expense of his own life. But Max is found hiding in a village and put on a train for a concentration camp. A farmer witnessing the train going by draws a finger across his own throat, showing that he knows the train is a death train.

On part Four’s opening page, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over Auschwitz is shown, along with many shaven-headed prisoners, including Max, who is looking out in agony. This is a flash-forward, since the chapter begins with everyone forced out of the train in which Max was riding. His good teacher, Fritz Kalb, now also a prisoner, sees him and tries to help him. Even though Max is sixteen, Kalb tells him to say he is eighteen and ready to work, in order to save him from the selection. The tattooing and genuine shower they are given are pretty grim, but the barracks in which they end up in prisoners’ clothing is not yet the worst. A sixteen-year-old boy who admits his age is taken out and shot instead of being brought to school as the guard says he will be. Kalb tells Max that “God himself turns his face from us” and that “there’s no place for heroes here, Max.” (And in Uncanny

, 150, 2001, Magneto himself comments that after Auschwitz, he “turned [his] back on GodX-Men forever.” ) Kalb cannot get Max into a relatively clean position working with him, and Max instead19C

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ends up having to watch people get gassed and to cremate them for two years. One of the most striking two-page panels in the whole work shows all of the victims’ eyeglasses piled up, and the reader sees this just as Max does, from his point of view. On the previous page, Max stares with very wide-open eyes, but only after turning the page does the reader see the eyeglasses, which in effect stare back at Max and the reader. Max later sees Kalb’s body among those to be cremated and realizes that there is indeed no help for his situation. Ironically, a cross appears on the back of each Sonderkommando as a designation, and this symbolism seems to indicate that they are somehow priests or holy men. The only help for him in this situation seems to be when he notices Magda, still clutching his gift of jewelry. But the guard soon warns him away.

The last, fifth, part begins with a more mature Max looking like he’s seen far too much; a number of wires in red are reminders of his imprisonment in the camp and its bloodiness. His eyes too are red, as if reflecting all of the bloodletting. Camp inmates see American airplanes overhead and think that they will bomb the camp, but Max points out that if they do bomb it, the bombs will kill him and his companions. Again, the bright spot is Magda, imprisoned in the Gypsy camp, whom he tries to help by bribing the guard, among other things. He hears that they will “empty” the Gypsy camp at the end of July, and the revolt that he is involved in planning will take place on August 15. So he must try to save Magda before that. The Nazis continue executing Jews, this time from Hungary, and the bombers keep passing overhead without doing anything. The prisoners say, “Bomb us already,” but Max says, “Oh, God,” when he sees prisoners wheeling baby carriages, and another prisoner says, “God’s not up there, Max. Just the Americans. And they don’t give a damn.” Max manages to save Magda, who is hiding in the corpse pile and to defend her against the other men in the revolt who are afraid that her presence will cause the Germans to kill them. The revolt begins, and Max manages to escape to the woods with Magda. Although he and Magda escape, the work concludes with a corpse and captions detailing grisly numbers, including the seven thousand survivors out of the one million Jews, Gypsies, and others killed at Auschwitz. And the fact that the Allies never bombed the camp. In an epilogue that takes place in 1948, four years later, Max returns to the camp and digs up a letter that he had buried telling whoever finds it that he is dead and to tell everyone “Please. Don’t let this ever happen again.” He is dressed in civilian clothing, and the background is a sickly greenish color. There is truly no sunshine in this work, and the reader wonders how Max can face life in the future, which he seems to be doing. This work may not have the depth of Anne Frank’s diary, but largely because of its adept writing and artwork, it does successfully capture the feeling of a true story. Max is lucky to be alive and is much luckier than Yossel, the hero of Kubert’s work. And it is a combination of skill and luck that has kept him from dying; he is not larger than life but much like a normal human being. Now, however, he will be different after these experiences.

What, according to this work, are the lessons that should be drawn from all of these events? One very important theme emerges when Max’s father tells him, “Sometimes in this life . . . you get a moment. A time when anything is possible. When suddenly . . . you can make things happen. God help us if we take that moment. And God forgive us if we don’t.” This idea helps Max when he saves Magda in the concentration camp and when he takes part in the revolt. As the prisoners say, they are on their own, without help from God—the same theme as in Miriam Katin’s memoir. But she and her mother survived. And when Max finds the letter he buried in which he stated that when someone found it he would be dead, he understands that he has triumphed. Because of his perseverance in the face of horror and his desire to live for something beyond himself—Magda—he has come through it all alive. Finally, there are his words: “Please. Don’t let this ever happen again,” and that is the final message of the book. The message is that humanity should try to work against such events, instead of being indifferent, like the onlookers in the Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” who turn their back away from the boy Icarus, Daedalus’s son, who has fallen from the sky in the painting by Breughel, leaving him to his fate. Pascal Croci shows in that such things Auschwitz

happen again, as in the Bosnian war and Rwanda’s genocide. Iran’s former ruler Ahmadinejaddo threatened Israel with nuclear annihilation should Iran ever get the bomb.

As if to solidify its feeling of reality, concludes with the true story of anMagneto Testament artist, Dina Gottliebová, who had been forced to draw the Nazis in Auschwitz. This is part of aCo

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campaign by artists against the present-day Auschwitz museum that refused to return the drawings to her. In excellently detailed drawings, Neal Adams shows Dina’s arrival in Auschwitz in 1942 from her native Czechoslovakia, her drawing of Snow White cartoon scenes on the wall of a children’s barrack there, Dr. Mengele’s demand that she draw Gypsies for him because his photographs could not adequately capture their skin tones and he wanted that to support his racial theories, her threat to commit suicide unless her mother were also spared from death, and her portraits of her Gypsy subjects with whom she shared the food she was given and whom she deliberately took a long time to paint in order to keep them alive. After the war she married Art Babbitt, the lead animator of the Walt Disney Snow White cartoon, who was working in Prague. (This is an amazing coincidence, since Snow White is a character that Dina drew in Auschwitz.) They moved to Hollywood, and Dina became an animator for several studios. When her Auschwitz paintings were discovered, she tried to get them back, but the Auschwitz museum, which had bought them from local people, refused to give them up. And no amount of cajoling by other artists—including the famous Jewish comics artist Stan Lee, who wrote an afterword to her story in —or the U.S. State Department,Magneto Testament convinced them to do so. Dina died at the age of eighty-nine with her portraits still not returned to her, but the reader is not told this. It is a somber story but shows the solidarity of artists, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the face of what they perceive is an injustice.

Then follow excellent footnotes to the volume, which include explanations of Max’s actions. For instance, in the next-to-the-last footnote (for page 17, although the pages are unnumbered), Pak writes: “In our story’s climax, we wanted our hero to take action. But we felt it was important not to depict him as the actual leader of the Sonderkommando revolt. Real human beings led this revolt—we didn’t want to detract from their almost unthinkable heroism by suggesting that the revolt was only possible because a super hero took charge.” This note again reveals the scrupulous attention to fact and the integrity of Pak and Di Giandomenico’s work on this story.

The volume ends with a teacher’s guide by Brian Kelley. This, too, is highly sensitive and scrupulous. Not only are there apt historical activities, including a discussion of the way in which the book portrays the Nazis’ use of lies to ensnare the Jews (such as telling the people below eighteen that they would be put in school rather than killed), but also very insightful literary and artistic activities (such as a discussion of the evolution of Max’s character and the analysis of powerful images and the ways in which the words and images interact). And among the writing activities, there is a persuasive letter to be written to a hypothetical school board that wishes to ban Magneto

from the classroom because of the “violent” images shown in the book. Among the mostTestament impressive activities suggested is the introduction of Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and suggested discussions of different aspects of the poem. Kelley even suggests following up the study of the book with student investigation of survivors’ lives and other serious social issues, including the violence then taking place in the Sudan. A bibliography of websites and readings accompanies the guide. All in all, the guide is a very fitting accompaniment to an exceptional graphic novel which, despite its origin in the popular comics, has (perhaps like Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight” series about the Batman character) risen to the level of nonformulaic creation, and takes its place among other admirable artistic reactions to the Holocaust. Kelley’s work also brings the Holocaust into the present because it can be used in school discussions today.

In Pak and Di Giandomenico’s work, the reader sees the broad impact of the Holocaust on the wider, non-Jewish as well as Jewish society. Indeed, the Holocaust and the atom bomb have been said to be the main influences on science fiction written since World War II, and that is difficult to dispute. The enormous destructive potential of the atom bomb is clear, and the Holocaust represents the first time that people were killed using a technological, factory method. The literary influence of the Holocaust has been enormous, even on writers who are not Jewish and do not usually work with Jewish themes. The graphic novel is no exception. Another work by non-Jews, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s , like one of the most important graphic novels ever written, makesWatchmen Maus constant use of the Holocaust as a major theme. As the protagonist Rorschach contemplates the child killer who has been set on fire, his diary states that he “looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.”20

2 01 4. U ni

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in New York, the band Krystalnacht is playing with the band Pale Horse, and the date is November 2. As I have noted earlier, Kristallnacht was the night that the Nazis destroyed Jewish houses of worship and businesses, and the date was November 9, 1938. “Pale Horse” reminds one of the four horses of the apocalypse in the Christian Bible’s book of Revelation. Moore uses the Holocaust to describe a catastrophic event in New York, and his references to smoke filled with human fat show that he has clearly not been able to free himself from the images of people dying in ovens in the original event, and Rorschach comes to the conclusion, like Miriam Katin, that people are alone, with no God to help. The character Jon, on the other hand, becomes a god, and actually walks on water at the end of the book; moreover, he will leave earth possibly to found a new race somewhere else in the universe (chapter 12, p. 27), having given up on ours.

The graphic novels by Jews show that the Holocaust is now an inescapable part of Jewish identity and a challenge to Jewish belief in God. But the graphic novels by non-Jews show that the subject is also deeply affecting for those who are not Jewish and a challenge to their belief in God as well. Clearly artists, including graphic novelists, of the world, Jewish and non-Jewish, will continue to reflect on the Holocaust because they cannot help doing so. Whatever lessons they draw from it, their images will continue to haunt and hopefully inspire their readers to avoid such evil in our own times.

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