Old age is gradually silencing the voices of Holocaust survivors. One survivor, a child in Paris during World War II, accepted the task of speaking to French school groups about her experiences when she was in her 90s. Ginette Kolinka tells her story through the medium of words and pictures, a graphic memoir, Adieu Birkenau.
As Kolinka admits, she had a child’s inability to grasp the bigger picture of the mandated wearing of yellow stars and the restrictions that followed. With the help of Roman Catholic friends, her parents obtained false identities for the family and fled to Vichy, only to find that “Unoccupied France” was soon occupied by the Nazis. They went from one detention center to another on their way to Birkenau, a slave labor as well as a death camp. The appendixes to Adieu Birkenau are as interesting as the main memoir, giving background information, press clippings and drawings of the camps by survivors and witnesses.
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