'We Survived the Holocaust' by Frank W. Baker
The timing couldn’t be better. The “graphic novel” biography We Survived the Holocaust arrives just after the debut of Ken Burns’ “Holocaust”—and at a time when rap and sport celebrities murmur about Jewish conspiracies and social media spreads the toxin of anti-Semitism. Art Spiegelman’s Maus opened the door in the ‘80s but his was truly a graphic novel, “inspired by a true story” as Hollywood puts it. We Survived the Holocaust is an account of real people in graphic novel form.
Writer Frank W. Baker knew the Holocaust survivors whose story he tells. Felix and Bluma Goldberg were Polish Jews whose position had always been precarious because of the commonplace anti-Semitism of their neighbors. But the Nazis took ethnic hatred to another level and began to implement their plan to eradicate the Jews after occupying Poland at the start of World War II. They were at Auschwitz and met the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The war ended in Nazi Germany’s defeat before they were killed. Their stories are harrowing.
An editor at the book’s publisher, New York-based Imagine & Wonder, brought illustrator Tim E. Ogline into the project. The editor, writer and illustrator “met weekly to discuss progress,” Ogline recalls. “I had initially mapped out the sequence of events based on the original script to scope out how much space in terms of pages that were needed for various scenes … As more of the pages were completed, I’d get more granular and move sequences around to their appropriate page place.” The team had regular meetings with the Goldberg family.
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Image: wesurvivedtheholocaust.com
'We Survived the Holocaust'
'We Survived the Holocaust'
The subject matter influenced the style of Ogline’s drawing. For inspiration, he circled back to Spiegelman’s Maus. “I wanted to have the art style rendered in black-and-white with a gritty feel,” Ogline says. “This is not a project you take on lightly—it’s a grave responsibility to the millions of people who were killed and the millions more whose lives and families that were destroyed by the madness of hatred and anti-Semitism. So, the most important thing at the top if my mind was just trying to get it right.
“We have to keep telling this story for the next generation and those that follow,” he continues. “It’s a warning. We comfort ourselves that what happened was the result of a perfect storm and a sequence of unrepeatable events that could never happen again. But that’s wrong. It could happen again—our society is so tribalized and fractured that we see ourselves as separate groups rather than as a whole. And separate groups become ‘the other’ and that's incredibly dangerous.”
