News
Holocaust Comics. A Story in Drawings
The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is joining a pilot program connected with the comic book The Search, which is intended to familiarize young people with the story of the Holocaust. The comic book is published by the Ann Frank Foundation in Amsterdam.
The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is joining a pilot program connected with the comic book The Search, which is intended to familiarize young people with the story of the Holocaust. The comic book is published by the Ann Frank Foundation in Amsterdam.
Erik Heuvel drew the comics using photographs from the Third Reich period as his model. The European experts who had input into the contents and illustrations include Dr. Piotr Trojański and Mirosław Obstarczyk of the Museum.
“Over the next few months, about a thousand pupils from all over Poland will work with the comic book, and they and their teachers will send us their comments,” said Piotr Trojański. The teachers attending the postgraduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust at the ICEAH have already seen the comic book, and some of them, from different parts of Poland, are using it in the classroom. “Our next presentation of the comic book for teachers will take place in Oświęcim on April 19, during a seminar marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. If the pilot project yields positive results, we will consider whether or not to introduce this material in schools next year,” said Trojański.
Similar trials are underway in Hungary and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The Search is already being used in schools in the Netherlands.
“The comic book brings children closer to a difficult subject. Nazism and the Holocaust stop being abstract history. People begin to take these matters very seriously, as something real, which actually occurred, and not so long ago,” said Julia Franz of the Ann Frank Foundation.
The pilot program is one of the many ICEAH offerings for teachers. Not long ago, the Museum published a wide-ranging set of teaching material titled How to Teach about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
The Search
The comic book tells the story of a fictitious Jewish family. The narration begins in 2007, when Ester Hecht, on a visit to the place where she hid during the war, begins telling her grandchildren about what happened 70 years earlier. Along the way, the reader learns the most important historical facts: about the NSDAP’s rise to power, Adolf Hitler’s launching of the terror mechanism, the forced emigration of families (like the Hechts, from Germany to the Netherlands), the outbreak of the Second World War, and the Holocaust.
Esther also tells the story of her parents, who were shipped in a cattle car to the Auschwitz death camp. Esther managed to go into hiding because she was in school when her parents were arrested. She survived by hiding with a family in a Dutch village. Only after the war did she learn about what happened to her parents from a friend, Bob, who also ended up in Auschwitz. The whole story prompts Esther’s grandson to go looking for Bob. Many years later, Bob and Esther are reunited. War period, along with historical and photographic documentation.
