The theme of this latest entry into the growing and increasingly respected field of graphic novels about the Holocaust is amply expressed by the pair of nouns in the book’s title: color and memory. Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory was released in time for Yom HaShoah last month.
It was published in London with the support of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Color.
Barbara Yelin, the German artist who has used her writing and illustration talents in earlier works that deal with the Holocaust, effectively employs color to reflect the varying moods that convey the events and feelings that fill the pages about one survivor’s life arc.
The darker periods are, just that, dark, morose shades of black and gray, enveloped in shadow.
A full palette accompanies more-optimistic memories.
Memory.
Arbel, a native of Holland who has lived in Israel since 1949 and reluctantly agreed to let Yelin literally illustrate her life, frequently states that she can’t — or won’t — remember details about her often-tortured experiences.
Those words are a constant refrain in the book — Arbel tells Yelin that she has come to the end of her road of memories . . . then she keeps talking. Only the skill and persistence of Yelin, who interviewed Arbel “close to a hundred” times over nearly four years in Germany and Israel and the Netherlands “and countless times via Zoom and phone and WhatsApp,” make the telling of one woman’s story possible. And gripping.
The two terms reflect the subjective, polychromatic nature of survivor’s memories. Memories that many survivors suppressed for many years after their liberation from death camps and hiding places, memories that many took with them to their graves.
While Arbel’s recollections are, of course, unique to her, they are also representative of what happened to countless survivors (and victims) of Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews of Europe.
Her words, artfully gathered and edited by Yelin can serve as remedial and introductory education. They are especially useful today, with both the survivors and knowledge of the Holocaust fading away, for a young generation largely unfamiliar with the details and aftermath of the tragedy that took place in 1933-1945.
This graphic novel is an expansion of Yelin’s 2022 visual essay, “But, I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust.” It, like the many WW II-based graphic novels that have preceded it in recent decades, offers a medium that both personalizes the horrors of the Final Solution, and makes it universal — more than a traditional biography from the period of inhumanity, can.
Yelin follows in the literary/narrative footsteps of Art Spiegelman. His 1991 Maus (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Literature) about his Polish-born father’s life during the Holocaust and afterwards in the US, popularized the genre of Holocaust graphic novels, giving them a legitimacy beyond the status of comics.
While Spiegelman depicted Jews and Nazis and other people in his father’s story as various animals, Yelin, like most graphic novelists who document aspects of the Holocaust, draws people as themselves. Including herself.
The Colour of Memory shows Yelin’s successful attempts to convince reluctant Arbel to openly speak about herself.
“Emmie said little, I often said a lot, but her sentences were as if etched into concrete,” Yelin says about the path of scattered recorded words into a full graphic novel.
“They were there before she said them, and then there they were, engraved in this story.”
As presented by Yelin, Arbel, who grew up in a Jewish family in Holland that was deported by the Nazis, is a complicated, not-always-entirely-sympathetic subject, a blunt, stubborn, opiniated, chain-smoking woman who lived through internments in Ravensbrück and Bergen- Belsen, became orphaned at seven, was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a post-war foster parent, and spent time in Israel on kibbutz but never fit in.
The honesty about Arbel’s foibles make her story especially credible.
“Like many genocide survivors,” the book’s translators write, “Emmie Arbel found it impossible to put into words the horrors she had endured . . . as a child survivor, she feared that her memories would not be believed.” So she did not speak about them for many decades, until she finally decided to serve as a witness. “Building on a trust-based relationship, Barbara Yelin worked closely with Emmie Arbel to draw pictures of her memories for the graphic novel.”
Arbel, who lives near Haifa, frequently travels to Germany to speak with schoolchildren about her memories.
The book proceeds in a non-linear fashion, depending on nuance rather than hyperbole to tell its message.
Some dialogue appears, in addition to the English translated from the book’s original 2023 German edition, in German, Dutch and Hebrew.
While Yelin has used her artistic talent to illustrate a wide range of contemporary and historical subjects, she has devoted much of her time to combatting the threat of racism, particularly anti-Semitism.
“Sadly,” Yelin says, “the topic doesn’t get old. In fact, it’s becoming more and more relevant.”