A Novel Approach To Holocaust Education

Can a comic book teach preteens the lessons, and horrors, of the Shoah?

“The Search” manages to explain the horror of the time in easy-to-understand language and casual dialogue matched with Tintin-style pictures using soft colors.

by Caroline Lagnado
Special To The Jewish Week

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently announced that he wanted every fifth grader in the country to learn about a French child killed by the Nazis, his proposal created a firestorm of controversy, and it put the issue of Holocaust education front and center.

As Holocaust survivors die off, making it less and less possible for students to hear first-person accounts of the horrors of the Shoah, educators are straining to find new ways of teaching the Holocaust. The more traditional history books and films may lack the pizzazz needed to attract a generation of visually oriented preteens.

Enter “The Search,” a new graphic novel produced by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. And with it comes an obvious question: Can

a comic book teach kids about the Holocaust?

At a time when shoppers in Ukraine will, frighteningly, soon be able to purchase Hitler dolls complete with a choice of outfits and accessories, the idea of conveying the message of the Holocaust in comic strip form may seem especially flip or insubstantial.

“The Search” relates the main facts of the Holocaust as seen through a fictional family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. With pictures drawn from historical photographs, and a storyline based on factual events, it has been vetted by institutions across Europe, including Holland’s Resistance Museum and its Auschwitz Committee, the Shoah Memorial in France and the Imperial War Museum in England.

Eric Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol and Lies Schippers, the team behind “The Search,” worked closely with historians, teachers and students while developing the 61-page book. Heuvel, a non-Jewish comic artist, had previously created “A Family Secret,” a Holocaust-based graphic novel seen through the eyes of Helena, a Dutch schoolgirl. It was distributed to every seventh grader in Holland through a grant from that country’s Department of Education.

“The Search” covers similar ground, though it is the story of Esther Hecht, Helena’s Jewish neighbor who moves with her family to Amsterdam in attempt to escape the Nazis in Germany. Her parents and Jewish neighbors are eventually deported to Auschwitz. Published last year, it is now being used in classrooms all over Holland, and is making its way across Europe. It’s now being tested in Germany and Poland and has been translated into English, German, Polish and Hungarian, from the original Dutch. While the Anne Frank Center USA sells both titles in English, the rights to the books have just been purchased by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, which will re-release them next year.

Both “A Family Secret” and “The Search” are told in the voices of the now-elderly women, explaining to their grandsons their experiences during and after the war.

“The Search” manages to explain the horror of the time in easy-to-understand language and casual dialogue matched with Tintin-style pictures using soft colors, and clear line drawings. The book shows that besides the atrocities faced by the Jews, ordinary Europeans had their own struggles at the time, such as food rations and economic depression. And it relates that while there were Nazi collaborators there were also people taking part in the Resistance.

Annette Insdorf, author of “Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust,” told The Jewish Week that her “gut feeling [about ‘The Search’] was positive. “As evidenced by Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ even a medium like the comic strip can introduce readers — especially younger ones — to aspects of the Holocaust, which they might ignore or resist in more traditional formats,” said Insdorf, director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University.

“The Search” presents students with difficult situations that can be teach by inspiring deep self-inquiry. Esther, for instance, is given the choice of following her parents to Auschwitz or hiding with a family friend. And while one of Helena’s brothers buys into the Nazi movement and enlists in the army, her other brother joins the Resistance, leaving Helena to choose which wartime path to follow. Students can take the opportunity to place themselves in her position, as well as Esther’s, and think about how they might have reacted. By telling the story through the lives of young girls, the authors make them more easily accessible to today’s students.

Maureen McNeil, director of education at the Anne Frank Center USA has noticed that “The Search” is particularly popular, as are all graphic novels, with teachers who are interested in teaching to a span of educational levels. The books are also popular with students who speak English as a second language, those with learning disabilities and students who have not yet learned to enjoy reading, says McNeil.

The Center runs a weekly session at The Bell Academy in Queens about Anne Frank, the Holocaust and World War II. The session’s culminating project will be two-page personal graphic narratives that McNeil will present at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem this summer.
“The Anne Frank House decided to use the medium of the graphic novel in order to reach young people more effectively,” said Maatje Mostart of Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House. “Many young people are attracted to graphic novels because of their interplay of text and drawings and their narrative energy.

“The Anne Frank House wants to use the power of the graphic novel to encourage young people to think about the Holocaust, and stimulate their further interest in the subject.”
And what about the reaction of an actual Holocaust survivor to a graphic novel that carries the weight of the Shoah story?

Rosa Sternlicht’s own story is quite similar to that of the fictional Esther. Sternlicht, who is 84 and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, was, like Esther, born in Germany, and raised in Holland before being sent to Westerbork and then to Bergen-Belsen. She then returned to Holland before participating in an illegal aliyah to Israel before coming to New York.
“I heard it was a comic book and I thought, ‘What does a comic have to do with the Holocaust?’” she said.

Yet after having read “The Search,” Sternlicht found it to be “very, very well written. It tells the story exactly like it was.”

Sternlicht finds the book to be an appropriate method of teaching the Holocaust. “Instead of reading a heavy book of all that was going on,” she said “[students] can get a good impression” of what went on during a dark time.

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