Publication Announcement – ‘Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses’ (The Secrets of the Jewish Hospital) – Sept 24, 2026
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives is pleased to announce the publication of Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses. Nach den Erinnerungen von Klaus Zwilsky (The Secrets of the Jewish Hospital: After the Memories of Klaus Zwilsky), released in German by C.H. Beck on September 24, 2026. The book was translated from English by Rita Seuß. The graphic novel is drawn by Israeli graphic novelist Gilad Seliktar, a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design whose Arad 95 won the 2024 Navon Prize for Best Israeli Graphic Novel and whose contribution to SCVN’s previously released graphic novel But I Live was nominated for an Eisner Award.
The book follows the story of a young boy named Klaus Werner Max Zwilsky who was born in Berlin on August 16, 1932. In 1943 his family was ordered to the Jewish Hospital Berlin, where his father, Erich, served as the institution’s last remaining pharmacist and his mother, Ruth, repaired military uniforms before joining him in the dispensary. What followed was a story of survival in plain sight: the hospital was the only Jewish institution in Nazi Germany to remain operational throughout the war, and roughly 800 Jews were still living there when Soviet troops liberated it on April 24, 1945. Klaus returned to school that July and became the first Bar Mitzvah in postwar Berlin.
Cover of Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses (The Secrets of the Jewish Hospital) co-created by Gilad Seliktar & Klaus Zwilsky (2026).
The book was built through direct collaboration between Zwilsky and Seliktar, in keeping with the project’s central commitment: that the gathering and understanding survivors’ experiences should place their well-being, agency, and cooperation at its centre.
The two met through Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin, who put them in touch in the autumn of 2022. In May 2023, Seliktar travelled to Zwilsky’s home in Palm Springs, California, to record his account; and that July he went to Berlin to see the archive and the hospital for himself.
The book Seliktar drew from those visits tells two stories side by side, allowing the reader to engage with two timeframes at once: Zwilsky’s wartime memories, and the encounter between an artist and a survivor eighty years later. The deliberate representation of these overlapping timeframes calls direct attention to the collaborative mediation process involved in the creation of this graphic novel.
A still of Seliktar painting Zwilsky’s portrait in the documentary short ‘The Apothecarian’s Boy’ (2025).
Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses leaves a genuine historical question open. Why the Nazi authorities never closed the hospital or deported the people sheltering inside it has never been satisfactorily explained, and the book is accompanied by an essay setting out what the documentary record can and cannot establish. Zwilsky has spent much of the past two decades on that record himself, organizing his parents’ wartime papers and donating them to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where they form the Zwilsky Collection.
SCVN recently held a webinar entitled Personal Histories in the Public Archive: Archiving the Klaus Zwilsky Story (January 2026) in which Zwilsky joined Aubrey Pomerance, and SCVN Project Lead Dr. Charlotte Schallié to discuss the Zwilsky Collection. Their conversation asks what it takes for a public archive to hold a family’s personal history responsibly, with the survivor himself shaping how his records are described and made accessible. The webinar recording can be accessed here once it has been made available for the public.
Left to right: Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin; Zwilsky family notebook;
Aubrey in the archives of the Jewish Museum Belin and Holocaust Survivor, Klaus Zwilsky.
Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses was edited by Charlotte Schallié, with Aubrey Pomerance, and developed within the project’s Holocaust Research Cluster.
The French version of the book Nous ont-ils oubliés ? translated by Hélène Duhamel is set to be released in October 2026 by çà et là.
Many thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for supporting our project, and to the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Jewish Hospital Berlin for their participation.