Publication announcement: ‘Nous ont-ils oubliés ?’ (‘Did They Forget About Us?’) – Oct 16, 2026
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) is pleased to announce the French-language release of Nous ont-ils oubliés ? (Did They Forget About Us?) by publisher Éditions çà et là on October 16, 2026. The graphic novel is co-created by graphic novelist Gilad Seliktar and Holocaust survivor Klaus Zwilsky. The book was translated from English by Hélène Duhamel.
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.
The two met through Dr. Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin, who put them in touch in the autumn of 2022. In May 2023, Gilad travelled to Klaus’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 Gilad drew from those visits tells two stories side by side, allowing the reader to engage with two timeframes at once: Klaus’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.
Nous ont-ils oubliés ? 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. Klaus 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.
Pages 19-24 from ‘Nous ont-ils oubliés ?’ Read more: https://www.caetla.fr/IMG/pdf/extrait_nous_ont-ils_oublies.pdf
In Jnauary 2026, SCVN hosted the webinar Personal Histories in the Public Archive: Archiving the Klaus Zwilsky Story, in which Klaus joined friend and colleague Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin, and SCVN Project Director 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 will be available to view here.
Merci! A heartfelt thank you to Klaus Zwilsky, Gilad Seliktar, editor Dr. Charlotte Schallié, Dr. Aubrey Pomerance, translator Hélène Duhamel, Éditions çà et là editor Serge Ewenczyk, and everyone who helped bring the French edition of Klaus’s story to French-language readers.
Learn more about Klaus and Gilad’s collaboration here. Learn more about SCVN’s Holocaust Research Cluster here.
This graphic novel was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.