Publication Announcement – ‘Gib nicht auf!’ (Don’t Give Up!) – September 17, 2026

Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives is pleased to announce the publication of Gib nicht auf! Wie eine junge Ezidin den Völkermord überlebt (Don’t Give Up! How a young Yezidi woman survived the genocide), released in German on September 17 by avant-verlag. The graphic novel is co-created by Jilan (pseudonym), a Yezidi survivor of the genocide in Sinjar, and German graphic artist Birgit Weyhe, whose earlier Madgermanes was awarded the Berthold Leibinger Foundation’s Comic Book Prize in 2015 and the Max and Moritz Prize for Best German-Language Comic in 2016.

Cover of Gib nicht auf! Wie eine junge Ezidin den Völkermord überlebt (Don’t Give Up! How a young Yezidi woman survived the genocide) co-created by Jilian and Birgit Weyhe (2026).

In summer 2014, the Islamic State attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. Jilan, then a young girl, was captured and held as a slave. The book follows her account of that captivity including the fear of death, her eventual escape, her work of coming to terms with trauma, and her first steps toward a new and self-determined life in Germany. It is the first time Jilan has told this story publicly.

The book was built through sustained collaboration between Jilan and Weyhe, in keeping with the project’s central commitment: that the gathering and commemoration of survivors’ experiences should place their well-being, agency, and cooperation at its centre. Jilan’s testimony shapes not only the content of the book but the terms on which it is told and drawn. Weyhe has confronted the question of how to centre survivor narratives before: her Rude Girl (2024) takes as its subject the ethics of drawing another person’s life.

The publication arrives while the conditions it documents remain unresolved. Because northern Iraq continues to be contested by shifting parties, the Yezidis are still not safe in their homeland—a fact that gives Jilan’s account, and the wider work of Yezidi documentation and advocacy, a continuing urgency.

Gib nicht auf! was edited by Kjell Anderson, Leyla Ferman, and Charlotte Schallié, and developed within the project’s Iraq/Syria Research Cluster. Further information on the collaboration is available on the project page and on the Iraq/Syria Research Cluster page.

Many thanks to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for our project funding, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law for supporting additional pages for our graphic narrative.

Gib nicht auf! is now available for purchase from avant-verlag.