Category: exhibits

Map of Romania and territories under Romanian administration between 1941-1944. Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons, 2025.

This digital exhibit, informed by my experience of archiving the project files for A Kind of Resistance, showcases the progression of a single page of the graphic novella, from initial sketch to final draft. Although some pages followed a slightly different trajectory, the development of page 24 is typical of the majority, and thus exemplifies how the chapter as a whole came together. My intent is to provide a glimpse into something the book on its own does not show. The creative process is obscured when only looking at the final page, but by looking into the archive we can see how this single page, and, by extension, the entire book, was constructed. Page 24 comes about two-thirds of the way through the story, and combines several key elements of David and his family’s fight for survival while hiding in the forests of Transnistria. It showcases the hunger that is a central theme of the story, not only in terms of needing to find food, but of the hunger to survive, both coming in the face of forces bent on their destruction. All these factors made this incident worthy of a full-page spread, as a small but crucial piece of David’s story of survival.

It is important to note that this reconstruction of Miriam’s creative process is a limited one, based on my observations as I moved through the archives and on how I personally pieced together the construction of this particular page of the story. Although I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Miriam about her work on this project in November 2025, I imagine her own perspective of how the chapter came together would greatly differ from the one I will showcase here. 

Final draft for page 24 for A Kind of Resistance (2022). Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

The earliest iteration of page 24 that I encountered in the project archives was in a page from Miriam’s notebook, which included a sketch of a sugar beet; presumably drawn during one of her conversations with David. The page includes a number of other illustrations: significant plants from the region, for example, and objects such as the bag David carried or the rags he wrapped around his feet after outgrowing his shoes, details that all come to play a significant role in the final story, albeit not on the same page as the sugar beet illustration. This initial sugar beet sketch served as the key detail around which the entire page was eventually built. However, the true significance of this sketch would not be revealed to me until I encountered the transcripts of Miriam and David’s conversations at the very end of the archiving process. 

The first sketches of the sugar beet, Miriam Libicki’s notebook (2020).

The next iteration of the page that I came across appeared in the form of a pencil sketched storyboard page, consisting of four panels, which show the sugar beets falling out of an overloaded cart with a nearby David waiting to collect them as they fall, David’s father being beaten by a Romanian soldier, and a cross-section diagram of a sugar beet. This early storyboard, though obviously a rough draft, is characteristic of most of the pages in the book, which typically remain consistent in content even as they undergo further refinement. It is worth noting that not every page in the story received an early pencil storyboard. As I discovered in my conversation with Miriam, some pages had their origins not as pencil sketches, but in digital form instead. This page is among the pages which did originate with a sketched pencil storyboard, but she explained to me that this is not necessarily the rule for all pages appearing in the final story. 

Storyboard sketch for page 24 (2020). Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

In order to accurately depict David’s experiences, Miriam drew on a number of references when composing each page. For page 24, these references included botanical illustrations of different beet varieties, which she used to illustrate the beets falling off the cart as well as the cross-section diagram of a beet appearing in the final panel. These references images are presented roughly in the order I encountered them in the archive, but because I did not deliberately select the order in which I went through the reference files, the order of these images does not matter nearly as much as the order of the drafts does. Additionally, the botanical illustrations and the cross-section diagram of a beet reflect David’s analytical gaze, borne of his engineering background, and a crucial element of his personality which Miriam told me she sought to incorporate in various illustrations throughout the chapter. 

Botanical references for drawing beets.
Photo credits, left: Golden beet illustration by Johann Simon Kerner, published in 1789 by Stuttgart.
Middle: Beet, source unknown. Right: Beet illustration by Giorgio Bonelli, published in 1783-1816, in his book Romanus juxta Systema Tournefortianum.

Additional reference images that went into the composition of page 24 include photos of mills from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, used in depicting the exterior of the mill that is the centerpiece of this particular scene, and images from an illustrated guidebook of soldiers from WWII, used to depict the Romanian soldier who beats David’s father and Mr. Landau in the page’s third panel. The reference images for this particular page were not directly recreated on the final page, which I noticed was the case for a handful of other reference images, but they significantly influenced how this page was illustrated, and ensured that the images appearing in the final story were as accurate as possible, whether in a historical sense or a botanical one. 

Historical reference images for drawing the mill and Romanian soldiers.
Left: 1800s House and Windmill, sketch from around 1860 from the Archives of Manitoba. Middle: 1900s Windmill photograph from 1900, published in N.W. Farmer. Right: 1940s Romanian soldiers, illustration by Horia Serbanescu, published in 1992 in The Romanian Army of World War II by Mark Axworthy.

The next key stage in the project’s completion was the creation of the first digital drafts for each page and the incorporation of text taken from David’s story that determines the final layout of the individual page. For page 24, as with the other pages which were originally sketched as pencil storyboards, the earliest digital draft was built from the sketched storyboard, with the illustrations from that sketch scanned and added to Photoshop, alongside a rough layout of where the text would appear on the finalized page. A handful of pages in the earliest digital drafts saw changes in their layout or arrangement with subsequent drafts, but page 24, along with most of the other pages in the chapter, retained similar or identical layouts from this point onwards. 

Draft for page 24, no colour (2020). Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

Once the page layout had been determined, the scanned pencil sketches from the original storyboard were traced over or refined in digital outlines of the elements appearing in each illustration. The outlines are colour-coded, which allows each individual element of the illustration to stand out, while also making the different people appearing on each page easy to identify—a strategy that I figured is especially useful with illustrations of large groups, or images where some figures are further in the background than others, as seen in the third panel of this page. As with the other pages, these digital outlines form the basis of the lines used in the watercolour illustrations on the final pages, with this stage of the creative process being used to refine the illustrations from their initial rough sketches and ensure that the changing depictions of David and his parents over the course of the story are linear and accurate. Miriam created a series of sketch sheets that served as a reference for how the depictions of David and his parents evolved over the course of the chapter, and the reference sketch sheets of both David and his father as they appear in the final third of the story reflect how they appear in the final illustration. 

Draft of page 24 (left), sketches of David (middle), and sketches of David’s parents (right) (2020). Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

The next set of drafts represent a crucial step towards completion. These drafts consist of full watercolour pages, but exclude any overlaid text elements. As seen below, these scans may vary in quality or include some pencil outlines in places, particularly around the outlines of text bubbles. However, these initial watercolour drafts indicate that the pages are nearly complete, only in need of some final touch-ups and reincorporation of the text elements from the earlier drafts. In reorganizing the files within the archive, I attempted to group each set of drafts by approximate order of when they were completed, but, as many of the drafts past the watercolour stage closely resemble one another, I found it impossible to determine the precise timeline along which these drafts were complied. 

Text-free drafts of page 24, full colour. Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

The final stage of putting each page together was the reincorporation of the text from David’s testimony, now included in a font built from Miriam’s handwriting rather than in plain typed text, as with earlier drafts. For page 24, once the watercolour was complete and the text elements reincorporated, there were virtually no changes, although other pages in the story saw some minor refinements at this stage. With regard to text reincorporation, the first five pages feature drafts that are solely made up of text, in order to correctly position the text on the page and also test out various fonts or styles, but as this page appears fairly late in the story, it does not have a lettering-only page available among the drafts. 

Final drafts for page 24, full colour. Image credit: Miriam Libicki.

The final drafts of page 24 were not, in fact, the last aspects of the page’s creation I encountered in the archive. Instead, the very last items I looked at were the transcripts from the initial meetings between Miriam and David, which contain the origins of the page in one particular conversation the two had. In this conversation, David describes going to the local mill to make flour from the leftover wheat he and his family gathered after the harvest. He was given the task of collecting the sugar beets that fell off the carts going past the mill while his father and Mr. Landau waited in line. This process was interrupted, however, when a Romanian soldier came and beat both men for being too close to the mill as Jews, splitting David’s father’s ear in the process. David, upon witnessing this, hid in the bushes to ensure his father’s safety while leaving behind the sugar beets he had gathered, but ended up facing his father’s anger upon returning home for leaving behind valuable food when they were in desperate need of sustenance. This conversation was captured by Miriam on the previously mentioned page of sketches that includes the sugar beet illustration, which is evidenced by the fact that the remaining illustrations on the page come from other stories David tells in the course of that same conversation. Thus, in my final encounter with the project archives, the story of page 21/24 at last came full circle. 

Screenshots of the transcript from the conversation between Miriam Libicki and David Schaffer, discussing the appearance of the beets and the attack by the Romanian soldier (2020).

Every page of the story came together slightly differently, though for the most part they all followed a similar path to page 24. The process through which each page moved from initial sketch to final version was one I uncovered only after examining the entirety of the project archives, and perhaps may still be an incomplete picture of the creative process, as I only have what was made available to me in the project archives and a single conversation with Miriam.

Even if my picture of the creative process is an incomplete one, it is still guided by my own expertise in this area, in part as a student archivist who has spent many hours looking at every single item in the project archives and seeking to place them in the context of the complete, published story, and, in part, as a student in the Holocaust Studies Masters program with a substantial basis of knowledge surrounding the events that all three survivors whose stories are captured in But I Live experienced. These two areas of knowledge are what I leaned on when seeking to piece together the creative process, as well as when speaking to Miriam about her work on this project. My sincere hope is that my expertise has allowed me to construct the best possible outline of how this work came together, even though I did not encounter these archives until well after the book had been published. 

Continue the Story

Page 24 is only one small window into a much larger project. A Kind of Resistance is the first chapter of But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, a collection that brings together graphic narratives by Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin, created in close partnership with four child survivors. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Reality-Based Work. The book also includes personal words from each survivor and historical essays. Learn more about But I Live.

Miriam’s latest graphic novel, Two Roses: A Story of Deception and Determination in Nazi Germany (2026), is also a product of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project. It tells the story of Holocaust survivor Rose Lipszyc and her aunt Rose Finkielsztajn, who survived the war under false identities as Polish gentile sisters. Learn more about Two Roses.

As this digital exhibit highlights, behind every finished page lie months of conversation, research, and revision. Thank you for taking a look inside the archive.

Thank you to the University of Victoria’s Libraries and Art Collections for supporting the development of our archival materials.

The Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Canada. We are grateful for their support in making this work possible.