“Our perspectives of the past are largely shaped by the stories of those who experienced it.”
On May 28, 2024 a panel of researchers, artists, and witnesses will gather to reflect on the ways in which graphic novels can be used to gather stories violence and genocide. These stories are not universal or encompassing of every detail of these atrocities, but rather they present the individual narratives of those who survived them.
Views around the Ezidi shrine of Shebl Qasim atop Shingal mountain (Wikimedia Commons).
The panel includes Tobi Dahmen, Charlotte Schallié, Akram al-Saud, Leyla Ferman, Kees Ribbens and Uğur Ümit Üngör. We are grateful to be hosted by our project partner NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at SPUI25 in Amsterdam for this event.
Date: May 28, 2024 – 5:00pm CEST Location: SPUI25, Amsterdam
From April 13 to July 31, 2024 the Ravensbrück Memorial is hosting an exhibition of ‘But I Live. Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust’ in cooperation with the International Comic Salon Erlangen and the Stadtmuseum Erlangen.
‘But I Live’ (2022) edited by SCVN Co-Director Charlotte Schallié was an important publication because of the way the stories it contains were created. Graphic artists Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin, worked closely with (respectively) David Schaffer, Nico and Rolf Kamp, and Emmie Arbel to gather their memories and experiences of surviving the Holocaust as children. This collection of graphic narratives set the tone for the broader SCVN project and many of the relationships that began with ‘But I Live’ continue on in the current work.
For the SCVN project, this new exhibition at Ravensbrück represents a commitment to learn about and remember the stories that have been so carefully gathered – in a way that does not reduce survivors to their moment of pain but instead honours their life experiences before, during, and after the events they endured.
Photographs by Eberhard Schorr. Ravensbrück exhibition opening, April 2024.
On March 20, 2024 join SCVN co-director Charlotte Schallié and illustrator Barbara Yelin for the next instalment of the Art & Testimony webinar series.
In this webinar session, Barbara Yelin will discuss her collaborative memory work with Holocaust child survivor Emmie Arbel for ‘But I Live’ (2022) and ‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’ (2023). In conversation with Charlotte Schallié, Barbara Yelin will reflect on how drawing can be used as a language to gather memories in trauma-informed storytelling. Yelin and Schallié will explore how the relationships they have formed with Emmie and with the research team guide the work and yield many insights, including the importance of emotion and subjectivity in witnessing survivor-centred testimony sharing. Yelin will begin with a reading from select pages of ‘The Colour of Memory’, grounding the conversation in Emmie’s story and the visual arts-based methodology of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) project.
Hosted by Dr. Andrea Webb, Associate Professor of Teaching, UBC Curriculum & Pedagogy.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 1:00-2:30 PM Pacific Time Online via Zoom
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new webinar series on the theme of Art and Testimony. In collaboration with UBC-V Public Humanities Hub this series has been developed as a critical exploration of contemporary arts-based research. The first webinar session with Dr Hank Greenspan will take place on January 25, 2024. Find the registration link below.*
This webinar series is an opportunity to engage with scholars of many backgrounds as they reflect on arts-based methods and relational processes of working with testimony.
In this first session, Dr Greenspan will discuss how his work as a theatre artist is interconnected with his decades-long research and teaching as a Holocaust scholar.
“Listening, Telling, Showing (and back): The Practice of a Holocaust scholar-teacher-playwright-actor”
Thursday, January 25, 2024 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time Online via Zoom
*Registration will not be confirmed via email. Simply fill out and submit the form to secure a spot. Email reminders are sent out ahead of the scheduled session.
Interested in our past webinars? Find the Ethics of Trauma-Informed Research webinar recordings here.
The ‘Fragility of Freedom’ is the overarching theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day and explores the many ways that human rights such as freedom of movement, expression, and religion are oppressed and restricted by regimes of power. This lecture will explore the way that freedom and liberation are often entangled with ongoing experiences of grief, loss, and absence.
Born in Holland in 1937, Emmie Arbel was deported with her Jewish family in 1942 and survived the Nazi concentration camps Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen as a child. Her parents and grandparents were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Emmie Arbel now lives near Haifa, Israel. She often travels to Germany to speak as a contemporary witness. Although her childhood was marked by death, speechlessness, abuse and loneliness, she looks back on a life full of rebellion, self-empowerment and humour. In her constant effort to bring her memories out of the silence, the consequences of the Holocaust become visible – in her life, with her family, in every single day.
Barbara Yelin’s graphic novel is based on her personal encounters and numerous intensive conversations with Emmie Arbel. It is a continuation of the first collaboration, and includes 40 pages already published in the anthology “Aber ich leben” (CH Beck) (“But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust” (University of Toronto Press) from 2022.
Edited by Charlotte Schallié and Alexander Korb, the graphic novel will be published on November 6, 2023 and is available to purchase from Reprodukt Publishing.
“For her, drawing, Yelin once said, is a process of searching, recognizing and carefully approaching reality. In ‘Emmie Arbel – The Colour of Memory’ she masterfully shows where this process can lead.”
The exhibition “But I Live: Remembering the Holocaust” is being hosted at the Wiesbaden Kunsthaus from September 14th to November 26th, 2023. Special thanks to Regine Meldt for hosting the opening night with the Kamp brothers Rolf and Nico, Gilad Seliktar, and curator Jakob Hoffmann!
More information can be found by selecting the exhibition program poster and on the website.
A curator’s tour of the exhibition took place on Thursday, September 21st at 5:00 pm with Jakob Hoffmann. The Kunsthaus also created a short film about the exhibition, featured on their YouTube Channel:
We received some wonderful photographs from the opening of our ”Aber ich lebe” – den Holocaust erinnern” exhibition at the schauraum: comic & cartoon in Dortmund.
