interviews Archives - Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives

Archiving the Process: Interview with artist Gilad Seliktar on working with child Holocaust survivors

interviews, publications1 October 20262 October 2026

On June 18, 2026, Survivor-Centred Visual Narrative’s research assistant Nevaeh Bitzer and KULA director Matt Huculak had the pleasure to interview graphic novelist Gilad Seliktar via Zoom. Gilad has worked on two graphic novels with the SCVN project. The first being Nico and Rolf Kamps’ story Thirteen Secrets, which is a part of But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (2022). The second is Did They Forget About Us? (2026) which was recently released in German by C.H. Beck. This graphic novel shares Klaus Zwilsky’s story of surviving the Holocaust at the Jewish Hospital of Berlin.

This interview touches on Gilad’s process making graphic novels, and his experience working with the SCVN project and the survivors. The images seen throughout this interview were generated in process of making Thirteen Secrets, and are a part of the Kamp brothers archive for But I Live.

Nevaeh: When looking specifically at this archive compared to some of the others, there are around 1,400 photographs out of, I think, 1,500 archival items, which is a lot compared to the other archives here. What role do pictures play in the archival process for you?

Gilad: I think the way I create and use pictures is very important in my creative process. It starts with trying to turn complicated things into more cinematic comics. I want to show a few angles and play with it a little bit, like cinema with the camera. There is something about the way I cut and edit it that is more like cinema. If I have a thousand pictures for one scene, I can edit them in so many ways, and this helps me tell the story the way I imagined it.

Sometimes I see something in the reference, and it takes me in another direction that I hadn’t thought of until I saw that one detail in the pictures or perhaps in the field while I was researching. I think this started with my first book, Where Are You Anyway? It started with a digital camera that a friend gave me, and from there I developed the process from book to book.

Matt: You mentioned just now that when you go back through the photographs, you might notice something that you hadn’t noticed before, and then it becomes part of the storytelling. Do you have an example of that from the Kamp brothers?

Gilad: I can tell you where that starts, how to look at things, or what to look for. Most of the time, it’s about looking for mistakes. Sometimes you take the wrong picture, or someone moves aside and doesn’t take the position you want them to take, and something happens. I learned to listen to the mistakes.

In my second book, I took pictures to document a village for one of the stories in Farm 54. It was a story set in the 1980s about the army and soldiers going to a village and blowing up a house. So, I went to the village and took pictures. I had very tight deadlines—I had about one week to send the book to the publisher. It was my first big book.

I took the pictures with a very old digital camera, around 2007 or 2008. When I went home and developed the pictures on the computer, they were not what I had intended. But I noticed one picture that was the perfect ending for the book, and that became the last frame. From that moment, I knew that I could use everything. I need to observe, and I have to go outside and explore and investigate, because things happen when you go outside.

With the Kamp brothers, as Nevaeh wrote about the rabbit candles, we went to their house and started the interview, suddenly, we saw two rabbit candles, just like in the story. Nico had a white rabbit, and Rolf had a black rabbit. Suddenly, there were candle rabbits. It was the perfect image for the beginning of the story, from my perspective. I knew it was going to be in the story. If we hadn’t gone to their home, we never would have seen that, and nobody would have thought, “Listen, there’s a rabbit candle.” I had to be there and see it. When Charlotte and I saw it, we were both like, “Whoa.” We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.

Top: Photograph of two rabbit candles on a platter. Photo by Gilad Seliktar. Bottom: Draft of the introductory illustration for Thirteen Secrets. Illustration by Gilad Seliktar.

Nevaeh: Looking at your digital templating, you have all the pages set up, with two or three photos underneath every page template. Is that how you work with all of your books, just to incorporate these photos and visuals?

Gilad: I think that was at the beginning, when I was using the Miro board application. It’s like a big digital wall that you can zoom in and out of. I had to try it, but it didn’t last long because I love putting things on the wall and seeing them.

When I sit in my studio, most of the time the entire space is covered with pictures, pages, and the process of the book. I look around and think about the book, and suddenly I see something on the other side of the studio. I see a page and think, “Okay, maybe I can put it here.” Everything is always moving. On the computer, in Miro, you need to go into each page.

After a few weeks, I left that behind and moved to pencil and paper. I think there are a few pictures of that. I used yellow notes, like square notes, and tried to find the order of the memories. I was trying to find a way to organize my thoughts. Most of the time, though, I work a little messily, and that’s the way I work. I find my order in the mess. Maybe that system was too ordered and too direct. I like to feel the materials a little bit.

Top: Gilad Seliktar’s Miro board for Thirteen Secrets. Bottom: Photograph of Gilad’s office wall covered in draft pages for Thirteen Secrets. He has drawn and written notes on the digital image. Photo by Gilad Seliktar.

Nevaeh: When you began creating this graphic novel, did you know that you wanted to incorporate the interview into the novel, or is that something you developed while interviewing both brothers?

Gilad: I think that most of the time—again, it was my first book—it was very important to me to show Nico and Rolf in the present. The book focuses on a few months or two years of their lives in the past, and I think it’s very important to tell that story. I think there is a place for the present because it shows what became of them, how they see it, and their perspective from the present. It was very important to me to show them as they are now.

Because it was my first documentary comic book, I tried to find a way to start the story before introducing their memories. I had to find a way to tell the story. The present is a very good place to start because if I begin by talking with one of them, I can go anywhere I want from that point. It’s a way to start the book, and I did it again in Klaus, in a slightly different way. I think it gives me a center. I would say it’s like the ground. It lets me use my imagination a little bit because I always have a way to return to it. It’s like going back to a moment. It’s very intimate.

Nevaeh: When you read a book or look at other graphic novels, all you see is the finished product. But I’ve seen how much this changed, specifically the colour palette—from that peachy-orange colour to yellow in the finished product. Why did you make that colour switch?

Gilad: I think it was very intuitive. I always start with a peach colour. I always begin with that; I don’t know why. Then I find my colour palette.

I don’t have a very good explanation for the change. Maybe one day I started playing with the colours and stayed with that. Perhaps the colour was a little too dark in the printing. I’m not coming from a design background, so I play with colour like a painter. I change the colour without thinking about how it will print.

In the new book, Klaus, I worked with a designer, so I think the colours are more exact. He gave me the numbers [Hex code numbers] and adjusted them to one colour. With the previous book, it was different. Again, I learned from that experience. In the end, it could have been white instead of yellow. For me, it felt like the right direction, so I just went with it.

Left: Draft of page 43 from But I Live in peach. Right: Finalized page 43 from But I Live (2022). Illustrations by Gilad Seliktar.

Nevaeh: Can I ask about your use of translucent paper in the process? I saw that there’s a seven-second video of you layering images over one another. What does that do for your process?

Video of Gilad using tracing paper on a photograph taken in Achterveld. Video by Charlotte Schallié.

Farmhouse in Achterveld. Photo by Charlotte Schallié.

Gilad: It’s 90-gram paper. I work with it all the time because it’s very easy to use. You can turn it and play with it, and you don’t have to use a light table. A light table is very difficult to work with. I don’t like using it too much because I need to prepare everything, and I like to work right away without thinking too much.

The materials I work with, like Panda oil pastels and graphite, work well on that paper, so it’s very important to me. In Klaus, I worked with transparent plastic paper, so the ink doesn’t dry on it too quickly, and it works a little differently. I always try to find materials that work well with the process.

I saw that you asked a question about digital tools [What role did digital art tools play in creating the graphic novel?]. Most of the time, I try to find the right way to work with the materials and the concept. With the Nico and Rolf book, I worked digitally, but I drew it. Most of the time, I work analog with pencils, and only at the end do I transfer the work to digital. I found a digital pencil that works like my regular pencils, so I stayed with that. But I didn’t plan it ahead of time because I didn’t know what the book would look like in the end.

Nevaeh: Did you find that working more digitally resulted in less draft material, just because of the way you edited in the app?

Gilad: I wish it resulted in less draft work, because I draw each painting and each drawing several times. I think I drew each book three or four times before I created the final draft. There are a lot of drafts and a lot of material.

I usually spend two years—or often even longer—looking for the style of the book. For my previous book, Tsav 8, it took about three years to figure out how I wanted to work with the colour and the 90-gram paper. What would the colour palette be? Would I use coloured pencils throughout the book, or perhaps Panda oil pastels? I didn’t know, but I tried. I drew a lot of the book again and again until I found the right direction.

With the Nico and Rolf book, I tried working with a monotype print. Because it was a very short story, I thought it might be too much to go back to the past and change the style; the changes would happen too quickly. I took that experience and applied it to Klaus. I used that approach in Klaus because it was longer and broader, so I had a lot more space to play with it.

Each experience takes me to the next book or project. I always take something from each experience, even if I don’t end up using it.

Nevaeh: How do you feel the process has changed from making such a small graphic novel, like in terms of pages, compared to Klaus, which is quite large in scale? How do you change the way you work with the material and present it?

Gilad: I have more space. For me, it’s the perfect match because I can play with it, stay with the book much longer, imagine things more broadly, and jump from the past to the present.

In Klaus, I play with the structure. The first two chapters include interviews with Klaus and his wife, Roberta Safer, and then with Aubrey Pomerance. Then I go back to Klaus, and Klaus goes to sleep on the couch. Suddenly, in the third chapter, we are in the past. I couldn’t do something like that in a 14-page book. It’s something you have to build gradually. I made the book longer because I wanted to create that effect. I tried to find a different way to tell this kind of story. My previous book was 200 pages, so I had some experience working with longer stories.

I have to say that after we made But I Live, making another anthology with one very short story would have felt like doing the same thing, and I didn’t want to do that. Of course, I told Charlotte that I would do whatever she wanted because I trust her and like the process. I enjoy working with the whole team; it’s been a very good experience for me. But artistically, I wanted to do something new. I had never done anything like this before. Again, I tried to find a new way to tell a documentary story.

Nevaeh: How important was it to use the historical photographs from the Kamp family photo album when trying to create a vision of what the boys looked like when they were younger, as well as what their family looked like, since you never met them?

Gilad: This is tricky because my style is somewhat realistic. You lay down a realistic environment—it’s like real people—and sometimes I try to find the middle ground. Because I started with Nico and Rolf in the present, I couldn’t go too far into the past. If I’m drawing Nico and Rolf exactly as they are in the present, I have to find a way to draw them as closely as possible to how they look in the photographs from the past. They didn’t have many pictures.

In my books, when I tell a story based on real people or a real experience—whether it’s autobiographical or something else—it’s usually about me. But here, it’s about two children. I had to find children who looked like Nico and Rolf, and finding the right people was always in the back of my mind.

My son, Yonatan, has two brothers in his school. One day, I went to pick him up at the end of the day. I sat in the car, and suddenly the two boys walked past. It was like in a movie, in slow motion. I suddenly saw Nico and Rolf walking. They were almost the same age as Nico and Rolf, and they were brothers who played with each other. The older brother was a little mean to the younger one. They were acting exactly like brothers. I asked their parents, whom I knew, and they agreed to be part of the project. For me, that was when the project started to move forward. I had Nico and Rolf in the present and the perfect Nico and Rolf in the past. The boys looked alike and played along with the story. I had the way they looked, but they also had the way they acted. You can’t draw people acting like brothers. If you find the right reference, you have an actor, their expression, their age, and the way you want to draw them. You have most of the elements you need to draw someone who feels real. I think that’s what I’m trying to do with the books: take you into the book. You’re supposed to feel that you’re in a real place.

I also used reference pictures from books. In the 1990s and in 2008, there were forums, from Facebook or something like that perhaps Facebook or similar sites. Later, I used references from the internet, history books, and the library. I use everything I can. It’s a little bit like a collage. I try to collect things and play with them, and then I think the style and materials make the difference. It’s like giving them a new life.

Left: Photograph from the Kamp family. Right: Page 45 from But I Live (2022). Illustration by Gilad Seliktar.

Matt: Gilad, I want to go back even further—or perhaps further out into the future—and ask you two questions. First, what does the word “archive” mean to you in terms of your artistic practice? Second, 50 or 100 years from now, what do you hope people will know about the artistic process behind this project—something they might not necessarily see in the material that remains?

Gilad: From my perspective, when I look at the process of other artists, that’s where I learn everything. If I look at someone’s drawing, I can see the nuances. I can see the way they move. I think that’s where I learn the most. I hope that if someone reads about or sees the process, they might learn something from it. More importantly, perhaps they can understand how I create, from my perspective.

Again, I think the same thing happened with Klaus. Most people who work on something will tell you that the next time it will be different. I always tell my publisher, “Next time, the book will be funny,” and then I do something about the Holocaust. Then, with the next book, I say, “I’ll do something very short,” and it ends up being 200 pages. What I think is important for people who see the process is that they let it carry them. Don’t think too much about what you want to do—just do it. It will take you somewhere.

And, of course, you need to find the right partners. That’s very important.

Matt: Speaking of that, I would love to have a little oral history about how you met Charlotte. For those who don’t know her, Dr. Charlotte Schallié is the lead of this project. She’s the one who brought everyone together: the artist and the survivors. How did you meet Charlotte? When she proposed this idea to you, what were you thinking? What did you expect from it, and what ended up happening?

Gilad: You never know what will happen when someone approaches you. Sometimes people send me emails, and I don’t answer them because they don’t catch my attention, or perhaps I forget. Things like that happen. If I remember correctly, Charlotte wrote to me on Facebook or something like that. She told me that Barbara Yelin, a graphic novelist with the SCVN, had recommended me. I knew Barbara, of course, and I had met her in Berlin at one of the festivals where we were on a panel together. I think she’s a great artist, and we have a very good relationship. When Barbara sent her that link, I thought, “Okay. If Barbara told her about me, I have to talk with her and see what we can do.”

I remember telling Charlotte that it was very interesting. It was something I hadn’t done before, so I was very curious. I told her that I wanted to do it, but she had to promise me one thing: that I would have complete freedom to do whatever I wanted. She has kept that promise to this day. I think that was the most important thing. If I’m going to give 100 percent of myself to a project, I have to know that I’m in the right hands. That’s why I came back, and we continued working together.

Then, of course, I met her in the Netherlands, and we developed a very good relationship. She took the pictures, and we had a great time together. For me, as an artist, to see someone take on a project of that size and stay with it is remarkable. It’s a very unique and ambitious project. She gave, from the way I see it, 200 percent. So, when I work on it, I feel comfortable doing everything I can to make the project as good as possible.

Matt: The results speak for themselves. It’s beautiful work all the way around. My last question concerns your process and the independence of your creativity. What was it like to work with the survivors and co-create the images? How was that different from your previous work, and has it shaped who you are as an artist moving forward?

Gilad: I have to tell you that, in the way I work, I can sometimes work on one image for two weeks or even longer. It’s a little bit crazy. You can’t bring someone into that process. I can’t start sending Klaus pictures and asking, “Maybe this one? Maybe that one?” I’ve been working on the new cover of the book for about four months, and I haven’t finished it yet. It’s like a nightmare, but I don’t mind because I’m sure we’ll find the right cover. I didn’t show it to Klaus because I didn’t want him to start asking himself questions. It would be too much.

During the process of making the book, I usually show the materials only at a few points because I need to give myself space to explore. It’s a risk. Sometimes you show someone a page that you think is very good, and they say, “Hmm,” because it isn’t finished yet. They can’t understand it because it’s in the middle of a thought. You throw it onto the page, and not everyone can understand that because it’s very difficult to process. So, with Nico and Rolf, I don’t think I spoke with them until the book was finished. With Klaus, I showed him things a few times during the process. He’s a very kind man, and he gave me freedom.

But, as an artist, I’m sensitive to whether someone isn’t fully comfortable with something, doesn’t like it, or feels uncomfortable. I always try to listen and notice those reactions when we’re talking or on Zoom, and then I change it.

Matt: It sounds like you seek that balance through empathy. Because you’ve met the person and have a personal connection with them, you have a visceral sense of what they might like.

Gilad: I would never do anything that would hurt him or make him uncomfortable. I appreciate his time and everything else. When you’re working with someone, you have to trust them, and they have to trust you. If that doesn’t work, it becomes a problem. I’m sure every artist has had a bad experience when something isn’t working. Sometimes you illustrate a book, and suddenly the writer starts calling you at odd hours: “What’s happening here?” or “It’s not right,” or “I don’t understand.” Things happen. In this project, I think everything is in the right place. The heart is in the right place, and that’s very important. When you work with survivors, you want to give them the safest place you can.

From left to right, of Rolf Kamp, Gilad Seliktar, and Nico Kamp outside the Kamp childhood home in Amersfoort.
Photo by Charlotte Schallié.

Nevaeh: Going back to something you said about not liking to present half a thought, is that why there is so little draft material in this archive specifically? Was it because you didn’t want those half-formed thoughts in the archive?

Gilad: Yes, I think that’s part of the reason. Archives often want you to present everything—the moment you have it, even if it’s in the middle of the night and you’ve just made a drawing. For me, it’s very personal. The process is interesting, and there are things I’m willing to show, but I have to feel very comfortable with that. You don’t show half-finished work—or at least, I don’t.

When we included the diary and interview at the end of But I Live, I didn’t want to show too much of the process. I remember that when we eventually showed something, I didn’t feel very comfortable with it. But I trusted everyone, and it ended up very well. That’s why, with Klaus, I didn’t talk about the process. I talked about the experience because the experience is what’s interesting for me to tell the reader. For you, I can show the process, and perhaps in the archive it’s part of the project. Now, the canvas is a little bit bigger.

But I don’t know. Maybe in the new book I’ll have more material. I have a lot of material, but I still need to photograph it and send it to the archive, right?

Nevaeh: I think this is such a good conversation to have because sometimes you can forget that care-based practices also should extend to the artists themselves. We’re protecting the survivors and we want them to feel comfortable, but also you, in your process, because what we’re sharing is what we want you to be comfortable with sharing.

Gilad: Yes, it’s very important. Each artist is different. Each one has their self-confidence. You know, sometimes you don’t want people to see you when you wake up. You want to put something on yourself, something that looks right and you have your self-image. I think artists have that in their art too. They don’t talk about it much, I think. There are artists that don’t want people to take pictures of them at all. It’s like they are names on the book and that’s it. So, for me the sketches are like the most way to expose myself.

Photograph of Gilad Seliktar from the archive. Photo by Charlotte Schallié.

Nevaeh: That was very lovely to put it that way. Thank you. And I think that is now officially the end of our questions.

Visit Gilad’s website to learn more about his work here.

Learn more about SCVN’s But I Live here.

The German release of Did They Forget About Us? is available for purchase here.

Works Cited:

Schallié, Charlotte, editor. But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust. University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Seliktar, Gilad. Interview by Nevaeh Bitzer and Matt Huculak. Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives, Zoom recording, 18 June 2026.

Filming Indigenous Narratives: Interview with Andy Rutter

films, interviews5 August 202622 September 2026

Filmmaker Andy Rutter recently discussed making his documentary Kokum Dorothy’s Story: We Can Still Sing and Dance with Ghada Youssef, UVic PhD student and fellow filmmaker. This film is part of SCVN’s Turtle Island Research Cluster and features conversations between residential school survivor Dorothy Visser and Métis illustrator Natasha Donovan as they discuss their upcoming graphic novel, We Can Still Sing and Dance: Kokum Dorothy’s Story. Below is the interview between Andy and Ghada, adapted by Laura Oakley. The trailer is available to view here, and the film will be released in early 2027.

Ghada: Maybe I can start with getting to know a little bit more about you. How did you end up on the SCVN project?

Andy: My partner Shannon Leddy brought me onto the project right from the very start of 2024. We did five interviews with Dorothy Visser and I turned them into a short documentary film.

Ghada: Yes, to put things in context, the SCVN project commemorates stories of survival, working with genocide and mass atrocity survivors and turning their testimonies into graphic novels and short documentary films. And your film, as you mentioned, revolves around the story of Dorothy, who is a survivor of the residential schools in Turtle Island. Working with personal experiences, and especially where trauma and memory and personal experiences are involved, requires careful navigation, at the very least, in how these stories are handled, represented, and shared. My question to you: Can we start with your relationship to Dorothy? How did you create a space that was emotionally safe for Dorothy to share her experiences, from trust to privacy to boundaries? I’m curious about your relationship to Dorothy.

Andy: Luckily for us, Shannon already had a relationship with Dorothy. Shannon had been going to Dorothy’s Cree language lessons. So, they did have a relationship or a bond already through the Cree lessons. But it was quite easy actually to create that space. In the beginning, of course, it was a trauma-informed environment. And so, we took it very slowly. But then we started to find that Dorothy was actually very funny and told a lot of really, really funny jokes. There was a good balance between some of the traumatic events that she’d experienced as well as some of the funny ones that she had as well. So that really helped us move on.

Dorothy, because she’s almost 90 years old, she couldn’t do long interviews. So, whatever we captured at the time was in one take. There was no, “Please stop. Can you go back and say that again?”

Ghada: Focusing on you as a filmmaker in this experience, I’m wondering if you felt a bigger responsibility as a filmmaker in comparison to making other films that are about a lighter topic. Did you feel that you have some ethical considerations that you needed to put front and centre, when you don’t usually need to do that?

Andy: I would argue that you need to do that all the time with every project that you work on. Every day was emergent. Every interview that we did, it started off with a few essential questions, but then it took on a life of its own. My job as the storyteller was to find the cohesion between the stories that were being told and the way we were trying to tell it. I focused less on the atrocities of residential school survivors had experienced and more on the resilience of Dorothy.

Every day was emergent. Every interview that we did, it started off with a few essential questions, but then it took on a life of its own.

The idea that we can say that we can work together, that there is two-eyed seeing, as a residential school survivor Dorothy would like to tell us about her resilience: bring it on. How do we fit into this? Because we as social beings, we all work together, so, the survivor side of it was the catalyst. The real story that I tried to tell was how we can work together.

And, so, the big part is with these kinds of videos is talking about why is it important to understand that there are three sides to every story and there isn’t just good and bad: there’s lots of grey area.

…it important for people to understand that there are three sides to every story and there isn’t just good and bad: there’s lots of gray area.

Knowing about some of these stories is a good way of beginning the reconciliation process. It’s a good way to try and get those who aren’t in communication with Indigenous communities and who don’t know the stories of residential schools, who only hear what their echo chambers give them, to let them hear another side of the story. Even if we only change that one mind, just ten percent, we’ve still done something. It is an educational process. You have to want to learn.

Ghada: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, the film centres around the collaboration between the survivor and the artist in the process of developing the graphic novel. I like to think of this as already having one layer of visualization done by the artist and then you contribute with yet another layer of visualization. Did the visuals or the content of the graphic novels influence the development of the film for you? Did they make your visualization easier, or it did not have that big an influence?

Andy: Well, at the time that I was making the actual short documentary film there were only around four or five coloured images, and they were still in the rough versions. Natasha Donovan was working as diligently as she possibly could, but I was moving faster. The whole project was moving faster than Natasha’s working on the actual illustrations. By the time we got to the end, she had around 50 frames, but I hadn’t seen them. All I had seen was the rough copies, which I incorporated into the video. And it’s also because the actual developing of the animations or the illustrations gave Natasha her energy to go on and do more.

I focused on collaboration instead of focusing on the actual product. We talk about the product as the overarching reason why we’re doing this together. It is the story. It is a story about people who are telling stories so they can turn those stories into illustrations.

Ghada: How did you approach the story building process through editing? Were there any moments that you had to give up? Or moments that you wished you had but did not. What did you do? Can you walk me through your editing process?

Andy: After doing five different interviews with Dorothy, each interview being approximately an hour and a half each, the parts that I tended to focus the most on were where there was a positive aspect to it or there was a talking about progress. There was a talk about something that had happened which has brought Dorothy to this thinking or that Natasha heard and brought into her illustration.

Working with somebody who just has a vast treasure trove of good stories that they can tell, like Dorothy, means she wants to tell the story, but then she’s reminded of another story that gives her joy. So, then she’ll start talking about that story that gives her joy, and then that will segue onto another story that brings her joy, and in the end, all we can do as audience is smile with her, is listen, is to understand. As the editor, I have to come back into the editing studio and go, okay, where did that story begin? Where did it end? It didn’t.

The story of We Can Still Sing and Dance, that was a story that Dorothy was telling about some injured eagles that she once used to look at the Langley Zoo. One flew down from the north, one flew from the south, and then one from the east and the west, and they stood in a circle singing and dancing to each other. Injured eagles. And she watched this and she said, that is like my people. That is like what’s happened with the Indigenous of Canadian residential school survivors. But I couldn’t get that whole story in one seating. Maybe one day we will sit down with Dorothy in another time, in another place.

Dorothy was not a seasoned celebrity, so every time the camera was turned on and the microphone was going, then she felt that this was a production, and now she should perform as if this were a production. We’d say, no, you don’t need to perform like it’s a production. Just tell us a story as you normally would if we were just sitting having a cup of coffee.

Ghada: Thank you for sharing this. This is very grounding. And it’s really what to expect in those situations where the essence is someone sharing stories, but in a very organic way. What is some advice you can give to filmmakers who want to do films like this, with this approach?

Andy: My advice to filmmakers that would like to take on these kind of trauma-informed stories or these survivor stories is to be patient with your subjects because if you tell them that you’re doing a survivor story or a survivor narrative, they automatically go to what do people want to hear about the struggles. Be patient with your subjects because chances are their survival techniques or the survival that they learned is actually what’s kept them resilient and has helped them live to where they are today with their positive attitude.

…be patient with your subjects because if you tell them that you’re doing a survivor story or a survivor narrative, they automatically go to ‘what do people want to hear about the struggles’.

So, it’s less about the trauma and more about what happened afterwards or how the living continued. There’s not going to be any straight line unless of course your subject is somebody who has worked in media or, for example, has done multiple lectures or TED talks about the topic. And this is where you’ll have to just listen, because that story will change. At least, we hope it will change. A good piece of advice: it takes a lot of listening, it takes a lot of patience, and it takes a lot of understanding of what it means to have two ears and one mouth.

Ghada: The idea of expectations—not that you’ll receive a particular story in a specific format, but that you’ll be open to the many different ways stories can take shape. Do I read you correctly?

Andy: Allow for the story to be emergent. And if you don’t have all the equipment on the first day, look at your footage afterwards, look at your dailies and say, what could be better for the next interview? You might not always get the location that you want, but you deal with what you have. You deal with the situation that you’re in. And that’s everything. That is having your subject, for example, show up 45 minutes late, for example, and knowing that you have a deadline, you’ve only got the room for two hours. You have to take things like that into consideration that your subject might not always be at their best on the day of the shoot.

Get what you can with your patience and quiet and calm. And of course, from the director’s side, you have to be able to be patient yourself with the other people in the room. The ones who might be nattering in the back while you’re trying to listen to an interview. Leave it there.

Andy Rutter filming Kokum Dorothy’s Story: We Can Still Sing and Dance.

Ghada: Thank you so much, Andy. I think it’s very inspirational, realistic, and very, very useful to any filmmaker. I usually ask the filmmakers about how they themselves handle the emotional weight when dealing with stories that are emotionally heavy. What can you share with me about this? Now, I do get the sense that Dorothy had this humorous side, and so maybe that kind of released this emotional pressure. But in the big picture, when you are reflecting on yourself that you are a filmmaker doing a story of this kind, how did you deal with this?

Andy: In Dorothy’s family, there would be times something happened, or she didn’t get enough sleep because there was a trauma. We would do a smudge. And then we’d clear out our minds ready for the shoot. We would have the lead up which was just a quick normal chit chat about life, about everything. And while we’re doing that chit chat, that’s when I turn the cameras on. As a filmmaker who’s done lots of interviews with people who aren’t used to being on camera, who are shy on camera, who don’t have that interviewing gene, what I’ve learned to do is don’t bring any attention to the equipment. Obviously, you have to set up your lights and your cameras and your microphones, but don’t draw attention to them. Don’t tell your subject, I am now going to turn the camera on, because then they say, I’m not prepared for that. If you never have to tell them that you’re turning the camera on, then the camera is always on.

And feel the room. I can’t push my subject to be bubbly and bright if I inside myself feel that they didn’t get enough sleep last night or if they have something emotional going on in their head. Or they’re dealing with something. I can’t try and pull that character out as if this were a Hollywood actor who can switch on a dime. This is a human being.

Ghada: Beautiful. SCVN films will be used in genocide and human rights education, so they will be shown at exhibits, in the classroom, online for a general public, so in very different ways and formats. What kind of response do you hope to receive from the diversity of audiences?

Andy: I hope that the response that I get from my short documentary encourages people to learn more. Those who have not yet experienced or don’t have knowledge of what happened in residential schools may have heard, at some point in time, was that residential schools weren’t so bad. What I would like to say to them is you only know a portion of the story. They’re sure the residential schools did have some good things and Dorothy talks about those. But for the most part, they were traumatic, traumatic, for many generations. And that is the story that I would like for people to look deeper into. And I hope that my documentary film allows people to say, oh, I didn’t know that. I need to know more.

Ghada: Is there anything in particular that you wanted to share with us? Any experience that I may have not asked you about?

Andy: Since working on Dorothy’s story and listening to the narratives, it has, in my own learning, taken me to UBC Indigenous Gardens, where now I am doing documentaries for the people who run the gardens. And I’m hearing about Indigenous medicines and about Indigenous storytelling. I’m learning about bees, which I never thought that I’d learn about before, about how to turn nettles into fishing nets, and about pickling. Once you start learning about Indigenous knowledge or incorporate this into your understanding, your worldview, it opens up so many more doors to more learning.

Once you start learning about Indigenous knowledge or incorporate this into your understanding, your worldview, it opens up so many more doors to more learning.

And, as a video editor, I’ve listened to stories 1,000 times, as a video editor does. When a video editor is editing a piece of work, he might listen to one person speak 100 times about the same thing. It is a whole different learning curve when you edit videos. And you start to learn about things that you never thought you’d ever be interested in, but then you hold on to that knowledge and you take it into your next project and say, I’m so happy that I learned that because now it makes this more understandable. So, my advice is, as a lifelong learner, never stop being interested in the topics because they always lead you to the next topic.

Ghada: There is never one thread that is in isolation to any other thread. It’s always all interconnected. It’s always going to lead you to other threads. It always has more than one outcome. As a student in philosophy, I think one of my biggest lessons is accepting that most of the times phenomena and experiences are so multifaceted, much more than we think. And it’s so nice to cultivate the sense of curiosity: to want to learn more and as much as we can.

Andy: That is right, and in stoic understanding, there are things that you have control over and there’s some things you don’t have control over. How do you identify these and which hill do you die on? When it comes to working towards the wrong and rights, is there anything called wrong and right? I don’t know: philosophy.

Ghada: Well, thank you so much for these very valuable insights. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Andy: It was a pleasure discussing them with you.

Survivor-Centred Co-Direction: Interview with filmmaker Marc Ellison

films, interviews15 May 202623 October 2026

What does it mean to make a film with survivors of genocide rather than just about them? That question runs through a November 20, 2025 interview between SCVN researcher Ghada Youssef and filmmaker Marc Ellison, adapted here for the blog.

Marc directed two documentary short films for the Rwanda Research Cluster: Why We Dance and A Compassionate Heart. Each film centres on a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Why We Dance features survivor Jerome Irankunda and graphic artist Michel Kichka, and A Compassionate Heart features survivor Madeleine Mukarwego and graphic artist Elyon’s.

In the interview, Ghada and Marc discuss the collaborative filming techniques behind both productions, including Marc’s focus on co-directing with the survivors, the ethical considerations of filming people as they recount traumatic experiences, and the role of film in preserving collective memory.

The photography throughout this interview has been generously provided by Marc and Erin Jessee from their trip to Rwanda in 2024.

Marc and Jerome filming part of Why We Dance in a field with cows in Rwanda in 2024. Photo credit: Marc Ellison

Ghada: Thank you so much for being with us today, Marc. To get us going, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your professional background? I’m curious how you became a filmmaker and how you connected with the SCVN project?

Marc: It’s a very roundabout path coming to produce these documentaries. Before I suffered what I called my pre-midlife crisis, I was a computer programmer for the better part of a decade. It’s an inauspicious sort of beginnings. My partner at the time–she’s part of the project, Dr. Erin Jessee–she was doing her field research out in Rwanda. And she basically said, “do you want to quit your job and come to Rwanda with me?”

That was really the beginning of it. While Erin was doing her field work, I was volunteering at a local NGO, working with survivors of the genocide. The NGO was aimed at putting orphans of the genocide through university. We lived in the country for about a year and came to love the country and the people, and we were fortunate enough to hear some stories of what some of these–I call them kids, I guess, because I’m old–some of these awful things that these kids have gone through.

And I’d been doing some writing at the time; I’d always been a keen creative writer and keen photographer. And I thought, “I don’t want to be stuck in a cubicle for the rest of my life.” I thought, “you know what, given the photography and the love of writing, let’s try my hand at journalism.” I was fortunate enough to get into the journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa. And then, I was basically a freelance photojournalist for a number of years, primarily working across Africa.

And not just video. I can’t draw, but I’ve produced a number of graphic novels. I did one quite recently called House Without Windows, [2021, coauthored with Didier Kassaï] where I collaborated with local artists. We travelled around the country, looking at how the conflict there was impacting children. And we had this great marriage of Kassaï’s artwork and my photography.

But then I’ve always come full circle. My current job right now is basically a data analyst with BBC Monitoring. It’s a bit more sedentary but still looking at quite depressing things like jihadist activity in Mali or what have you. I still do the photography and the filmmaking whenever I can. And then, as you say, I was fortunate enough to get involved with this project.

Left: Jerome sitting in front of church. Middle: Madeleine on pier. Right: Marc filming the church. Photo credits: Marc Ellison and Erin Jessee

Ghada: It’s always inspiring to see how people end up in different places in different ways. How did you navigate the balance between documenting the survivors’ experiences and protecting their dignity and their privacy? And along those lines, how did you create a space that was both respectful and emotionally safe for the survivors to share their stories while there is a camera recording?

Marc: It’s tricky. I’ve dealt with many video projects in the past, even dealing with female former child soldiers in Uganda or victims of FGM [female genital mutilation] in Tanzania.

It’s tricky to get a balance of getting the person’s trust, not sensationalizing the story, and respecting their rights to anonymity, if that’s what they want.

I’ve been fortunate enough to know both Jerome and Madeleine, the focus of both stories. I’ve known them for several years. As in the case of Jerome, a colleague, I’ve worked with him for a number of years. And Madeleine, she’s almost a mother figure for me in many ways. And whenever we’re out there, she makes sure that she gives me lots of food. She’s a lovely lady. And I think that comes through in the documentary.

Arguably, it was maybe a disadvantage having known them for a few years. I had to take a step back and be a bit more objective and remove myself a little bit from the fact that I do know these people. On the flip side, there was an advantage because obviously I did know them. They, I think, trusted me. I’ve worked with them on and off over the years, and they’ve seen the work that I’ve done with Erin Jessee as well. I think there was a certain amount of trust there. I think a lot of the groundwork had already been laid.

But, I made it clear from the start that obviously we wanted to empower them in the storytelling, and both Jerome and Madeleine were really involved. When we talk about myself directing them, the film or both films, I would argue that in many ways, it was a co-direction. They were very clear that they wanted to be included in the story.

I think there was a mutual trust and mutual respect there in telling their story. And I think they know that I would never try and make them uncomfortable. I’d always try and put them at ease. Not just for these projects, but if there’s nothing that they want to do again, or if they do get a bit sort of upset or a bit emotional, we always make it clear from the start that we can stop.

They don’t have to answer that question at all, or we can come back to it later. It’s just about having a certain degree of empathy. Having had that experience over the last 10 or 15 years of dealing with people who have been traumatized by different conflicts or events that, you do learn. It becomes a gut instinct how to navigate these things.

Ghada: I feel sometimes it’s a skill to be nurtured. And then with the right mentality and enough experiences, we can nurture that skill of empathy, which is such a crucial skill to have in life.

Marc: Yeah, absolutely. And I should say it was an eye opener for myself as well.

Both with Jerome and Madeleine, despite having known them for many years, there were elements of their story that they shared with me for the first time on camera.

For example, there’s a bit of Madeleine’s story where we’re interviewing in the church. You see that at the beginning of her documentary, and she describes hiding underneath the bodies for a couple of hours. She’d never shared that with me before. I think that came out partly because she felt empowered; she wants people to know the horrible things that happened to her. But also, I think she felt she was in a safe environment.

I think often the fact that we’re doing it in a sort of guerrilla style, quite low key, I think that sort of makes them feel less nervous as well.

Madeleine atop the hillside. Photo credit: Photo credits: Marc Ellison and Erin Jessee

Ghada: Related to that, I’m curious about some ethical considerations that maybe guided your choices in visualizing and creating two documentaries about trauma and memory. Did you feel that you have a bigger responsibility as a filmmaker in comparison to other films that we might arguably say are fiction?

Marc: Because I know Jerome and Madeleine, I wanted to respect their rights and anonymity if that’s what they decided to do. I didn’t want to force them to go into great detail about what they went through.

It’s funny, actually. Jerome’s documentary was shown for the first time–was it in the Netherlands? …and the audience members were saying to the members of the team that were there, “Oh, where’s the conflict?” [It was first shown at the Wiener Library on October 23, 2025].

You’re expecting like an acted reenactment of what Jerome or Madeleine went through. And it was very much Jerome and Madeleine’s decision to take us to the places where some of these terrible things happened.

I mentioned Madeleine’s church and Madeleine’s story too, where there’s one moment where she’s thrown down a ravine by a Hutu neighbor. And those are things that she easily could have just told us about. I wouldn’t have forced her to take us to those locations and recount these things that happened.

And in terms of ethics too, there’s an interesting moment at the end of Madeleine’s story where you see her interacting with a perpetrator of genocide, so the man who basically killed her brother. So obviously there’s ethics involved with that.

With the man, Joel, the perpetrator, we made it very clear; we asked a number of times about getting his consent and asked him, “Are you aware there potentially could be backlash?” Even though, in the country, many perpetrators are out of prison and do live back in their original communities.

But we made sure to get signed consent and then, when Erin was back there quite recently showing him the finished film, just getting informed consent that he’s happy with [his] portrayal.

So, respecting not only survivors, but also the perpetrators, which, in itself is maybe controversial.

Marc filming conversation between Madeleine and Joel, a man responsible for her brother’s death. Photo credits: Erin Jessee

Ghada: Speaking about consent, with the case of Madeleine, you had already shot the film, and we already had drafts of the films. And then Madeleine had her reasons to ask to be anonymous. She didn’t want to have her face shown, and that was already after the process was done. As a filmmaker, how did you approach that?

Marc: I should say, it sounds like now she’s happy for it to be shown. That’s my understanding.

At the end of the day, if given the sensitivity of the topic and again, the fact that I’ve known her for so long and I really love, admire, and respect Madeleine. She’s an amazing person. Even if I wasn’t that close with Madeleine, it’s still the decision that you ultimately have to respect. There’s arguably ways in which we could have tried to re-edit it. It would have been quite a challenge just because she’s so in it; she’s in most scenes and obviously interacting with Joëlle, the artist.

Ultimately, had she wanted to remain anonymous in the film, there’s ways in which we could have tried to have made it work, be it with blurring, disguising the voice, removing any identifying information in the transcript as well. So, had we had to go down that route, of course, we would have respected her wishes.

Ghada: I’d like to zoom out a little bit and talk about films in general. How do you see films playing a role in preserving collective memory and understanding history? What is the main function for documentaries like these?

Marc: I think it’s primarily about informing, engaging, making people realize that things that are happening in a faraway place, even years ago, that they do matter. There are ripple effects of everything that’s happening around the world, now and back in 1994. And I think, the world’s only getting smaller.

It’s important that documentaries, for example, that they inform, they educate, and they engage.

And they leave a historical record, too. Madeleine’s a bit older than Jerome. Madeleine’s not going to be around forever. And this is probably the first time that her story has been properly documented. I think she’s told it to the community a number of times.

Every year in Rwanda to commemorate the genocide, you have an event called Kwibuka [“to remember” in Kinyarwanda], which basically commemorates the genocide. And so most years, survivors will recount their story. Of course, people in the community would have probably heard her story, maybe not all of it, but certainly have a rough idea of what she’s gone through.

But in terms of a more global international audience, documentary in general is a great way to get down for eternity somebody’s story. I would say that that’s the primary benefit I see: education and engagement.

Ghada: Both documentaries start as the initiative to show the survivor and the artist’s collaboration in the process of developing a graphic novel on the SCVN project. I like to think of this as having your first visualization of the story by the graphic artist. Then you are adding other layers of visualization as a filmmaker. Did the visuals or content of the graphic novels influence the development of the films?

Marc: I think it’s probably the other way around. I think because both artists, Michel and Joëlle, did visit Rwanda, but I don’t think they got to visit some of the key locations in Madeleine’s story or Jerome’s story. They’ve actually used a lot of the B-roll and the footage I shot as sort of visual references.

For me, one of the most incredible parts, certainly of the filming of Jerome’s story, is that development of the relationship between Michel, the artist, and Jerome. And I think that comes across in the film. Obviously, you just see a small part of it. I took hours and hours of footage, but it was really quite touching to see almost this father-son bond develop over the three or four days in Belgium.

But in terms of did the graphic novel inform the video, did the video perform the graphic novel, as I said, I think in this instance Michel and Joëlle drew a lot from the footage that we then shot in Rwanda, after the filming in Belgium.

Marc filming Jerome walking from behind. Photo credit: Erin Jessee

Ghada: I didn’t see this answer coming and I love it! I’m also curious about how much was planned and rehearsed versus how much was just improvised?

Marc: I’ll talk about kits to start with. In a perfect world, there probably would have been two or three crew members. Obviously, that’s not always possible. I mean, and to be frank, just because of money. That’s not just for this project; that’s for countless freelance projects I’ve done. Often funding for these types of projects is limited. And so you get used to just doing the best you can on a budget.

I’m fortunately quite used to having to do everything myself. I do the filming; I do the editing; I do the production, the directing, the writing of the script. I sort of joke that, you know, I used to have hair, but that’s sort of what happened. Because it can be intense, because you are doing everything.

Ghada: Yeah, filmmakers know what you’re talking about. And unfortunately, sometimes people who are not familiar with the process of making films tend to underestimate the need.

Marc: Yeah, and even just setting up, people think that when they just see like a one-on-one interview, they think, “Oh, okay, you just get the camera set up and away you go.”

Often you’re moving around multiple tripods, just to get the right framing, get the right lighting, then you’re setting up the lighting, and then you realize, oh, there might be background noise. So maybe you then need to move. It can take at least an hour, half an hour to an hour just to set up for a standard so-called “talking head” interview.

But yeah, because it was just me, it was a case of taking what I can carry. And particularly, because again, bear in mind that, a lot of the filming that we did in Rwanda, you’re out in the boonies basically in quite remote rural areas, so literally it’s whatever you can fit on a backpack. I had a Sony A9 camera and multiple lenses. A prime 35-millimeter, 50-millimeter, and then a 400-millimeter actually, which came in very handy as well. I had a couple of tripods, too.

And smartphones are so good nowadays. The video is so good on them that I basically just used my iPhone as a second camera. Primarily just for the wide angle and then using the good camera for the close-ups of Jerome and Madeleine. Because at the end of the day, it was most important to get the close-ups of them that, worst comes to worst, if my iPhone crapped out, you can always get set up shots afterwards of the wide shots. As a backup, I just had a Zoom audio recorder, but I try to keep it out of shot when possible. But that was just a backup for the audio, just in case there were any issues. Then I had a couple of Sennheiser wireless mics. And that’s literally about it.

I did also have a reflector for the light source as well because obviously when you’re filming somebody who’s dark-skinned, you don’t want to overexpose or underexpose. So we would have to use the lights and the reflector to try and expose Jerome or Madeleine a bit better.

And then just a laptop with Final Cut on it. That, in many ways, is the hardest bit after you’ve been filming for say 10, 12 hours a day, and you’re really tired. I always back it up on at least two external hard drives. Because again, it’s never thankfully happened to me, but we hear stories.

Jerome and Marc filming in a local field with cows. Photo credit: Marc Ellison and Erin Jessee

Ghada: So how much was improvised versus how much was rehearsed and planned?

Marc: We would tend to take it day by day in terms of, I guess, people’s energy levels and the weather because we were actually very lucky where we did a lot of the filming in Belgium just because, even though it was November, the weather was glorious. So we tried to keep it fairly organic.

And again, it was largely survivor-driven in the sense that I had some sort of preconceived ideas of types of shots and sequences I wanted to get, but every day, I tried to keep a bit of wiggle room for what we wanted to do and when we wanted to do it. Even at the end of a day’s filming too, we’d often had an informal debrief over dinner and say, “Okay, well, you know, what went well, what didn’t go well?”

Sometimes you have to roll with the punches, too, because we obviously really wanted to film inside the church with Jerome, to show where he was sleeping before the interim army came and attacked. But unfortunately, we couldn’t get permission.

There’s again a brief moment where you see Jerome near the river on the border of Burundi, and that’s where he fled to Burundi with his uncle. We were there for about 10 minutes and just getting some filming. And then some border police from around the side came over and asked what we were doing. And even though we had all the paperwork, they said, “No, sorry, you can’t film here.” Even though you have the paperwork, you just learn you’re not going to argue. So, we had to pack up, unfortunately.

As a filmmaker, you just have to be fairly easy going and often just brainstorm ideas on the spot.

I should say that in many ways both documentaries were co-directed by Jerome and Madeleine. They had some really good ideas and things that I wouldn’t have thought of. There’s a moment where, near the start of Jerome’s documentary, we’re filming him walking through the sort of bean fields where his home used to be.

And he says, “Oh, you know, when I’m here, I’ll often just come here and sit and think about how our family used to be on this hill.” And he’s like, “Oh, Marc, why don’t why don’t we just get a shot of me sitting in the bean field?”

So there’s this beautiful moment where you see Jerome sat amongst the bean.

There were moments like that with Madeleine as well; they were both really invested in telling the story and even though I’m credited as the director, they were very much a part of the storytelling and how they wanted it to be.

Ghada: You took us to my next question where I wanted to ask you about the collaborative nature of doing these documentaries. Did you have to at some point revise your approach based on feedback from any of the project team or artists?

Marc: I guess I’m thinking specifically of when we were all physically together for the filming in Belgium. I think a big part of that was just navigated by… every evening, all of us, the project leads, Jerome, Madeleine, myself, we’d all have dinner in the evenings, and we’d all be talking about the project. And, I think, informally talking about what we thought went well, or maybe things that people maybe didn’t like. Not that there were any sort of major disagreements! It was fairly easy going.

The only thing I can think of where there’s, maybe not disagreement, but debate was when […] one of the first cuts of Madeleine’s documentary had been put together. And I think there was some concern. There’s a moment where, because again, I wanted to get Joëlle and Madeleine out of the hotel and into a different space and kind of just engaging as human beings. There’s a moment where they’re on a swing set. And it’s quite a sweet moment because Madeleine had never been on a swing set in her life. And so she was kind of like a giddy schoolgirl.

It was quite funny in many ways. But I just raised that just because when some colleagues on the team first saw that cut, there was concern. I think it was coming from a good place. There was concern that this could maybe show Madeleine to be childlike or that people could have certain preconceived notions of what people from the African continent are like. There are negative connotations and perceptions, unfortunately. I think they were afraid that that could reinforce those preconceptions. But yeah, and again, it was a collegial discussion that we had via e-mail with members of the team, and obviously we did ask Madeleine if she was okay with the footage, but I certainly pushed to keep it in just because it was a spontaneous moment in the documentary that wasn’t really that scripted.

And it’s just a moment of levity and shows that despite everything that she’s been through, she’s still one of the most cheerful, well-adjusted people I know. I was keen to keep it in, but we did go back to Madeleine, just to say, “are you okay with it?” And she was fine.

Marc filming with Madeleine in the church where she was attacked. Photo credit: Marc Ellison and Erin Jessee

Ghada: How did you approach the story-building process through the editing? Were there moments you had to give up and you didn’t want to?

Marc: I think initially both films were only supposed to be 10 minutes. And I think Jerome’s ended up being, goodness, I think 13, maybe, maybe a bit more? And Madeleine’s is way longer. This was a luxury to have, because often a lot of the work that I’ve done, for example, for the BBC, you’ve got 10 minutes, and it has to be 10 minutes. And so you do have to make those hard editorial judgments.

I went to Charlotte Schallié, the leader of the project, and said, “do you mind if I do more?” And she said, “fill your boots!” If I had to rigidly stick to 10 minutes, then yes, there would have had to have been some hard decisions to have been made.

But in terms of putting the film together, I was very keen not to have too much narration. In Madeleine’s story, she doesn’t speak English, so we could have had a narrator give some of the context of the genocide, but I always like, when editing, to try and keep the person’s voice in as much as possible to keep you in the story. So that’s why there’s no real narration. You’re just hearing the voice of Jerome or Madeleine. There’s minimal text on the screen. There’s just a little bit of context at the beginning of both.

Ghada: To sum up our talk about all these technical aspects of the process, what would be your main advice to filmmakers who’d like to explore trauma-informed storytelling such as human rights, mass atrocity, and other social themes, especially through documentaries? What would be some advice that you would feel it’s important to share with them?

Marc: Oh, goodness me. People have literally written books on this!

It seems obvious–but I’ve seen journalists not do this–is just to listen, not only to what people are saying during the interviews, but what are they comfortable with, what are they not comfortable with. It’s important to remember, this isn’t about you as the journalist. This is about them, about what they want.

Yes, in a perfect world, you’d want them to relay every detail of what happened, but if they’re not comfortable, you can’t push them. I think it’s really important. In terms of mental health, it’s really important to stress that if they don’t want to answer the question, they don’t have to. If they want to stop, they can. When I was working on different projects across Africa, it was important to make sure that you’ve got a counsellor on hand if somebody does get upset and they want to sit with a counsellor and have a chat.

It’s important for you as the filmmaker to have resources that you can rely on in terms of unpacking things that you’ve heard. It’s quite sad in a way, but when you do this type of work for many, many years, you do become a bit detached. Well, I always liken it to a mental scab in the sense that when you’ve heard so many awful things, after a while you do become a bit detached. But every now and then you do hear a story that picks off that scab. So it’s really important to take mental health seriously when you’re dealing with this kind of thing.

Ghada: How did you manage also the emotional weight yourself as the person who also is listening to these stories nonstop, dealing with the material, having to think about it and having to visualize it and even be there in the place of the event?

Marc: It’s a curse and a blessing when you’re a one-man band doing everything, but often in the moment of the interview, you’re trying to juggle so much that yes, of course you were listening and paying attention for follow-up questions, but you’re also so focused on adjusting the camera angles. “Is the lighting okay? Is the sound coming through okay?”

Very famous journalists like Lynsey Addario or James Nachtwey have said that having that camera in front of your face when you’re taking a photo is almost a barrier that allows you to sort of distance yourself a bit. It’s only afterwards when you’re going through the rushes or when you’re looking at your photos of the video. For example, with Madeleine’s story, I was aware of what she was saying, but it’s only when I was watching back, there’s a moment in the church where she mimics the sound of the cries of the children dying in the church.

Of course, I would have clocked it in the interview, but as I said, you’re so busy keeping an eye on everything. It was only when I was sat literally at this desk, doing the editing, I was like, “Oh my God, it’s chilling.”

If you want to do this kind of work, you do have to just compartmentalize it in the moment and almost have that sort of healthy detachment. You need to watch out for any potential red flags for secondary trauma or what have you.

Right & Left: Marc filming and taking photos of Madeleine. Photo credits: Marc Ellison and Erin Jessee

Ghada: Those two documentaries, like other SCVN documentaries, will be used in genocide and human rights education, so they will be shown at travelling exhibits, in the classroom, even online for the general public. What kind of response do you hope for from the diversity of audiences?

Marc: We’ve talked about the fact that the primary role of documentaries is engage, inform, and educate.

But I think as much as we’ve just talked about the doom and gloom of trauma, I think ultimately both of the documentaries are quite uplifting. They have quite positive endings. And that’s why Jerome’s story is called Why We Dance: the importance of reconciliation of the battle to move on.

And the strength of character that Jerome and Madeleine have that they’re not victims; they are survivors. They’re both incredible people. Jerome is amazingly successful. He’s an instructor at a really good university in Kigali. Madeleine’s a high-up community leader, very well respected.

That’s just to try and get people beyond that notion of victimhood, that victims don’t need to be powerless and can be really involved and active in how they not only present their narratives but also showing the horrible things that they’ve been through, that there is a way forward.

I mean, I don’t think it’s been easy for either of them, but ultimately, I want people to take away a sort of message of the positivity of hope. And I think that comes across, and I think obviously people watching it won’t probably ever get to meet Jerome or Madeleine, but I think they do give a sense of what they really are like. They’re not the sorts of people to act up to the camera. They’re very, very down to earth.

I guess the hope is for people to relate to them as human beings and not as victims.

Ghada: Thank you so, so much for your time first and also for being very generous and sharing all your input and experiences and advice and beautiful insights. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Marc: The pleasure was mine.

Filming Anonymity: Interview with Olaf Markmann

interviews21 March 202628 March 2026

The following interview is adapted from a conversation on January 23, 2026 between SCVN Media Lead Maya Wei Yan Linsley and filmmaker Olaf Markmann, who worked with SCVN’s Iraq/Syria Research Cluster on the documentary short film “I Just Keep Going.” Olaf’s film offers a glimpse into the collaboration between comic artist Birgit Weyhe and Yezidi survivor Jilan (pseudonym), and explores Jilan’s experiences in northern Iraq when the Islamic State (ISIS) began a genocide against the Yezidi people in August of 2014. Since Jilan’s identity remains anonymous, Olaf’s approach required sensitivity, confidentiality, and technical skills to conceal her while filming and editing. This interview explores Olaf’s approach to filmmaking, how he connected with the SCVN project, and his considerations when filming with Jilan to ensure her privacy while sharing her experiences.

Olaf Markmann filming for “I Just Keep Going” in Birgit Weyhe’s studio.

The photographs featured in this interview are a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Olaf’s time filming with Birgit and Jilan in July 2025. The photos from Birgit’s studio were taken by Elif Eker and the photos from Bergen-Belsen Memorial were taken by Kjell Anderson.

Maya: Thanks for being here with me. Let’s talk about your film. How did you end up working with SCVN? How did you find the project?

Olaf: SCVN actually found me through Leyla Ferman. I used to work with her, years ago, on a Yezidi project. We did a couple of interviews for her project, and she now and then seemed to work for SCVN, and recommended me.

And so, one morning I woke up and had an e-mail from Jennifer [Sauter] saying, “Hey, we have this recommendation from Leyla, and we have this film project with a lot of information, and read through it, take your time and let me know what you think.” And I went through it, having my coffee in the morning, and I was like, that sounds really great! I’m always in for a good cause. And then I said, yes, of course. That’s how I got on the project.

Maya: You were working on something related to Yezidi stories before?

Olaf: Yes. With Leyla together, we had a project for a memorial organization in Germany. There was a project funded for only two years. Leyla is Kurdish herself, but she knows the language. So she was perfect for doing the interviews. And we had like, I don’t know, 12 or 15 interviews of Yezidi survivors from the 2014 genocide in the north of Iraq.

I have a legacy of doing interviews for the memorial for Bergen-Belsen, for the concentration camp, and for the Nazi prison in Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel. I did close to 100 interviews for the memorial with survivors, with second generation survivors, sometimes third generation survivors, because you have family traumas.

And that’s where we met, because I’m recommended internally at the memorial. And then I met Leyla and then we did the Yezidi project.

Right: Tapestry depicting a Yezidi temple. Centre & left: Olaf films Birgit Weyhe and Jilan at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.

Maya: That’s really cool. How did you come to start doing that kind of work? Were you always interested in that?

Olaf: Not necessarily. It was because of a colleague that was asked by one of the interviewers from Bergen-Belsen. They had a first round of interviews [with Holocaust survivors]– let’s say in the late 90s or beginning of the 2000s – collected for a big exhibition, which was with post-production and everything, and planning a lot of work that took years. It kind of silenced all these interviews for a time.

Then Diana Gring, from the memorial in Bergen-Belsen, asked a colleague that she knew, [and] he asked me because I have all the gear. And then I talked to Diana, and we liked each other and started working [together] in 2010.

Maya: I like hearing about how people’s journeys have led them to where they are now.

Olaf: The beginning of the story is usually a really, really tragic one. Everybody has lost someone in the worst way imaginable. And that is the bad part of the story, which you have to hear if you want it or not all the time. There are similarities in those stories, but they all differ from the point when they leave the concentration camp, of course, because if they don’t leave, I wouldn’t interview them. And then that’s when it becomes interesting.

And most of the people are really nice people, thankful people, decent people. Most of them made something out of [their lives] because, “Hey, we survived the hell in a concentration camp. What else can kill me? Come on, let’s go for whatever life throws at us.” And it grounds me. It used to ground me a lot when I did these interviews back then, because I worry about things. I worry about my health, I worry about my family, I worry about taxes.

And when I go out of these interviews, I’m like, my life is perfect compared to other people, really. It’s warm in my room. I have something in my fridge. There’s still some money in my bank account. We’re all kind of healthy. And we live in Germany. It’s good. Really, it’s good.

It’s good to have this kind of interview going on. And I tell those people a lot of times that I’m always a little grounded and very thankful for what I have when I’m going out of these interviews, because of the stories that you hear that you sometimes really cannot believe.

Maya: And so with Jilan’s story, how did you feel while you were making her film, and how were you taking care of yourself?

Olaf: The thing is, she speaks German because she’s been living here for 10 years. She speaks very good German. But once she gets emotional in her story and goes really deep in, she switches to Kurdish, so I’m not able to understand. And this is why we have Leyla also in the movie to translate.

Birgit, the comic artist, who is talking to her, understands what she’s saying. And in post-production, I got the transcript from the interview, and most of the things I first heard then, or I read then, because I couldn’t hear it on the day, except for some key points. Leyla’s always translating the main issues, but not everything word to word. And on the other hand, because I’m the filmmaker, I have to take care of the cameras, of the lights, of the sound, of the surrounding, of any noises, basically of everything.

Because I knew that Leyla was there, as a foundation or as a security for Jilan on the one hand, and for translating on the other hand. I knew that she’s very protected and I don’t really have to [worry] that much for Jilan, because she has Leyla, who she had known for years and trusts her.

And she also knew Birgit before. They had some meetings for the first draft of the comics. And I was the only new person there. But I guess Leyla said, “Olaf is a good guy. You will like him. He’s always fine. He did several interviews with [survivors].” So I guess that was a working ground, that was pretty good to start.

Maya: So when you were actually making the film, you were more focused on the technical aspects of the filmmaking and making sure everything was running smoothly?

Olaf: Yeah. More or less, because I had to, I was alone. The budget, as you know, was moderate. I tried to bring an assistant in for the two shooting days, but considering the budget, it was impossible. Oh, and there was a lot to do, but I’ve done this for over 25 years as a freelancer, so I know what I’m doing.

Maya: What was it like for you during the filming process and the editing, making sure that you were protecting Jilan’s privacy? Because I know she’s supposed to be anonymous, and you don’t see her face. So how did you go about that?

Olaf: That was hard. Hard for me because when I said yes to Jennifer, I’ll do the movie, then she mentioned, well, “you remember in the briefing that I sent you, she needs to be anonymous. We cannot see her face, to protect the family.”

Olaf and Jilan in between filming.

I said, “yes. Now, as you mention it again, I remember. That sounds like a challenge, but I’m up for the task lightheartedly”. And I had a location scout in the office, but we were shooting with Birgit in Hamburg. I was there, I don’t know, two weeks before, just to see how it looks and where I can place the cameras securely. So one camera can always run, and the other camera is like run-and-gun [fast-paced filming with minimal gear].

Since I will not see her face, I always have a fallback camera that I can cut to if something happens with the other one. And I was able to look. When I stay here, I won’t see her face. When I was here, I can hide her face behind this. There was a lot of planning of having a lot of camera angles to keep the movie, and the footage, interesting for the viewer because, in my opinion, if you cannot see the person’s face, it is so hard.

Maya: So what kind of choices were you making when you edited the film to deal with that? What kind of decisions have you been making to bring out the impact?

Olaf: I tried to bring out the impact over the story because the interview is like 2 hours long, and the film can only be like 10 or 12 minutes. You have a little freedom.

But I had to read this two-hour long interview, like 50, 60, 80 pages, and filter it, “Okay, what is the key point?” So the viewer can see the story, what happened, how horrific is it, what happened then to her when she’s separated, and how she escaped. This is why she’s here now and can tell her story. And what happened in between is the horrific thing that people need to hear to connect, of course.

And I just tried to build a story around this, but Jilan, maybe due to her age, was not so open about what really happened to her. I talked to Birgit also about it before and after. Jilan is very closed off in saying things. She’s protecting herself, I guess. Maybe she doesn’t want to think about it again. I think it was really, really, really, really bad for her being in captivity. But what really happened, it always scratches the surface and opens the door just a little bit and then closes it back again.

Reading the interview in the translation was difficult. I needed to have an impact, but I cannot see her face; I cannot see emotions. So what she’s saying has to be impactful. And I think I found the passages that make sense. I have the story in these minutes, so I can build up a story in these minutes that I have, with the impact that we need, to let the audience have these feelings for her.

Hopefully, I cannot really keep at it anymore because I’m working since May on this movie. And sometimes, I don’t really know. I need to step back and let it rest for some weeks and then go back at it again. To say, “OK, is it good or is it bad? Was it the right choice to do?”

Maya: Wow, it sounds like the editing was really the big challenge.

Olaf: Yeah. It was. You say a lot of times: “the movie is made in post-production.” There it all comes together; there you build a story. I’m usually not of this opinion because I’m a cinematographer. The story is built on set or in pre-production. But this time I totally agree.

Yes, I had to make the story. I made sure during shooting that I had everything, that everything is there that I need to tell the story image-wise, footage-wise. And then I had the freedom to do everything in post-production, just to have enough footage of here, enough footage of there.

And I needed a lot of what we call B-roll. So we need a lot of footage, like a wide shot, a tighter shot from another angle, just to have these one, two, three-minute passages where she is speaking, I need something that the viewer can see. Maybe some reactions from her, so I can underline what she’s saying with some footage.

I think we did good, and hopefully people are sensitive enough to get the story. I really think that.

Close-up of Jilan being filmed in interview with Kjell and Leyla.

Maya: So in your perfect world, what kind of impact would this film have on its viewers?

Olaf: I don’t know the word. I have the German word, but I just don’t know the translation to English. In German, it’s Empörung [indignation]… I want them to be angry about the situation.

I want them to be angry about the injustice, about racism, about fascism, about religious fanaticism. I want them to be angry and loud about it. And I want them to stand up and say, “OK, I don’t know what, but I want to do something about it. I want to take action and not sit silent at home and doom scroll till death.”

Hopefully it has the same impact. And if it’s just one of 100 people that starts doing something, that would be enough. That’s why I’m doing this.

Maya: How do you think that film, specifically, has the potential to inspire anger and inspire people to action?

Olaf: I think people can relate because they see things they maybe already know, or things they don’t know. And I feel like if you’re doing this kind of documentary work, you are documenting things that are already there. And people can, I think, better relate to things that they know are real, and are more grounded in realism, than fictional movies.

Fictional movies can better play with emotions and evoke emotions. It has to be made good for the viewers. If you’re not interested in the topic and just watch it on some documentary channel, chances are maybe not so big that it has the impact, that it has a movie that is just built for evoking emotions in you. That’s why it’s made.

Maya: Yeah, I agree. And these films, including yours, I think our hope is that they will end up in classroom settings and students will be able to see them, which is maybe, you know, the best place to have a film like that.

Maya: Could you talk a little bit more about the ethical considerations behind your work on the film? I’m interested to hear about the work you did preparing to make the film, and the things you were thinking about.

Olaf: Because I did so much work for the memorials, I did not think that much about ethical considerations because they are imminent for me. Really, my main concern was, how do I get impactful footage without showing her face? That was my main concern, because that is like three quarters of the work on these shooting days. And I had to check on the time and so on. Ethics were mandatory and an obligation, but I didn’t really have to think about it.

I was very polite when I first met Jilan. We met her at lunch. I first did some footage with Birgit, the comic artist, and then we did a little interview with her. And then we went to lunch. And there I met Jilan for the first time. And after lunch, we just went right into an interview, going over comic footage and talking about the story. I had to be a little sensitive with her and not overwhelm her with technical aspects. That was my main goal for the, let’s say, first hour. She has to feel confident and secure and warm so she can open up herself a little bit.

Maya: Yeah, totally. Did Birgit’s comic drawing work influence your vision for the film at all?

Olaf: I really have to think about that because I saw the comic first on the shooting day. After the shooting day, she sent me the first 15 pages, and I was thinking of incorporating some of the comic images, but I didn’t feel they were right in the movie that I was doing. I did a very slow pan over the first pictures because they were perfectly aligned with what she was saying. “I was young. I played with Arabs and Muslims and Yezidis, we were all friends. We slept together. We ate together. Everything was fine. I wanted to become a doctor.” And I saw this all-in-one comic picture. And that was perfect for going into the movie.

Olaf filming the opening sequence panning over pages on rollers.

But then it was like, I looked over the other pictures that I had and was like, “no, these don’t really fit.” So I put them aside. I watched it; I read it. But they were not really fitting because it was a lot of story before everything happened. That wasn’t really my main point for the movie, so I didn’t really need that comic much.

But I must say, I like Birgit’s style a lot. And now, I don’t know if you know, but we had a little reshoot three months after principal shooting because Jilan was not really satisfied with her answers because, she said, “it’s not good that I switched between German and Kurdish.”

I was like, but it doesn’t get more realistic than this. Going emotional, going to your mother language. I mean, everybody can relate to this.

And let’s be honest, maybe 1% of the people that watch this movie can either understand Kurdish or German. So they don’t really know what you are saying. They are reading subtitles.

But she was pretty adamant about it. And they told me, well, we are recording this with an iPhone. I said, “you don’t record anything. I’m coming over!” And we did another round of shooting, of course, hiding her face. And I did another concept for the room that we were in. The room was one of the smallest rooms I ever shot in. So it didn’t really look nice.

But there was one situation where she started crying a little bit and had like two, three sentences with a crying voice. And really, I still get goosebumps when I think about it. It wasn’t that present to me when I was in the situation with her, because I knew she was protected by Leyla. She was with us. And I couldn’t see her either because she was behind this white wall. I just saw a shadow. I heard her. And I was like, “Oh, I’m curious what she’s saying,” because she did it all in Kurdish. I didn’t understand a word. And so I had to wait for the translation, and I had to scroll through the footage to find it, to look after the time codes and see, okay, what is she saying at this point?

Fortunately, she said something I could use. But I hate to show people crying. I really, really hate it. I don’t want to see people crying in the movie. But this is the most impactful scene ever I had with Jilan. And I was very – I’m sorry to say that – but I was very thankful for the scene. And I edited it in. And Jennifer agreed to it. She said, it’s really, really, really impactful.

Screenshot from one of the different draft versions of the filmed interview with Jilan.

Maya: How was your experience working with SCVN? What was it like working with all the different levels of team members and support people to create the film?

Olaf: I just actually worked together with Kjell Anderson. He was present and did the long interview. He was quite helpful and a very nice guy. But most of the discussions I had with Jennifer, we had two Zoom calls and endless emails. And I like Jennifer. She has very good energy. And she’s really deep into the project and really wholeheartedly in it. I like this energy. I think you must to have this energy on this topic. You cannot handle this like, I don’t know, any commercial for any perfume or shoe or dresses or whatever.

You have to bring – you must want to do this, and you feel it with Jennifer. And I haven’t talked to anyone else. My artistic freedom was very limited in the feedback. But okay, it’s straightforward feedback. So I’ll deal with it. If I say no, then it’s no and it’s fine. I had Jennifer also say, “Olaf, do it as you want it. I thought about it once again and I think it’s good what you said, and do it.”

That’s the kind of professionalism that I really admire. That was really on the same eye level that I had with Jennifer. The working experience, that was really, really, really nice. I wish I had every producer would be like Jennifer. My life would be so much easier. So kudos to you, Jennifer, if you see this!

Leyla and Kjell in between filming the interviews.

Maya: What advice would you give to other filmmakers working on storytelling and documentary about human rights and atrocities?

Olaf: You need to deal with it, and that it’s not always easy. If you want to deal with atrocities and human rights and so on, I think you will have seen maybe a lot in movies and magazines and photos that you know what you’re up to do. So hopefully you’re not shocked by what you might hear or see when you start working on it, and find yourself a project or a survivor that is willing to tell you a story and you make something out of it.

Like we said, it grounds me, and I’m very thankful for the experiences that I can share and collect and distribute. On the other hand, I am shocked and horrified that this is possible in 2025. Sometimes it seems like we’re still in the Middle Ages or in the Stone Age – how people treat other people. It’s unbelievable and it leaves me speechless a lot of times.

I learned when I come home from shooting and when I shut down the computer, I don’t think about it anymore. To protect myself and my family, especially my wife.

Because usually we talk when I come home, “how was your shooting day? What did you do?” Now I’m doing a lot of things for the Nazi prison in Wolfenbüttel near Brunswick. And we have the children and the grandchildren of the inmates that are killed there, that have been killed there in ’44, ’45. And there’s a trauma in the family. It’s not that horrifying of a story, of course, because they usually don’t know their grandparents because they were killed in the prison. They just know the traumatized grandmother, usually.

But these people are nice people, and we have a chat about this and that. They call the memorial because they heard their grandfather was executed there, and somebody who’s executed must have been a really, really bad person. When they call them, sometimes people are crying. They tell them, “yes, the name is so and so. Yes, we have him in our database. And the family really needs to know what he did. He must have been a horrible person.” Well, yes, I look it up. We have like a small database where we can like look right now. We have a big database where it takes us some time to research it. And Martina, that is my interview person that I constantly work with in the prison, this one call she said, “oh, yes, I have the name here. He stole a chicken.”

That was it. He was executed for stealing a chicken in 1944. That was Nazi Germany. It’s called Volksschädling [offensive term used during the Nazi regime that translates as “harmful organism”] which is somebody who does bad things towards his tribe, his peoples. And the family is so relieved, and of course they are then willing to come to visit the memorial and maybe give an interview. I get to know these people, and they’re nice people.

I remember one story years ago, maybe 10 years ago, in Bergen-Belsen from the concentration camp, we had a survivor from Bergen-Belsen. She was way over 90 years old. And she was 16 when she was in the concentration camps. And she was in Auschwitz. She was in Bergen-Belsen. She saw everything. She made the big hunger march. And she really saw everything. And this story, because it was in German, I could understand everything. It was the worst story I’ve ever heard.

And on that evening when my wife asked, “how was today? How was the survivor?” I said, “Not today. I cannot tell. Later.”

That was the worst story.

Maya: It’s good advice. Keeping a boundary. You need to. Even with my work on the project, I need to. Sometimes I have to close my computer and take a walk, not think about it.

Maya: Before we wrap up, Is there anything else you want to share or highlight about this project?

Olaf: I think I said everything. I put the inside out, so to say. It was an honour and a privilege to do a project like this, which came out of nowhere. Just in my inbox one morning. And usually it looks like spam. I was close to deleting it, but then I saw the name Leyla Ferman, and I was like, “Oh, Leyla, maybe I should read the mail. Maybe it’s important.” And yes, the rest is history.

Maya: Lovely. Thank you for chatting with me. I loved hearing your insights.

Olaf: Thank you, Maya. It was a pleasure to meet you and to talk to you.

From left to right: Leyla, Birgit, Jilan and Olaf filming in Birgit’s studio.

‘Storytelling is collaborative work’: Interview with Barbara Yelin discusses her relationship with Emmie Arbel and the SCVN project

interviews16 December 202517 December 2025

On July 22, Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) Research Assistant Lucie Kotesovska met with Barbara Yelin, an internationally acclaimed artist and author of several book-length visual narratives who was part of the original Partnership Development Grant ‘Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling In Holocaust & Human Rights Education’. This grant produced the graphic narrative But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, and sparked a five-year collaboration with survivor Emmie Arbel. In this interview, Barbara discusses the creation of her graphic novel, Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory, and reflects upon what has contributed to its notable critical acclaim and success with readers in several countries.

Lucie: In 2023, you published a graphic novel titled Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory. This book is an expansion of the story based on your conversations with Emmie, which was published in the 2022 collection But I Live. Since its release, The Colour of Memory has gained wide critical acclaim. It is now available in four languages. What do you think makes this book so well-received, and what factors might have contributed to its success?

Barbara: The most important factor is Emmie’s voice—her words and her story, which she told me so directly and frankly. These words connect not only with me but they get a direct connection to every reader. Then there’s everything she said without words: with silence, in the breaks between the words, or while smoking a cigarette…. While visually meeting her, her person, her character.

The second factor is me trying to transform all of that into a piece of narration within the format of a graphic novel and with its tools. This element is communicating in several layers, emotionally, and also unexpectedly with the reader.

Emmie’s story has a very strong connection with the present time. While it is, of course, located in the past, she is here today and she tells us about the connection between her memories and the present, and what this connection means to her. Our collaboration and my work was to make that accessible for the reader. Emmie’s story is very important from the historical point of view, and it is important to be heard because there are not many survivors alive anymore. Her voice also speaks for those who did not survive. It is an important voice.

Lucie: This leads me to my next question. In what ways was working on Emmie’s story special for you and different from your work on your other books? How has this collaboration between you and Emmie shaped and changed your approach to storytelling?

Barbara: It was the first time for me to speak directly with the person who told me her story—her childhood memories—in person. I didn’t only research her story in history books, or in archives, or in documents, or through other people who knew her. It was her herself. And she was so generous, giving me much of her time and of herself. She trusted me. I’m deeply grateful for that. Without this trust, the book would not have happened as it did.

It was a constant learning process to understand how strong and fragile Emmie is at the same time. For me personally, it was important to learn about how trauma forms, and how someone like Emmie is dealing with that until today. How violence of the perpetrators has consequences until today and, at the same time, how Emmie did succeed in not remaining a victim.

In this project I found out that drawing, and putting together images and sketches, is more than depicting a narration or depicting a story or depicting history. It is actually a process of memorizing.

We communicated, of course, with words, and Emmie told me her memories in many hours of conversations. After that—sometimes already during our conversations, but mostly after that—I tried to put what she told me into drawings. And by doing that, I found more questions. I understood that there was more to ask. And then I showed her the sketches and then I would ask her new questions. She could tell me, ‘This might be right like this. You can change it to be like this’, or ‘I do not remember that. Please ask the researchers. Ask the historians. They have to find out’. So, this kind of sketching was something that really enriched our dialogues and actually helped her memories become clearer.

Sometimes we included Charlotte [Schallié] or some of the historians on the team. So, it’s a mixture of ‘we’ and ‘I’. It’s a collective work. If we did not know, we had to decide. Maybe there was a memory gap or an empty space of memory or a traumatic space of memory. Sometimes, we tried to fill the gap with documentary knowledge that we could obtain from the historians. Other times, we actually left these… spaces transparently free and empty to show that there is something that is not catchable at the moment.

This was new ground. It changed my understanding not only of telling history or retelling history, but also of what to include in storytelling. This means anything that cannot be said in words but still needs to be shown to be there. The importance of showing what is absent and giving the space to it.

Lucie: We will get to the question of silence. But first, let me ask you another question. You described in detail your process of collaborating with Emmie on her story. How did this collaboration or collaborative relationship evolve? How did it change over time?

Barbara: There was a kind of a direct connection with Emmie from the beginning. And that worked both ways. We got to know each other better as we spent more time together, and a friendship began to grow. I think she knew she didn’t have to make anything lighter for me. She told me the difficult and sad things. But we could also speak about very normal things—we knew what kind of coffee the other liked to drink and things like that. It was important to spend time with each other, and it helped us during the long process.

And Emmie soon understood the medium of the graphic novel and its potential. She saw the results of my work, but she also listened to the reactions of others who read parts of the graphic novel before it was published. It was important for both of us to see what it does to the reader, and that her story gets a kind of accessibility to the reader. There were people deeply impressed by her story, telling her, ‘I didn’t know it like this before’, and that was important for her to trust the medium.

Emmie told me many times that some drawings of her weren’t accurate and she wanted me to change it—which I did. But she was absolutely generous in letting me decide about the dramaturgy—how I built the story and which parts I chose—and how I drew and told the heavy, traumatic memories. I learned that Emmie is someone who really knows about her limits. She told me when she wanted to have a break, she told me when she didn’t want something in the book, she let me know when something was missing, so I could absolutely rely on that. That was very helpful for me. She took on all responsibility for her side of the collaboration.

Emmie reviewing pages on Zoom with Barbara. Photo credit: Marion Reis.

Lucie: I notice that you even included these moments in the book when Emmie says, ‘Oh, I need a break’, and she turns to her computer. You made them an important part of the narrative.

Barbara: That was of course something that became relevant. I included these moments in the book because they are special. They were also important for the transparency of the narration and its documentary aspect.

I learned to be silent with Emmie. In the beginning, I remember, I often tried to fill the silence. But later, I did not do that anymore. Now, when I listen to the recordings, I heart it that we could actually be silent together for long minutes. This is even more special for me because normally I speak a lot! But with Emmie, we were able to be calm together.

Lucie: Speaking of silence, how do you work with it visually in the novel? I noticed that you incorporate it quite often. Sometimes, you even make it speak.

Barbara: Yes, I included the parts where Emmie would not speak or when she took a break. This is part of her testimony, and I found visual solutions to show that. There’s the panel, the square in the graphic novel. It is a kind of a frame. It might also hold a silent space. Like this, I can actually show silence, and we can see and feel that there’s silence in between words. I was also focusing on the rhythm of the words when I put parts of sentences in sequenced panels and then had a silent panel. We can, of course, listen to silence—in recordings, in movies, in documentaries. But I think that there is a special kind of significance in presenting it visually—the absence of words. Like this, I could really work with these renderings of silence. Another example: You have speech balloons in graphic novels, and normally you’d fill them with words, but you can also leave a speech balloon empty. It’s a way of showing that someone is not saying anything. And I could include silence in landscapes or in parts where we only see almost abstract forms. There’s nothing really to recognize, to identify, and still this drawing will ‘speak’ to you as a reader.

Lucie: Do you think that there were more moments like this in The Colour of Memory than in your previous visual stories?

Barbara: Yes. For example, I worked with almost black colour when Emmie told me what the colour of memory is. At first, it was a complete abstract drawing. I put black and blue colours on paper, and only afterwards I drew the face of Emmie digitally, her person surrounded by these shapes and forms of abstract colour. And then she speaks about humiliation, and we see that part by part her face, her expression gets invisible. In the end, we can see only the eyes. And only when she lights her cigarette is she visible again.

Page from Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory.

Lucie: In The Colour of Memory, Emmie speaks about some traumatic events in her life perhaps for the first time outside of her therapist’s office. You mentioned how she became open and shared things that are not light with you. Could you reflect on some of the challenges of this sharing for you? How did you take care of yourself during this process?

Barbara: When I met Emmie, she had already been working with her memories. She had a ten-year-long therapy in the middle of her life and had been speaking publicly about her memories and about history for decades. I was absolutely not the first one who listened to her, and I was not the first one who asked questions. I’m not an expert in psychology, I’m neither an academic expert in psychology, nor a historian, nor a trauma expert, so I tried to do my best there. I learned about oral history and how to ask questions without going too quick or too far, without doing any damage with my questions, and how not to retraumatize the other person. Then I found out that Emmie knew perfectly what she was doing—when she needed a break, when she did not want to answer, and what she told me in private. And still, of course, it was a very sensitive work that we did together.

Sometimes we cried—sometimes she cried, sometimes me…. I learned that this is part of the work… To memorize, to remember, is work. It’s memory work, like Charlotte said.

I did not only have to learn how much Emmie was affected by everything, but also that it affected me to listen to her story. I needed breaks, and I needed to reflect upon what she told me, and it brought up emotions. Sometimes we had to stop. Sometimes I was very exhausted. Sometimes, of course, she was very exhausted. So, I learned that this is part of this work.

On the other hand, I always wanted to find a way to create narration about her. We had always this book in sight as our future outcome. We had a mission. So we pushed through, and I learned about myself that I need a good balance between listening and really being open there, and then again to keep more distance and take time to process things.

I was glad that I had partners during this process like Charlotte Schallié. I could speak with her. I could speak also with Emmie and Charlotte, the three of us. There were some points when this was necessary. I had a historian, an expert, Alexander Korb and also Andrea Löw, who were amazingly helpful with details about the Holocaust.

I had Matthias Heyl, head of the Education Department at the Ravensbrück Memorial. He is the person who knows Emmie best, and the other way around, she knows him very well. So, it was collaborative work because there were many, many people who also had the interest to bring Emmie’s story into this graphic novel and who helped me. And there were Emmie’s daughters, who also took part in this dialogue several times and who could also read the graphic novel before we published it.

I had trauma experts, I had also my editor from my publishing house, who was helping me with the specifics of the graphic novel. It was a complex dialogue involving many people. I’m truly grateful. I could never have done this work without this support, and I think none of us could have done it without each other.

Lucie: Both But I Live and The Colour of Memory have been published with the support of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project. How did the project help you more specifically as you worked on the two publications? And is there anything that might have been done differently in order to support you better?

Barbara: I think it was an amazing and special support from the start. We all worked on it together. I say ‘together’ now, but Charlotte and her team had already been working on this before I became part of the project. There was a conference at the beginning, even before I had the first longer conversations with Emmie, where I could meet historians and show them my initial approaches. That was incredibly supportive, helpful, and important. So, there was a lot of work done around us, which was very necessary.

And there were other aspects that I especially appreciate: connecting art and research. That is something I am incredibly interested in. What is historical research and what is artistic research? I’m not really sure if ‘artistic’ is the right word—art-related research. Sometimes, these two are actually similar, and it was mind-blowing to understand that and realize that we are enriching each other’s work.

Lucie: Do you feel that this realization is something that the project enabled?

Barbara: Absolutely. The project enabled that, and it also enabled the survivor-centred aspect—the understanding that the survivors do not work for a historical project, but it is the historians and the artists who work to understand the perspective of people like Emmie better.

It was already fixed in the contract that it would be always Emmie’s story, and if Emmie did not agree with what was happening with this graphic novel, then it wouldn’t be published. To really understand who owns the story was an important question that Charlotte asked us. Now we have not only the graphic novel, but there is also a new archive of all the conversations between Emmie and me, the archive of all the documents and all the sources we found and collected.

Who owns that? Who is the owner? Is it the university? Is it the artist? Is it the reader? Or is it Emmie in the end? Or is it the collective? There is no answer. I think the best answer would be Emmie, but it was collaborative work. So, absolutely, that widened my understanding of who’s owning a story. It is important to understand that storytelling is not a work of a solo genius of the past, mostly male, who owns the story. Storytelling like this is a collaborative work. This insight is something that I was really profiting from. In this sense, this project was successful the entire time. It’s not comparable to any other project I know.

And now, the project is expanding, producing more stories from different perspectives, from different times, and for more genocides. That is a truly deep approach.

Lucie: Let’s talk about the exhibition, or a series of exhibitions, based on But I Live that you helped to curate. How important was it for you to be able to take part in this process? Did you feel that you were able to communicate some aspects of Emmie’s story more clearly or effectively in this way?

Barbara: I was very glad that we could do the exhibition. I suggested it to the Comicsalon festival, and I asked Jakob Hoffmann to be my partner during the curation of it. I was strongly interested in showing the project not only as the result, but also in the process of development. We showed sketches, which are not in the book, sources, documents, and the original works, which you do not get to see as a reader of the book. These original paintings included Miriam’s wonderful aquarelles, or my multi-layered dark drawings, or Gilad’s amazing work that was partly analog and partly digital.

Photos from the exhibition at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, May 11–June 30, 2025. Photo credit: Marion Reis.

Like in the book, we approached the story through all these parts of a memory puzzle. For me, it’s always like a kind of puzzle. You have pieces, and you show these pieces, and there are empty spaces. There are missing parts, and you can be sure that the visitor or the reader will do something with their own concept and imagination to fill these gaps or to think about these gaps. We showed it for the first time in 2022 in Erlangen, for the International Comics Festival, and it was so successful that they wanted the exhibition to travel. So, in the end, we had six locations including the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and the Ravensbrück Memorial. I was glad to accompany the exhibition to most of these locations and to bring the exhibition to these important places of learning about history, but also to locations like Erika Fuchs House, which is a museum specialized in comics, and to confront their visitors with the topic of the Holocaust. It got very positive resonance, and again, it grew out of collaboration with many different people in all these locations.

Photos from the exhibition at the Ravensbrück Memorial, April 13 to July 31, 2024. Photo credit: Eberhard Schorr.

Lucie: Last question for you. After the two books and the series of exhibitions, where do you think your steps will lead you now? What are your next plans?

Barbara: I just finished, some months ago, another biographical graphic novel, but it was much shorter this time. It tells the interesting life of Terese Giehse, an actress who lived in Munich. She had to flee the Nazis. She was Jewish and a very politically involved and strong woman. She came back after the war. Another biographical work, which was very interesting. Afterwards, I also felt strongly that I want to take a break and not to go on with further biographical works because repetition is not good. I want to approach history again with a fresh view.

But there will be a new book, and I want to work still with documentary material and do research, but this time I want to focus on present times. I also want to learn more about how I can connect words and images together in a new way. How can I embrace more artistic ways to do that, or poetic ways, or experimental ways? That is something that will always interest me.

SCVN is grateful to Barbara Yelin for her generous time and dedication, both in sharing this insightful conversation with us and in co-creating the phenomenal Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory. You can find more information about her project work here.

‘Our dignity grows through connection’: HUMA 180 students interview SCVN Research Assistant Lucie Kotesovska

interviews, student engagement16 December 202516 December 2025

On November 5, University of Victoria students Ananiah Bartsch and Lily Schaefer interviewed Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) research assistant Lucie Kotesovska. The interview took place online and was conducted as part of a practicum for HUMA 180: Encountering Humanities Research, one of the three courses that make up UVic’s Humanities Scholars program. This is the fourth time SCVN has had the pleasure of welcoming practicum students from HUMA 180. In this interview Lucie reflects on her involvement in the project, the realities of working with difficult stories, and the lessons she learned from her work as a research assistant.

Ananiah: We’ll just start with an easy question. Lucie, how did you become involved with this project and with Charlotte’s work?

Lucie: I was hired in summer 2024 as a research assistant for the project, and it happened through my home department, which is the English department at UVic. My official role was media communication and administration assistant. I think the team was specifically looking for somebody with strong editing and communication skills. They were seeking somebody to help them with the textual production and presentation of the project in textual terms. I was hired as a research assistant on these terms. Besides being an English major, I also had quite a rich previous experience with academic and professional writing, editing, copy editing, reviewing texts and translating. I forgot to mention that my first language is Czech, it’s not English. I’ve been moving between languages my whole life and it’s been a great passion and source of joy for me to be tinkering with words and learning new words and growing into new languages.

Lily: What drew you to the work of this project?

Lucie: That’s a great question. As I said, I’m passionate about working with and through the written and spoken word. That’s my primary tool in exploring the world and making sense of it for myself and others. So, to have this chance to pursue that passion and bring use to a large project was very attractive and meaningful to me.

Second, I was really excited about working as a part of a team, and supporting the team. I have to say that my PhD work was really lonely. It was quite an isolating experience because for a couple of years you’re just focused on this very niche area or super-specific subject. For me it was Irish poetry from the 1960s up to now. You start to miss human connection during this extensive research and writing project. Even though, of course you are connected with the selected poets quite deeply and intimately, but still … It’s natural for us as human beings, and also as humanists, to connect with people. So, I started to really, really miss that kind of interaction. And this was something which I found as a member of the project and this team. What also drew me to this teamwork was the appreciation of all kinds of talents and levels of expertise. The SCVN project hires junior researchers who just entered the field. So, there are team members like you and then senior researchers, professional scholars, who work in the field of trauma, genocide, history, human rights and so on. There’s this vast scale of various abilities and experiences. So, the team aspect was really a huge plus for me.

And third, I could sense a very strong humanistic mission in this project. You probably talked about the 4 pillars of the humanities mission at UVic in HUMA 180?

“Enrich human dignity” is the first one. And that’s very obvious with this project because of its focus on the survivors. It most emphatically contributes to making us feel and appreciate human dignity, especially in places and times when it was tread upon.

“Provoke critical inquiry” is the second pillar. This project has consistently critiqued some of the traditional scholarly approaches to history and memory. It has brought a new perspective, and a new medium because it is primarily visually oriented.

“Engaging myriad voices” the third pillar, is a very fitting one, because this project over a couple of years of its existence, has become global. Starting with Holocaust research, it has now spread to former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Turtle Island and also Syria and Iraq. It comprises several research clusters while engaging many people globally – researchers, journalists, community members, and artists.

And there’s the fourth pillar, “inspire innovative expression, including the full plurality of media”. This project is really a great example of that. Searching for new ways to communicate messages and research to the wide public, not just the academic community, but to the public worldwide, to people of various generations and ages and milieus.

And I should not forget about the fourth reason that drew me to the project. I felt I could keep learning new things while being a part of it. That was a big one for me as well. I could just keep learning, and I was continually encouraged to do so as I was getting new tasks beyond my initial contract, but we’ll probably talk about that a bit later on.

Ananiah: You’ve touched on this briefly already, but what did your work, and what has your work entailed with the project? You’ve been working on a bunch of things, so could you tell us a little bit about what that’s looked like?

Lucie: As I said, it entailed various tasks, both short- and long-term ones. I think my major initial contribution and something I’m quite proud of still was the editing of transcripts from two webinar series which were organised by the project and the Public Humanities Hub at the UBC as a joint initiative. These were two series of talks with scholars, artists, journalists, and other professionals on the topics of trauma-informed research and art and testimony.

And my main goal was to make these webinars accessible through these transcriptions. These texts were posted online, and I tried to make their formats standardized across all the different episodes, speakers and topics.

Another major undertaking was working with students from HUMA 180 last academic year. Last fall, I was tasked with onboarding three HUMA students and with training them in transcribing while sharing my experience and some of the best practices. They each picked a webinar and transcribed the whole episode which is a substantial amount of work. Beside the transcription, they edited it all through making sure that all the names were spelled correctly, and all the places were correctly identified. It was a wonderful way of sharing what I learned on the project.

I also created content for the project’s blog. I wrote blog posts covering various events like exhibitions and upcoming talks, award ceremonies for artists on the project, film releases, and other things as well. I updated content for three of the project’s research clusters: Rwanda cluster, Holocaust cluster, and former Yugoslavia cluster.

It was my first time tinkering with website design. Speaking of learning things, I was really thrown into deep water here, but I enjoyed it immensely.

Ananiah: You wore all the hats!

Lily: Jack of all trades.

Lucie: Yes! Forrest Gump; that’s what I would say, Forrest Gump. But Jennifer Sauter, my supervisor, would say no, no, it’s like – think about it more like a Swiss knife: versatile and excellent in all circumstances.

Lily: What was something you found difficult while participating in the project?

Lucie: Sometimes it was prioritising, as I was often assigned several tasks at the same time. For instance, I felt very reluctant to break the blog-writing rhythm in order to go and fill in a travel reimbursement form or go and copy edit somebody else’s work, somebody else’s style while drafting my text. As a graduate student, I was constantly busy with other things as well. I tried my best to juggle several jobs at the same time. While I was working on this project as a research assistant, I was hired as a teaching assistant in the English department, and also as a tutor by the Academic Skills Centre, and during this whole time I kept working on my dissertation. Plus, I had a couple of kids at home.

Also, speaking of difficulty, I think it’s quite obviously the sheer amount of human suffering you face working through various materials and media across the project. It’s even more difficult given the fact that violence and social division and victimisation keep going on and on in the world. I’m not the only one saying this regarding work on this project. This is an issue that I notice every team member has to deal with. Historically speaking, we live in a very difficult moment for our world right now. There seems to be no end to the trauma inflicted. Working on this project makes you painfully aware of this fact.

Ananiah: Lucie, how is it that you take care of yourself when you’re involved in a project that has so much human suffering? How are you looking after yourself to make sure that you were not being crushed or consumed by the weight of the project?

Lucie: That’s such an important question. I talked to people on the project about this and it helped sharing these concerns. We were advised to take breaks from the materials, like those transcriptions. We are speaking of dozens of pages of text on very heavy things. We were encouraged to take breaks and talk to other team members or stop working for a week or two in order to process the feelings that were coming up as we needed to. I would say this is also something that I’ve been asking myself as a literary scholar for a long time, because I focus on Irish poetry that was written during the time of The Troubles in the second half of the 20th century.

You’ve probably heard about this conflict in Northern Ireland. It was a very violent one, tearing up families and communities. It is still hard for me to believe that it went on in Europe during my childhood years. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this question and honestly, I came to the conclusion that while we can never completely escape these traumas, personal, generational or cultural ones and stay unharmed, it’s essential that we learn to be aware of our feelings, and also learn to be responsible for the way we handle them; how we express them as well as whether and how we communicate them further.

As I mentioned, I grew up in the Czech Republic in a culture which, as a heritage of the forty years of Communist regime, was emotionally repressive to say the least. I realized this fact only years later in my early adulthood.

To compensate for this, I actively made efforts to learn to feel–not just feel, because this is the part that comes to us naturally–but to be able to notice these feelings, to describe them to myself, label them, and express them safely and, when I am lucky, creatively. Literature has been a tremendous help in this sense. Being a literary scholar, I have been able to see what is going on inside other people and how they handle their emotions. It is not an exaggeration to say that literature helps us stay sane and stay alive.

I’m trying now to share this vocabulary I learned with my kids. For example, we read books on this topic together. One of our favourites is called In My Heart and it’s about a girl naming her emotions and has beautiful illustrations that help children explore big feelings such as anger or sadness. It will say “I’m angry,” and explain visually what that means. I also plan to teach emotional literacy in one of my courses in spring, in the English department.

For me, this is an essential skill for us as human beings, because we’re connected through and in the heart. So, coming back to your question, I think that this emotional self-awareness has helped me greatly when I was dealing with this sensitive and almost soul-crushing material. Another thing has been helpful besides taking long walks in Victoria, which is a great, great town for solitary walks, and that’s reading. While engaged on the project, I did some reading that was really helpful to me.

I’ll mention just one title. I’m reading it right now, actually. I realised early on that there’s a link between my work on the project and how I felt about it, and this reading. The title of the book is Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross and was written by S. Mark Heim.

It has helped me to understand the sacrificial mechanism in practically all human civilizations, and also, how truly transformational and revolutionary it is when the victim can find a voice or can be given the voice and also has a name and is remembered through their narrative.

Lily: Self-documentation.

Lucie: Yes, right. And this is exactly what the project has been trying to do all along. So yes, reading also helped me. I’m sorry if this answer was a bit long.

Ananiah: No, no, no, I appreciate it.

Lucie: Just to conclude, I think emotional awareness and self-awareness are super important. That’s the key. As I said, we cannot be safe from harm, [it will happen] probably just by living.

Ananiah: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that answer.

Lucie: Thank you for asking these questions. This topic is so important, and it resonates with people, but is not always communicated sufficiently and adequately. And we don’t realise sometimes, entering humanities especially, how big is the part of our own existence and experience we bring in.

Lily: Can you tell us about a moment or memory, positive or negative, that stands out to you?

Lucie: I have a great memory of the interview I did with a German artist, Barbara Yelin. Just to give you some quick information on who Barbara Yelin is and how she’s connected to the project–she did an interview with Emmie Arbel, a child Holocaust survivor, and from this interview came a story titled “But I Live” which was published in 2022. And then she developed this story, which was originally about 40 pages long, into a book-length line visual narratives, titled The Colour of Memory. Emmy Arbel. I interviewed with her in July for the project blog… We talked about the various techniques she uses and the philosophy behind her art. And we also talked about her relationship with Emmie and how it evolved and how in turn this evolution affected Barbara’s approach to visual storytelling. For me, it was really fascinating to listen to how she talked about the limits of verbal expression and verbal memory, about moments where only our body knows the truth of what happened to us. We sometimes lack words to talk about these things, and we might be resisting them because we don’t want to go in there. But something or someone makes us visit them. So how do you do that? How do you recreate it in pictures when you don’t have the words? These questions were immensely interesting.

Barbara said that sometimes she had only colour to work with, she didn’t even have the shapes. That was really fascinating. And there was a moment when she talked about Emmie’s face fading from the page in the book. It was the moment when Emmy tried to remember, I think, the last moment with her mom.

Emmie’s face is fading from the picture. It is lost in this painful remembering, and the visual panel or square is only blue and black. That is all there is on the page. And at that time, Barbara was on the screen because we were on Zoom, and she herself almost became just the mouth and the eyes. And it was dark because it was noon in Victoria and late evening in Munich where she was.

And moments like this would always bring home the essential truth of the project regarding connecting as human beings. It is the undeniable and universal fact that our dignity grows and flourishes through connection, through cultivating relationships, and through genuine curiosity in one another. And, on the contrary, it is endangered and destroyed when these connections are broken as happens in wars and conflicts of all kinds. So that is still my favourite and fond memory.

Ananiah: What is a lesson or an idea that you learned from this project that you’ve carried forward in your career?

Lucie: I would like to mention two things I learned while working on the project. First, I came to feel that there’s hope for humanities in the world today. As long as they are willing to embrace new ways of research, engage new voices, and provide testimonies to untold stories. And the second thing: I believe there’s some hope for humanity in the world today as well. There’s ongoing violence and conflicts escalating all over the world, all around the globe. At the same time, there are distinct voices heard that clearly understand the cost and the damage that’s being done and that’s affecting whole generations. And I think this project is a voice of this hope. It’s a voice that promotes survivors’ and also personal and interpersonal healing.

Ananiah: Thank you, I appreciate that. A lot of the narratives in the world are counter to hope, so I appreciate that insight and that perspective.

Lucie: So true. Yeah, I know. Sometimes it seems like a lost cause altogether. Doing this kind of work, doing this research, and being in the humanities. So many people will be dissuading you, and challenging you and doubting you, but it’s so immensely important, because we’re now wielding various technologies, but who’s going to reflect upon this development? Who’s going to draw the bigger picture here? Humanities bring this wholeness in terms of contextualizing things, and that’s so important. That’s the only way we can really restore hope and faith in anything. So, yeah. Thank you guys for your great questions. I really enjoyed reflecting upon my time on this project. It’s been quite exceptional.

Ananiah: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much. It has been so wonderful to hear from you. And again, I appreciate you making the time with your busy schedule and your international excursions.

SCVN would like to thank Ananiah and Lily for their work planning, conducting, and transcribing this interview. Our blog post about last year’s HUMA 180 practicum can be found here.

Interview with Miriam Libicki for the GraphicMemoirBlog: The art of translating Holocaust survivor stories into comics

interviews, news10 October 202517 June 2026

In September 2025, Jonathan Sandler, host of the GraphicMemoirBlog and author of The English GI (2022), interviewed SCVN graphic artist Miriam Libicki in a blog feature titled ‘A Conversation with Miriam Libicki: WWII Graphic Memoirs’. They discussed her previous SCVN collaboration with Barbara Yelin, Gilad Seliktar, and Dr. Charlotte Schallié in But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (2022), and her forthcoming publication Two Roses: A Story of Deception and Determination in Nazi Germany (2026).

Jonathan and Miriam discussed the ways in which graphic novels can be used as research and storytelling tools for Holocaust education and to honour the voices of survivors. As Jonathan highlighted, Miriam worked from transcripts and shaped narratives that stay faithful to the survivors’ words, such as David Schaffer, where “every word in that book is his… the story is his voice.” Through comics, the stories convey information about survivor experiences while providing a safe and supportive learning environment.

Miriam Libicki. Photo credit: Chorong Kim.

In this interview, Miriam also shared her experience working closely with Holocaust survivors and the impact of the narratives on her art, describing her collaborations as “transformative.” To her, David’s story felt like “something out of dark fairy tales”, leading her to develop a watercolour style that would “evoke the living, threatening natural world.”

Inspired by early 20th-century children’s illustrations, she used watercolours “to set apart from the monochrome charcoal styles often associated with Holocaust art.” The illustrations in her SCVN graphic narratives also reflect different influences, ranging from Will Eisner to Japanese manga and Canadian comics, that supported her journey in both projects.

In her narratives, she has been drawn to first-person stories and particular points of view, and believes:

Comics are a powerful tool for empathy. Even if you disagree, you can still be compelled by the perspective.

Thank you to Jonathan for interviewing with Miriam and sharing insights into her artistic process and collaboration with SCVN!

Read the full interview here.

Drawing on History: An Interview with Rwanda Research Cluster artists Michel Kichka and Joëlle Epée Mandengue

interviews23 July 202517 June 2026

This interview introduces Michel Kichka and Joëlle Epée Mandengue, the two artists working on the survivor-centered graphic novels within the Rwanda Research Cluster of the SCVN project. In April 2025, they met online for a conversation facilitated by Dr. Anna Ball, an Advanced Research Fellow supporting the Rwanda team based at the University of Aberdeen. Together, they discussed their experiences of working on the project so far; how they are grappling with the weight of history and of their responsibility to the survivors’ experiences they are representing; as well as the personal and professional journeys that have guided them to this work.

Joëlle Epée Mandengue is a Cameroonian comic book artist based in Guinea Conakry. Working under the penname of ‘Elyon’s’, she is the author of the successful series, The Diary of Ebene Duta, and a number of comic works describing, with humour and a pinch of tragedy, slices of the lives of black characters who are living in other territories and experiencing different cultures. She is also the creator and director of the Bilili BD comic festival in Congo Brazzaville, which has branched out to other countries across the African continent, including Rwanda. Joëlle is working with an anonymous survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, who was a mother to several young children at the time of the genocide. In its wake, she became the mother of several more orphaned nephews and nieces, who are also represented in the graphic novel.

Michel Kichka is an Israeli graphic novelist of Belgian origin based in Jerusalem, where he studied graphic design and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts until his retirement in 2025. Alongside a longstanding international career as political cartoonist and member of Cartooning for Peace, he is the author of several graphic novels, including Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father, about his experience as the son of a Holocaust survivor. Michel is working with genocide survivor Jerome Irankunda, who was just six years old when the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi overwhelmed Rwanda. Michel’s work is also supported by the contributions of Jerome’s wife, Nina Uwera.

Anna: The project that you are working on is concerned with representing the stories of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi through the graphic novel form. But I would like to begin by understanding a little more about your own personal histories, and what brought you to find your voice in graphic novels.

Michel: I was born in Belgium 70 years ago to a family of Holocaust survivors. My father lost all his family and was in different camps for three years and survived. And my mother’s family were refugees in Switzerland, but originally they had all come from Poland. My grandparents had emigrated from Poland after the First World War because for the Jewish population the situation there was worse than anywhere else in Europe.

I was born with a talent for drawing. My father wanted to be an artist, and he was very talented, but he was arrested when he was 16 and liberated when he was 19 from the camps in Buchenwald, so he could not accomplish his dream to be an artist. But I could, because I was a baby boomer born after the Second World War. And I was born in Belgium: a kingdom of comics. Here, I grew up on the classic Franco-Belgian comics: Tintin; The Smurfs… These were my heroes when I was a kid. And this is what I wanted to do, and I knew it from the age of six.

In 1986, I first read Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this work, and it was the first time this had been awarded to a comic. The work was also unique in its way of addressing adult readers, not kids. It was not funny, and there were no heroes. That was real life. I remember when I first read Maus the positive shock that I had. I said to myself – well, if he did it, it means that it’s possible to tell people about your life in comics.

Michel Kichka (Photo credit: Elie Max Kichka).

Joëlle: I was also passionate about comics from a very tender age. I was born in Cameroon, and I grew up there. My parents used to tell me that I was already so caught up with animated features when I was something like four or six months old. You know, for people of African descent, it can be very painful to comb the hair. So, I would sit and watch animations while I had my hair braided, and I would be completely numb to what was going on around me. I knew from a very, very young age that I wanted to tell stories, and to convey messages through drawings. So, I made my first comic book at the age of 7 and even learned how to sew the book together when I was 9. And from then on, I pursued that dream.

I grew up as the first born in my family and as the only girl, it was really difficult for my parents to admit that this could be my full-time job. Both of them were like, “why can’t you find, you know, a decent job?” They both worked in banking and finance. So, I took my degree in English and French, and after that, started working in a French cultural centre. I had to show my family that I could earn money and be independent. But also, I could not miss out on my dream. And so, when I reached the age of 25, a bell really rang in my head, and I realized it’d been a quarter of a century in which I’d done things that were not my core passion in life. I told my parents that I wanted to spend the rest of my life messing it up on my own terms and conditions.

So that’s when I went to study Fine and Graphic Arts in Belgium. And after that, I started to get some jobs, and my parents saw that I could be paid $300 per page as a comic artist. I was invited for a residency in the Caribbean. And so, at that point, my parents told me that I had their blessing because I’d proven to them that there was not just one way of succeeding. And this was really a milestone in my quest as an artist. It has helped me a lot to know that I can dream big and I have my family behind me.

Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s (Photo credit: Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s)

Michel: I also had a moment when I realized that I needed to take my life in my hands. When I was 19, I decided to emigrate, and I moved from Belgium to Israel. I understood at this age that being born talented is not enough. I needed to study and develop my skills to improve what I had learned by copying comics as a child. So, I was admitted to the Art School of Jerusalem. And I’ve been teaching illustration and comics for 40 years in the same academy in which I studied.

Anna: I’m interested to learn more about your decision to get involved in this project. Neither of you are from Rwanda, yet you have both made a significant commitment to grapple with its history through the stories of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. How do you relate to the content and context of these stories?

Michel: I was invited to Rwanda four years ago by the Israeli Embassy for the commemoration of World Holocaust Day on 27^th January.

The Rwandans I met were asking me a lot of questions about the Holocaust because they had a very deep need for their genocide against the Tutsi to be known, to be written about, to have creation around it. And I felt that my personal experience offered something.

So, when this project was proposed to me, it was like a call. I knew very little about Rwandan history, but I can see the connections. And now that Tutsi and Hutu are living together, they are both part of their reconciliation program. There is much to learn at this moment. So, the fact that this project is now on the table is something very special.

Joëlle: My own relationship to this project has obviously been very different from Michel’s. But I have other issues that connect me to it – like the fact that Cameroon has had the same president since I was born. As Cameroonians, we have a history of colonial violence and postcolonial pressure that are still denied. We have archives that we still don’t have access to.

There is a huge part of our hurtful memories that we don’t have access to. I’ve been growing up as a Cameroonian by birth, but my culture is not at peace with its past. So, working on a project like this, where a country is looking at the horror of its past, facing it, trying to work from it, trying to build from it, is really something that resonates at a personal level for me too.

But I feel my link to Rwanda in another way, too. When I was living in Congo, we used to fly with RwandAir to Cameroon, Douala, where I am originally from and where my parents were living. And when I was travelling on these planes, I was flabbergasted, overwhelmed by the quality of the service. I’m really uncomfortable in planes, but these were wonderful. And the Head of Staff began to notice me because I was among the regular clients on that line. So we’d get chatting. And at one point I summoned up the courage to ask one of the Stewards – what happened after 1994? You guys seem like you are thriving. I read about how you’re aiming to be the Singapore of Africa. So our discussions started. And it was that Air Steward who gave me so many stories about what Rwanda is as a society – how complex it is. He explained the difficulties of, you know, having a crush on a girl, then discovering that girl is from the family that murdered your neighbour. How will you reconcile that? I was fascinated. So, when Fransiska wrote to me and asked me to consider embarking on this journey, I didn’t even know how to express it in words. Having the right to work on this project really meant a lot to me.

But I am also aware I’m not from Rwanda. There are so many things I won’t be able to understand. We are all Africans, but we have varied histories. I talked with Erin and Fransiska about this – wondering if I am legitimate enough to work on this subject. But what has really given me peace and focus is the fact that I also have my own unique lens that I bring to the project, as a foreigner – someone who has not had to live that history for 30 years. And it is the following thing that was really emphasized about the project by Fransiska and Erin.

This project is about building dialogue across cultures, and how we search for understanding by connecting with others, as well as through our own experiences.

Anna: What has it been like working with the survivors on this project? What have been the most challenging and enriching aspects of this collaborative process?

Joëlle: The person I am working with was already an adult at the time of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. And when I first started to encounter her stories, it was really brutal. Watching documentaries, reading materials on the subject, going to a memorial is something; but having this encounter with her was something else.

During our interviews, we were working with her son, who was also the translator, creating a linguistic triangle in our conversation. That time of translation was very difficult to handle for me because my mind had to process the information that it just got. Then you are awaiting the next translation, and you have this silence where you’re facing the survivor. So, you can have this physical connection in the presence of the survivor, but then there are spaces of disconnection in which you are left to process the deep, horrible information. So, one day during the interview, I asked for permission to digest the information, and I felt really guilty for this. I felt – this is her life; her memory; she went through it. But in this case, it’s the artist who needs a break.

Yet at the same time, I felt really privileged to have this access to things that are so traumatic, but that still need to be told for history not to repeat itself.

Michel: I identify with lots of things that you have just said, Joëlle. You know, Jerome, when you meet him, you can’t understand what he has passed through. He’s so optimistic and full of life and action and positive thinking. And this is the lesson that I would like the reader to learn: how he has rebuilt himself.

A challenging aspect of working on Jerome’s story is that there are a lot of things in his history that have no visual references. They were all lost. You know, when I visited the memorial in Kigali, there’s a room where photographs are hung, like clothes. Jerome told me he goes there very often to look at the photos because people who find documents bring them to the memorial, and he wonders if one day he will find a photo of a man and woman who could be his own parents. So, during our interview, I asked a lot of questions about what the house was like, the village where he lived, how he dressed at school because he had no photos to show me.

Draft artwork by Michel Kichka, responding to the memorial in Kigali that he visited during his trip to Rwanda, and conversations he had with local Rwandans. Photo credit: Michel Kichka.

Anna: So far, you have both visited Rwanda and interviewed the survivors whose stories you are drawing. In these early stages of contemplating and developing the graphic novels, what ideas, images, and decisions are emerging for you?

Joëlle: So, in my head at the moment, there is this idea of the seed. The survivor with whom I am working has strong faith in God. I too am a Christian – and that gave me the idea of the seed in the Christian faith. We learn that Christ died, and he was buried and resurrected, and brought with him a new way of living. And this lady, she also created life, she had many children. So, there’s this image of the seed getting into the soil and producing a family tree. And that’s why, when we had our interviews, I sketched a tree. She really went through death and came back to life.

And it is also an image of what you produce from your suffering – because you could decide just to feel vengeful. You could fall into a depression. But you can also find a way for something to come of your suffering – to move from the seed to the tree. That is something that has really formed part of my translation of the survivor’s story. It’s also important from a Rwandan cultural point of view, as it highlights the role of the umuko tree. I am also exploring the way I can present graphic imagery, through the umuko flower. The heart shaped leaves, thorns, reddish flower, make the umuko tree a very special element that can be used all through the story.

Draft sketch by Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s, showing the motif of the umuko flower that bears symbolic significance in her graphic novel. Photo credit: Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s.

Michel: For me, personal history is the best way to access history. So, I find in Jerome’s narrative the possibility to tell people about a big history through his personal history, to better understand people who pass through deep traumas and to better understand humanity and probably themselves in the process. I don’t want to offer simply a lesson in history; I want to tell a personal life experience of someone real who exists.

Anna: It’s clear that both of you feel a tremendous sense of responsibility towards the people whose stories you are collaboratively creating, and to the graphic novels that are emerging because of this collaborative process. What do you hope your work will achieve?

Joëlle: I hope to bring my reader to see the many layers of history and experience there are within the story of my survivor. This is something I always work to create. On the surface, my drawings are very cute and nice, with lots of colours. When people come to my drawings, they do so thinking the work is light – but the more they really get into it, the more they realise this is just a way to get you closer to many more hidden layers. The idea is really to work through contrast. They may think they see the story in the drawings immediately, but they have deeper layers of messaging. There is much more beneath the surface.

Michel: It strikes me that there are many things we can learn from what has come after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. You know, Jerome was so young, he was six, when he found himself an orphan. He was brought up as a son by his uncle and aunt. And what is also very interesting is that when he went back to school, “artificial families” of people were created to support one another. It was part of the experience in the classroom. This reconciliation program is unique in the story of the world, and so this will be part of the story that I tell. It will emphasize the process of rebuilding resilience that has taken place in Rwanda.

Recently I saw the short video that Marc [Ellison] shot when we were in Belgium and in Rwanda [‘Why We Dance’]. And at the end of that film, he showed Jerome and his wife Nina dancing, and I watched it with a huge smile.

This is what I would like the reader to experience. I want to bring Jerome to life; I want to show that those who committed the genocide failed in ways that matter. This is the lesson I would like people to remember.

Many thanks, Joëlle and Michel, for so generously sharing your time and experience with us. It will be wonderful to see how these thoughts emerge in your graphic novels.

To learn more about Joëlle and Michel’s ongoing collaborations with survivors in the Rwanda Research Cluster, check out their page here.

Into the Archives with Nora Krug: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

interviews7 March 20254 June 2025

On November 14, SCVN Research Assistant Lucie Kotesovska met with Nora Krug, an internationally acclaimed artist and illustrator and author of several book-length visual narratives. Nora is currently an artist-in-residence at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, where she is conducting research of the survivors’ video and written testimonies. Her aim is to produce a graphic novel based on her engagement with these archival sources.

In this interview, Nora spoke about her current research and how she envisions the form of her next book. She also shared her thoughts on the unique potential of the visual narrative when communicating survivors’ experience and whether it is ever possible to overcome the trauma of war.

Lucie: Can you tell us a little bit about your current research and your research method as you work with the materials at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archives, and also, how do you envision the final product at this point?

Nora: I’m only just embarking on the research for the book. I haven’t fully figured out the themes yet, but roughly speaking, I think it will be about the question of resistance and forgiveness, and whether we can ever overcome political trauma, personal trauma, and retaliation, all of these aspects. I’m researching the testimonies of survivors that were recorded in the 70s and 80s that touch on these subjects. I’m watching the interviews and I’m looking for certain keywords. I’m finding it difficult to find certain information, especially when it comes to description of violence. It’s a taboo, for instance, to talk about violent acts that you might have been involved with during the resistance. That’s an interesting component, but also something that’s hard to track down at least based on what I’ve encountered so far. I’m eager to look at both men’s and women’s testimonies from various different countries. I’ve watched some in Hebrew—there’s often a transcription in English—some in German, some in Polish, some in English. It’s interesting to observe how differently people dealt with the legacy of trauma, of experiencing trauma. People experienced it in different ways and had different modes of survival. I’m interested in that too—what makes us respond to certain traumas in different ways. And while I’m doing this, I’m also doing some research outside.

From top left: Cassette tape, files, and VHS tapes from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Photos courtesy of Stephen Naron and Nick Porter.

I would say when I embark on research, I’m not extremely systematic, I’m rather very broad. And I try to articulate the basic underlying questions that I’m asking myself for a new book project. I’m not interested in telling a story chronologically, you know, the story of one person’s life. While the testimonies are very gripping and emotional, I’ve decided not to focus on one person’s life, and not to tell a chronological story but rather approach universal themes that I find in the interviews and create a sort of collage of my own thoughts on that subject that will include individual narratives. For instance, my book Belonging was structured in this way: I interwove several different narratives in a kaleidoscopic way. So, I think that’s what I’m envisioning at the moment—including different voices. I would also like to branch out after this year at Yale to other crimes, other wars, other cultures, and other religions, so that the subject of the book won’t entirely focus on the Holocaust, but also on how we deal with these experiences universally.

I’m not interested in telling a story chronologically, you know, the story of one person’s life. While the testimonies are very gripping and emotional, I’ve decided not to focus on one person’s life, and not to tell a chronological story but rather approach universal themes that I find in the interviews and create a sort of collage of my own thoughts on that subject that will include individual narratives.

Now that I’m at Yale, I’ve been connecting with professors from different departments including the Visual Arts Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Psychiatry Department, to get different people’s input into these questions. I also found a photo album at a flea market in Berlin some years ago that belonged to a German soldier. He documented an atrocity committed by the German Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939. I had this album lying around for many years thinking about what I could do with it, how to make those important photographs accessible to the public. And I would like to find a way of integrating it into the narrative of this new project. So, I’ve been reaching out to historians in Poland, the United States, Germany and Austria, to get more information about the historic events surrounding the atrocity depicted in this album, and to try to find out who the people depicted in the photographs are.

From Left to right: Card catalog cabinets, video library and VHS tape from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Photos courtesy of Stephen Naron and Nick Porter.

Lucie: It sounds as if you anticipated my next question and, in a way, already answered it. In the SCVN team, we have been wondering whether you plan to focus on one main story or several of them in your next book project. Could you talk a bit more about how you envision working with multiple narratives?

Nora: Yes, I’m trying to look at my work less as illustrated biography and more as a philosophical reflection on themes that could include multiple narratives, also contradicting ones. This was the case in my last book, Diaries of War, about Ukraine and Russia, where I portrayed the voices of a Ukrainian woman and a Russian man, and even though the Russian man was anti-Putin, it is a contradictory narrative, and it clashes with the perspective of the Ukrainian protagonist. What I’m interested in as an artist and a writer is to bring out the complexities and the subtleties and focus on narratives that can be difficult to confront, because they’re uncomfortable or because they don’t fit into our conventional understanding of war or of the Holocaust.

What I’m interested in as an artist and a writer is to bring out the complexities and the subtleties and focus on narratives that can be difficult to confront, because they’re uncomfortable or because they don’t fit into our conventional understanding of war or of the Holocaust.

Lucie: This leads me to another question. In your understanding and in your practice, what do you see as particular strengths of the visual narrative when dealing with trauma and the topics that you mention?

Nora: For me, it’s very important to recognize the whole political history of illustration as a medium. It’s always been a political medium. It was the only visual medium that communicated political and social ideas before the advent of photography. We tend to forget that now. It is a political tool that shapes the way we think and feel or that hopefully opens up new perspectives because it is so visceral and so direct. And it can provide a very direct emotional entry point into narratives about war and memory and history in a way that I think classic textbooks aren’t able to. We understand that with movies—with movies, there’s no question. I mean, fiction films about the Second World War are very emotionally gripping, but with illustrated narratives, the general population wouldn’t necessarily recognize that medium as a powerful tool in the same way. I don’t know why that is given that for centuries it was such an important tool. I mean, if you think about illustrated church manuscripts, but also illustrated representations in other religions and cultures—illustrations were always used to inform the way we think about the world, but also to propagate, for instance, stereotypical ideas like antisemitic depictions in the Middle Ages.

So, while I really appreciate the political strength of the medium, I’m also aware that you have to treat the medium very sensitively and responsibly as an artist. I thought about that a lot when it comes to the depiction of violence. I’m somebody who really feels that it’s important to not avoid violence in images because we need to know what happened, for instance, during the Holocaust. If there hadn’t been any photographs taken at the time when the camps were liberated, our understanding of the Holocaust would be so much more limited. So, I think I’m really a proponent of showing images, of witnessing historical events, even if they’re hard to look at. But at the same time, there are many different ways of representing violence as an illustrator. It’s more a question of how rather than if you should show violence. But that is a component I think about a lot—what’s my responsibility as an illustrator to illuminate these subjects without being voyeuristic or sentimental. It’s sometimes a very fine line.

Illustrations from ‘On Tyranny Graphic Edition: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century’ by Nora Krug and Timothy Snyder, 2021.

But at the same time, there are many different ways of representing violence as an illustrator. It’s more a question of how rather than if you should show violence. But that is a component I think about a lot—what’s my responsibility as an illustrator to illuminate these subjects without being voyeuristic or sentimental. It’s sometimes a very fine line.

Lucie: You mentioned that as a researcher and illustrator working with the trauma of war and mass atrocities can be extremely challenging. Can you speak a little bit about how this might affect you, and also how do you take care of yourself during this process?

Nora: Unfortunately, I don’t reflect enough on how I should take care of myself, because I always focus on my sense of responsibility of dealing with these subjects rather than on how my research will make me feel. I think my curiosity is what drives me forward despite the difficulty of the subject matter. When I wrote Belonging, a lot of people said, oh, that was so brave. I never thought of it as brave. I always felt like I simply had to find out what happened. I had such a burning desire to understand war and why people fight wars and how we live with the trauma of war that everything else was pushed into the background. I know that’s problematic because I also do a lot of visual research and looking at those photos probably impacts me emotionally on some deep level.

As illustrators, we have to do a lot of visual research, which means you look at photographs of the Warsaw ghetto or other atrocities throughout history. I try to switch into a professional mode when I do that, but it probably weighs on me in ways that I’m not always aware of. At the same time, making books on these subjects is my way of dealing with all the terrible things that are happening in the world. It’s my way of staying sane because there’s a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety about what’s going on. And I feel like confronting this directly is my preferred way of handling those feelings. So, it’s in a way therapeutic, even though it can be challenging. But I probably should find better ways of dealing with the emotional repercussions.

Lucie: The archival work, which you engage in at the moment, is quite unique within the Survivor-Centered Visual Narrative project. Is archival work also new to you? And what differences do you see between this kind of work and listening to survivors face to face?

Nora: I’ve done a lot of archival work. I did a lot of archival research for Belonging when I was looking for my grandparents’ files from the time of the Nazi regime. I went to the local archive in my father’s village and looked at the police documents from between 1933 and 1945. I looked at some of the letters that were written after 1945 by Jewish emigres who wanted to know what happened to their houses and their property. So, I’ve done a lot of research in archives, not academic research, but research to look for personal narratives. I love that. I find it so exciting to stumble across these voices that would otherwise remain unheard and then bring them back to life. One thing that I find a bit challenging is that the interviews I’m watching are with people who have already passed away, so I can’t ask follow-up questions. Sometimes I have very different questions than the ones that the interviewers ask. That’s a challenge that I’m experiencing because I’m not the one asking the questions.

Pages from Nora Krug’s ‘Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home’, 2018.

A lot of the questions that are asked in these interviews are about the chronology of what happened where they were born, how they experienced anti-Semitism as a child, when they had to flee or hide or what camp they were in, how they escaped or how they survived. All of that is very important. But I would also want to know more about the emotional aspects. What did they go through emotionally at various points during the process, not only what happened to them.

Lucie: When we communicated prior to this interview, you mentioned that one of the central questions you’re exploring is whether it is ever possible to overcome the trauma of war. Do you feel any closer to reaching an answer after working for several months in the archives?

Nora: No. I mean, it’s also so individual. Like I said earlier, I think that everybody deals with it very differently. Some people, as you know, committed suicide. Some people were deeply depressed. One woman whose interview I watched was very interesting. She talked about how after the war she had a child, her first son, and how detached she felt. She felt basically incapable of showing anybody love. And that capacity to love seemed to have died the moment when she was separated from her family in the ghetto, and that was a moment when she basically became incapable of loving or expressing her love for anybody. After the war, she had a son, and she realized that she couldn’t give him what a mother under normal circumstances could give a child.

Thank you so much for your time, Nora, and for sharing your research and artistic experience with me. We are very excited to have you as part of our project and I am looking forward to hearing more about your book in 2026.