Category: interview

This transcript is adapted from an interview between SCVN researcher Ghada and filmmaker Marc Ellison, on November 20, 2026. Marc has directed two documentary short films for the Rwanda Research Cluster titled “Why We Dance” (trailer) and a “A Compassionate Heart” (trailer). In the interview, Ghada and Marc discuss the collaborative filming techniques that went into each production as Marc worked with Rwandan genocide survivors Jerome Irankunda (“Why We Dance”) and Madeleine Mukarwego (“A Compassionate Heart”). Marc and Ghada discuss his focus on co-direction with the survivors, the ethical considerations of filming recounting of traumatic experiences, and the role of film in preserving collective memory.

Marc and Jerome filming part of “Why We Dance” in a field with cows.

Photos have been generously provided by Marc.

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 Carlton 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 peer. Right: Marc filming church.

Ghada: Thank you for sharing. It’s always inspiring to see how people end up in different places in different ways. I’m curious to know 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 Jeremy 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.

Ground level shot of Madeleine

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? Literally just a month or so ago, and the audience members were saying to the members of the team that were there, “Oh, where’s the conflict?”

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.

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.

But yeah, 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.

I think, 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.

Ghada: Nice. 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.

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 wheat 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 wheat field?”

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

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: Oh, that’s a good question. I can’t think of any specific examples. We navigated that quite well. 

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 it 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 Madeleine in the church

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:  Beautiful, beautiful. 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: Yeah, I did want to ask you, 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?”

And very famous photojournalist 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 taking shots of Madeleine.

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: Yeah, that’s a good question. 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

On February 27, SCVN research assistant Ghada met with curator Jakob Hoffmann to discuss the exhibition journey of But I Live. Remembering the Holocaust. The exhibition, co-curated by Jakob Hoffmann and Barbara Yelin, features the process of co-creation and original artwork by artists Barbara Yelin, Miriam Libicki, and Gilad Seliktar, produced for the graphic novel But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, edited by Dr. Charlotte Schallié and based on interviews with Holocaust survivors Emmie Arbel, David Schaffer, and Nico and Rolf Kamp. Displaying original drawings, sketches, archival materials, and interviews with participants, the exhibition illuminates the process by which the book came into existence.

The interview with Jakob offers a closer look into his life and work, while inviting reflection on the concepts and challenges that arise at the intersection of first, artistic media such as graphic novels and film; second, social phenomena such as collective memory and mass atrocities; and third, human experience, particularly through the lens of survivors.

Ghada: Hello Jakob, thank you for taking the time to have this conversation today. Before getting into the details of the project, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What do you do? Where are you based? What is the scope of your work?

Jakob: Yes, what can I say about myself? Well, I live here in Frankfurt am Main. I’m 60 years old, and I’ve got a proper regular job, which is working in the Scout movement. This is maybe a little bit unique, because most of the people who are involved in Scout are volunteers and young people. And I’m an old man, and I’m doing it as a job, but you could say I’m kind of a trainer doing projects with young people in the area around Frankfurt. This is my steady job that brings me some income and a lot of joy.

Jakob Hoffmann during the exhibition of ‘But I Live: Remembering the Holocaust’ exhibition in Dortmund, Germany, May 6, 2023. Photo credit: Max Mann.

My job does not have really anything to do with how I’m involved in SCVN, but maybe there are some parallels, because I’m always thinking about how to transfer certain political or cultural topics to young people and students.

I don’t know how exactly that happened, but maybe ten or fifteen years ago, I started getting interested in comics and graphic novels. And since I’m definitely not an artist or someone who can draw a straight line, it was very clear to me that if I want to get involved in this scene, I can do it by organizing things. So, I created a little series of events where I invited comic artists from all over the world.

I’m also into curating exhibitions. I started with a side project for contemporary art and then got the chance to do a bigger exhibition with Art for Children in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. This was a huge step forward, because, as a non-professional, it’s quite unique to get this chance. But I got it, and it was great, and I worked together with illustrators. Since then, I have done it from time to time.

I don’t know exactly when it was, but I did some exhibitions with comic artists, and that’s how Barbara asked me one day if I wanted to curate an exhibition on But I Live.

Ghada: I will use your last point to ask you to elaborate a little bit on your contribution to SCVN. Between 2022 and 2024, you co-curated and toured an exhibition of But I Live: Remembering the Holocaust. How did you first connect with the project? What inspired the creation of this exhibition?

Jakob: The comic scene in Germany, maybe the comics scene in most of the countries in the world except for perhaps France or Japan, is very well-connected and everybody knows each other. You don’t need an agent to get in contact with somebody else, and there is a strong interest in each other’s work. I’m not a comic artist, but since I invited a lot of people and published a comic magazine for kids, I’m in contact with many people, so it’s very hard to say when some things get started, because you always talk about projects, “Oh, let’s do this, let’s do that”.

In this case, I was talking quite frequently to Barbara Yelin. We had several events together , we met at festivals, and through our private friends. I don’t know exactly when she first told me about this project, about the life of Emmie Arbel, but I remember it was in the middle of COVID, when she called me in January 2022… No, no. It should be before then, maybe 2020, if it was at the beginning of COVID. No, it was 2022. But there was no COVID anymore. Well, you see, I’m very bad at remembering things.

Ghada: Maybe that’s why we need exhibitions, novels, and tangible materials? Because we need better memories? I’m just like you, it’s so hard for me to remember dates and names of people!

Jakob: Yeah, 2022. It was in January 2022, because we had a very short time to prepare this exhibition, so maybe I mixed things up. But Barbara called me—it was five or six months before that one big comic festival in Germany—and asked me: what do you think about offering an exhibition about But I Live for the Erlangen International Comic Salon? And I said, yeah, send me a PDF.

Then I saw the story, and other stories by Miriam and Gilad, and I was overwhelmed. We called Katja Rausch, from the festival in Erlangen, who gave us one of the best spots we could have there. However, we said let’s not limit it to the short exhibition during the festival. Let’s make it a little bigger, a little more durable, so that we have three months to show this beautiful artwork. This was the start. Then everything went very quickly from there.

Ghada: Can you give us a quick brief of what the exhibition consisted of content-wise for our readers who might not necessarily be familiar with previous posts and information that we’ve shared?

Jakob: Yeah, that’s a very good question, because, you know, it’s always the question, What? What would you show if you were doing an exhibition about a comic? What would you display? Because a comic is happy with itself as a book, and it doesn’t need an exhibition.

We first considered a traditional approach of showing original artwork. Yet, this is another tricky thing, because original artwork is not necessarily something that is done analog by hand. We got a beautiful mix in But I Live, because Gilad works strictly digitally, but Miriam and Barbara do analog studies. They work nearly completely with analog techniques, including watercolours, which is special. So, it was clear from the beginning that the exhibition had different components, but the main thing was to show original artwork that would give the visitor a strong impression regarding the three stories of the child survivors of the Holocaust.

We also decided to display studies, scribbles, sketchbooks, interviews, and research materials. At the time, the project had already produced three wonderful short films about the artists, and so the films were also shown. Of course, it’s very important to offer the audience some comics as well, a place where they can encounter the book, because it’s all about the book. The aim of the show is that people buy this book, take it home, and read it whole with all its strong components, especially since it’s not a traditional comic book. It also features very interesting essays from historians and so on.

Ghada: You mentioned the audience, and that’s precisely what I have been thinking about as well! Knowing that the exhibition has been in multiple cities, and I will not attempt to say their names because I will not pronounce them correctly. My question is, were there different conceptions for the different exhibits as they went to different places? Did you encounter any differences in public engagement? And finally, did you make any changes or specific adjustments?

Jakob: Yeah, I can tell there’s a lot to say about that, but I will try to keep it short. When we started planning for the exhibition, it was absolutely customized to the museum in Erlangen, which is a very special but limited place in a 200- or 300-year-old building. We had six very small rooms, and, in total, the space was not more than sixty square meters, which is very small for such an amount of material. But we grabbed the opportunity to classify the different materials accordingly: three rooms went to showcasing the three stories, one for introduction and orientation, another hosted screens to showcase portraits of artists and witnesses along a big map that displayed the itineraries of the survivors, and the last room displayed the network of the project, the epilogue and physical copies of the book.

And at that moment, we still hadn’t even thought about taking the exhibition to another place. But there was an important journalist from Germany, Andreas Platthaus, who wrote about it and said, “This is really something, this exhibition should travel”.

As such, before we even finished the first exhibition, we got two really good requests to show it in other places, and that’s what we did. We showed it in a small comic museum in Dortmund, then in Wiesbaden, which is close to Frankfurt, in a classical museum site. Later, we were asked to display the exhibition at the Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, a former concentration camp and the very place where Emmie Arbel was imprisoned. This was really something. Then the exhibition was displayed in another comic museum in Bavaria, Erika- Fuchs-Haus in Schwarzenbach.

And now, sharing new information, it will go to Bergen Belsen, the place where Emmie Arbel was liberated. This was the concentration camp where her mother died, and they decided to show it as well. So, as you can imagine, these are two totally different situations—showing the exhibition in a comic museum in the middle of a town with no certain historical background, versus a former concentration camp that was the setting of one of the stories in the book.

Ghada: Very interesting, it somehow gains a new meaning, doesn’t it? When you put the place in the context of the story, you feel that it takes on a new dimension.

Jakob: Absolutely. The opening in Ravensbrück, the former concentration camp, was on the liberation day of the concentration camp. There were hundreds of people, including former prisoners. It was really frightening in a good way. The context is totally different, but we also try to adapt the exhibition to the exhibitions spaces that are quite different as well. You have a classic white cube in Wiesbaden, which is very easy to play with. And then you have very small old rooms in Erlangen. And then you have the memorial space in Ravensbrűck, where you’re not allowed to put anything on walls, and you must hang everything. These are technical challenges that force us to find new solutions which is very interesting. In “Aber ich lebe” [But I Live] in Ravensbrück, Emmie Arbel was there. In Dortmund and Wiesbaden, we had interviews with the twins [Nico and Rolf Kamp] from the Netherlands whose story was told by Gilad. It keeps changing all the time. We also invite other comic artists, because it’s now a very big thing, doing comics in this way about historical issues.

Ghada: This is a beautiful transition to my question on how you envision the role of art and graphic storytelling in preserving and conveying memories of mass atrocities. What goals do you believe we achieve when we use art to address big issues such as social memory, history, group identity, and mass atrocities?

Jakob: It’s a big question, a philosophical one, and my opinion about it changes every day. Sometimes I think it’s the perfect medium to carry things that must be remembered—things that would be lost if we didn’t use art to preserve them. Yet, sometimes I think, no, it did not work. It’s always a process full of doubts. But we got very good responses to these exhibitions.

I guess comics have the advantage of allowing people to reflect on a story at their own pace, at their own speed. This is a difference from film, for example. When you watch a film, you’re totally passive.

Another challenging aspect of But I Live is the fact that it creates pictures of the concentration camps that do not exist yet, because we only have the official pictures by the Nazis, and they don’t show people in gas chambers, or all the killing and the atrocities. The pictures we have are only those taken by the perpetrators.

Comics, and maybe art, offer the chance to show what happened, while making it totally clear that this is not the exact way it happened, but that it could. Comics don’t pretend to present historical truth. Rather, they highlight that history always needs reconstruction, and this means there is nothing like objective truth about what happened.

I think that’s what art can do—bring the audience, like the visitors of an exhibition, to engage with the pictures and the story, but they must play their own role in the process. There is always a relation between the visitor and the objects we display.

Ghada: I may have not mentioned, but I am doing my PhD in philosophy, so these kinds of questions are at the core of my interests in participating in and contributing to this project!

Jakob: Yeah, like this idea for example, is informed by Walter Benjamin, who said that history is always in construction, not reconstruction, but construction. I guess art can make that very clear. Another important idea, which is a common notion about art, and especially comics, is that art makes the process easier, more accessible, when you approach history through pictures.

Ghada: I like to reflect on this informational dimension of art, focusing on the difference between getting information from art versus, for example, news or other formats. I tend to think that art speaks to us in the totality of our existence, that is in thinking, but also in feeling, in imagination and creativity. It taps into different aspects of us all at once.

Jakob: That is true on the one hand, but it’s also dangerous to use art to just put some emotion in a material or issue. Of course, this is something one must be careful about. Among the quality points of these comics in But I Live, is that they keep their distance, because the project is survivor-centered, not about manipulating the audience. It’s about keeping everything centered around the survivor, and how we can stay genuine and authentic about that.

Ghada: Beautiful. You spoke earlier about your work with Barbara, and I understand that there was a lot of collaborative work. I am curious about the role of collaboration in the making of projects like this exhibition. How does the collaborative nature of this work help advance the project?

Jakob: It is absolutely necessary. It’s something that can never be enough, because in such projects, there are tons of information you haven’t read or worked with. And it’s the same with the connections to the artists, or with other people who are involved in the project. There you always have the feeling it’s not enough, but it’s absolutely necessary to get in touch with them, to talk to them and to understand what they do on a personal level as well.

What we did for this exhibition—something I will also do in my upcoming exhibition that involves some people from SCVN— is doing interviews with the artists and bringing them into the exhibition so that you hear from them about their processes and struggles, and how they make their decisions. There are a lot of decisions to make as an artist when it comes to showing things, and this is what I’m interested in.

We work together with some graphic designers, so we always have a digital version of the exhibition. We show it to the artists, discuss it with Charlotte, and eventually we must make the final decision as curators. This is a very democratic way to bring in a lot of perspectives. The collaboration is very close, beautiful, and it’s the most interesting thing about the process.

Ghada: Wrapping up our conversation and looking forward, what is next for SCVN in terms of exhibitions? I know that you will be creating an exhibition for the new SCVN project, which moves beyond the Holocaust and includes other genocides and mass atrocities from Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, Canada, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Can you speak about any plans for the next exhibits?

Jakob: An upcoming exhibit will take place in Wiesbaden again, opening on May 21. We open this exhibition with four comic artists, three of whom are involved in the SCVN project: Tobi Dahmen, who worked on Akram’s story from Syria and whose work will be shown for the first time; Nora Krug, who’s working on a project about archives in Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive, and we will display some work from her book; and there is Birgit Weyhe, who is in the working process for an upcoming comic about a young woman from Iraq. Charlotte will also be invited.

In November, the exhibit is set to travel to another museum in Constance, in the very south of Germany. We have a current discussion about whether it will also go to Erlangen in 2026.

In general, there are eight or nine artists working now on graphic novels about genocides worldwide [on the project]. Fantastic artists dealing with shocking issues. The question is, what will happen to these stories? Will there be anything beyond the fact that they will be published, hopefully in different languages and in different countries? So, Charlotte and the team came up with the idea of creating not a digital exhibition, but a portfolio which can be easily adapted in different places all over the world. Something like a core set of pictures, information, and layouts which can be printed, for example, on location, but in a certain, outstanding quality. The concept aims to, on the one hand, guarantee that there will be a high-profile exhibition or a good-quality exhibition, and on the other hand—the charming argument of course—to enable people and institutions, for example schools which don’t have much money, to display exhibitions in a way that is possible.

I’m very much into organizing events, public readings, and exhibitions, because I love bringing this fantastic artwork to people in a very direct way, to invite the artists and show original artwork. But I also understand the need to make the material more accessible to institutions.

Ghada: My last question is from a research process perspective. I am wondering how you approach the weight of the material at hand. Despite that we are dealing with comics and artistic material, the content is heavy. How do you deal with this aspect of the project?

Jakob: Oh, that’s hard to say. I usually don’t do it twenty-four hours a day. I have my job, my family, and my nonsense stuff like watching Netflix series or soccer on TV. I also have a lot of friends and family I can talk to throughout the process. This is helpful. I think comics, as I already said, offer you the chance to keep a distance. And the artists I worked with are very considerate not to overwhelm the people they are working with. But to be honest, I cannot answer completely because I don’t know how much impact it [this work] has on me. And I think there is some kind of professional distance I try to keep. Sometimes I distract myself and do other things. Actually, there is a beautiful picture about this in But I Live, in the story of Emmy Arbel, who worked with Barbara. After telling her the most horrible stuff you can think of, she says: “Now it’s time to stop, and I must go to the computer and play my solitaire game.” So, the question is much more an issue for the victims of these tough stories. We are in a comfortable position in not having experienced what they did.

Ghada: These were the questions that I had. Did I miss any question that you wanted to address?

Jakob: Not now. Thank you for these questions. It has been a pleasure. As I already said, it’s not so easy for me to answer in English, because sometimes some words are missing, and you try to paraphrase in an awkward way.

Ghada: It’s also my everyday struggle, so I understand!

Jakob: What is your first language?

Ghada: It’s Lebanese Arabic, which is my first language. Then we learn French as a second language, and English as a third. You can imagine me trying to phrase all those philosophical ideas in English but getting the words in Arabic first. Then I have to translate, but that is not always a practical thing to do.

Jakob: Well, you are into at least two other beautiful languages. I always envy people who can speak French. It’s very hard for me not to be able to speak French, because France is really the best country for comics. Yeah, and Arabic. I don’t understand Arabic, but it sounds very nice. Is it complicated?

Ghada: It is… It is usually considered harder to learn than some other languages, especially let’s say English, French, and Spanish, which share some vocabulary and grammatical structures, whereas Arabic has a completely different structure and a different alphabet. But that’s the beauty of diversity among people and languages!

Jakob: That’s a very good last word, I guess, that beauty of diversity.

Thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise, Jakob, and we look forward to your next exhibit with the project!