Academics Amrita Das and Debapriya Basu have recently published an article entitled “Dwelling in grief: the traumarchitecture of But I Live (2022)” in the online Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, on August 18, 2026. The article examines the SCVN graphic narrative But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, and is outlined in the abstract as:
“This essay examines how the authorial/editorial team bends and stretches the conventions of the graphic novel and the materiality of the comics page to evoke the silences and stutters that accompany such testimonies. It reads the visual strategies deployed by the artists/illustrators (such as the presence or absence of demarcated panels and their overall arrangement, choice of colour palette, and the stylistic aesthetics referenced) as architectural elements that draw the blueprint of what we propose to call the ‘traumarchitecture’ of the narrative. Invoking conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and Thierry Groensteen’s formulation of spatio topia, this essay argues that studying the traumarchitecture of But I Live leads us to a deeper understanding of what it may mean to make art after Auschwitz.”
As part of exploring traumatic space in But I Live, the authors argue it unfolds on two fronts: 1) the exploration of the body as the site of trauma and 2) the comics page as the cartographic representation of the traumatic space, and that “…graphic artists, here, as Schallié herself puts it, ‘are actively co-creating the history with the survivors’ (Citation2022, 179).”
The article deeply reflects on the artistic approaches in each graphic narrative, from the choice of colour, use of grids, and representation of trauma in the body, with their conclusion outlining:
“While the testimonies offer a glimpse into each survivor’s childhood suffering and the abiding sorrow that is its lifelong burden, we also witness how they spill trauma across the pages…lead[ing] us towards a deeper understanding of what it may mean to make art after Auschwitz.”
Throughout the article the authors incorporate images from the book. This page from the book is shown with the caption “Emmie’s past spills over into the present (99),” for example.
The platform Taylor and Francis Online is not an open access site but the article may be accessed through an institution like the University of Victoria Library. To read the article please follow this link:
Amrita Das is a Research Scholar and Debapriya Basu is an Assistant Professor both in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, Assam, India.
Das, A., & Basu, D. (2026). Dwelling in grief: the traumarchitecture of But I Live (2022). Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2026.2715395
It is with deep sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Rose Lipszyc z”l–, beloved wife of the late Jack Lipszyc. Cherished daughter of Eliezer and Dvorah Handelsman. Loving mother and mother-in-law of Alan and Sharon Lipszyc, Linda and Howard Hofbauer, and Carol Lipszyc. Dear sister of the late Izzie Handelsman, and Heniek Handelsman. Devoted grandmother of Sarah and Andrew, Madelyn and David, Brittney and Mor, Brooke and Kyle, and Tara, and great grandmother of Delilah, Iver, Meadow, Dawson, Liam, Eyal, and Orli. Our heartfelt condolences go out to Rose’s entire family.
Seated: Rose Lipszyc. Standing left to right: Mark Celinscak, Miriam Libicki, and Charlotte Schallié. Photo Credit: DWM Creative for the Toronto Holocaust Museum, March 25, 2026.
We had the honour of getting to know Rose Lipszyc through the international research project Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (www.visualnarratives.org), led by the University of Victoria and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC). The project advances a new way of gathering and documenting the experiences of genocide and mass atrocity survivors by placing survivors’ agency and participation at its centre. A previous anthology pairing four survivors with artists and historians, But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New Jewish Press, 2022) / Aber ich lebe: vier Kinder überleben den Holocaust (C.H. Beck, 2022), has won half-a-dozen book awards in Canada and internationally.
Rose Lipszyc began publicly telling her harrowing story of survival in the mid-2010s, after retirement. In Rose’s early teens, after the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto, her mother and two brothers were deported to concentration camps where they were murdered. Rose lost approximately 50 family members during the Holocaust. Rose escaped a forced march after her mother urged her to flee; her grandmother and some gentile neighbours provided her with false identity papers. Posing as Polish Catholic sisters, Rose and her aunt made it through the war while working as forced labourers in the F. Tecklenborg rope factory in Bremen (Germany).
Rose found that her stories were particularly impactful on teenage audiences, who were the same age she had been when she “cheated Hitler” (as she understood the mission her mother had given her). She lent her title and testimony to the 2019 documentary Cheating Hitler. In 2021, Rose was appointed to the Order of Canada for her dedication as a Holocaust educator. Until her final months, Rose spoke to school groups, warning of the dangers of hatred and anger, telling them “Be good to one another and be grateful to live in this country of freedom and peace.”
Rose agreed to collaborate on a graphic novel about her life in 2022. She had already been given high honours for her educational work, and although a lover of literature, she was not very familiar with the graphic art form. Nonetheless, she entered the project with great enthusiasm and open-mindedness, hoping to reach the hearts and minds of even more young people worldwide. She appreciated the rigorous historical approach of our project, but repeatedly warned Dr. Mark Celinscak, the volume’s co-editor and lead historian, “Don’t make it dry!”
In June 2023, graphic novelist Miriam Libicki, Mark Celinscak, Rose Lipszyc, and a film crew spent four full days at Rose’s condo in Toronto. Rose participated in hours-long interviews. During breaks she played the consummate host: feeding everyone from the deli across the street, inviting the team for a swim in her building’s pool, and preparing her second bedroom for Miriam to sleep over. This immersive trip built a strong bond between Rose and everyone on the project. Rose was unfailingly warm but also incredibly candid, with sharp observations of character. She connected easily with her childhood feelings, from the sustaining love of her aunt Rose, to anger at the petty tyrannies of slave labour, to enduring grief for her lost toddler brother, “the love of my life,” Heniek Handelsman.
We vividly remember our first meeting with Rose. We hoped to spend several hours with her on that first day, learning more about her experiences. During our first recorded interview, she shared painful stories of the Holocaust. She spoke with great energy and intensity. After an hour or so, she abruptly stood up and said, “I am tired and I think that’s enough for today. We can pick it up tomorrow.” She thanked us and walked out of the room. As we packed up our supplies, and headed for the front door, we checked on Rose who was lying on her bed, facing the window. We recognized how much she had given us that morning, how much sharing the story had drained her. We worried that we were asking too much of her. When we returned the next morning, Rose met us once again with great positivity and energy. We told her we were mindful of how taxing this could be for her. She appreciated it and then told us: “When I share my story, it is a way to keep the memory of my loved ones alive. If I don’t do it, who will?” Her commitment to Holocaust education was deeply impressive to us all. It was also a reminder of the importance of the work we were trying to complete.
Miriam spent the next two years composing a script from Rose’s transcribed recollections, conducting further research with assistance from the SCVN team, and painting the graphic novel. Rose had a great way with words in English, and a keen sense of dramatic irony. Miriam and Rose co-created dialogue to flesh out scenes from the war, over a series of videoconference calls. Miriam shared her script draft, and they read it aloud, with Rose offering factual corrections, memories of the people involved, and “punched up” the word choices.
Cover of Two Roses: A Story of Deception and Determination in Nazi Germany (2026) by Miriam Libicki & Rose Lipszyc. Edited by Mark Celinscak and Charlotte Schallié. Photo Credit: DWM Creative for the Toronto Holocaust Museum, March 25, 2026.
Rose’s memory was deep and accurate. In August 2024, Miriam traveled with historian Dr. Andrea Löw to Bremen-Grohn, where Rose’s factory had been located. Local German historians of the Second World War escorted Miriam around and helped her consult archival documents, including Rose’s falsified personnel file. Miriam told them that Rose had recalled fleeing from Allied bombings to a bomb shelter built into a hillside near the factory. The local historians initially told Miriam that there was no such shelter in the area. Before her arrival, however, they confirmed that the shelter had indeed existed and was still standing. Later, when Miriam showed Rose photographs she had taken of the shelter entrance and the semi-hidden air vent on top of the hill, Rose said, “I was shaking all over.”
Between 2024 and 2026, Miriam travelled several times to Toronto to meet with Rose in person as Rose faced a series of health setbacks. Nevertheless, Rose remained passionately committed to the book’s completion. She continued to work on the edits together with Miriam from a hospital bed after fracturing her hip, declaring, “I’m the woman with nine lives!”
Upon the book’s publication in spring 2026, the Toronto Holocaust Museum hosted a launch in partnership with the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project. Two Roses: A Story of Deception and Determination in Nazi Germany sold out at the standing-room-only event. The museum, members of the greater Toronto Jewish community and government officials paid tribute to Rose. Joining Rose on stage were graphic artist Miriam Libicki, and co-editors Mark Celinscak and Charlotte Schallié. The panel was moderated by York University’s Dr. Sara Horowitz. The whole team feels blessed that Rose experienced the book launch and saw the massive outpouring of love and gratitude for herself and her work.
We will miss our dear Rose very much.
With deepest gratitude and immense respect. May her memory be for a blessing.
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives is pleased to announce the publication of Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses. Nach den Erinnerungen von Klaus Zwilsky (The Secret of the Jewish Hospital: Based on the Memories of Klaus Zwilsky), released in German by C.H. Beck on September 24, 2026. The book was translated from English by Rita Seuß. The graphic novel is drawn by Israeli graphic novelist Gilad Seliktar, a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design whose Arad 95 won the 2024 Navon Prize for Best Israeli Graphic Novel and whose contribution to SCVN’s previously released graphic novel But I Live was nominated for an Eisner Award.
The book follows the story of a young boy named Klaus Werner Max Zwilsky who was born in Berlin on August 16, 1932. In 1943 his family was ordered to the Jewish Hospital Berlin, where his father, Erich, served as the institution’s last remaining pharmacist and his mother, Ruth, repaired military uniforms before joining him in the dispensary. What followed was a story of survival in plain sight: the hospital was the only Jewish institution in Nazi Germany to remain operational throughout the war, and roughly 800 Jews were still living there when Soviet troops liberated it on April 24, 1945. Klaus returned to school that July and became the first Bar Mitzvah in postwar Berlin.
Cover of Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses (The Secret of the Jewish Hospital) co-created by Gilad Seliktar & Klaus Zwilsky (2026).
The book was built through direct collaboration between Zwilsky and Seliktar, in keeping with the project’s central commitment: that the gathering and understanding survivors’ experiences should place their well-being, agency, and cooperation at its centre.
The two met through Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin, who put them in touch in the autumn of 2022. In May 2023, Seliktar travelled to Zwilsky’s home in Palm Springs, California, to record his account; and that July he went to Berlin to see the archive and the hospital for himself.
The book Seliktar drew from those visits tells two stories side by side, allowing the reader to engage with two timeframes at once: Zwilsky’s wartime memories, and the encounter between an artist and a survivor eighty years later. The deliberate representation of these overlapping timeframes calls direct attention to the collaborative mediation process involved in the creation of this graphic novel.
A still of Seliktar painting Zwilsky’s portrait in the documentary short ‘The Apothecarian’s Boy’ (2025).
Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses leaves a genuine historical question open. Why the Nazi authorities never closed the hospital or deported the people sheltering inside it has never been satisfactorily explained, and the book is accompanied by an essay setting out what the documentary record can and cannot establish. Zwilsky has spent much of the past two decades on that record himself, organizing his parents’ wartime papers and donating them to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where they form the Zwilsky Collection.
SCVN recently held a webinar entitled Personal Histories in the Public Archive: Archiving the Klaus Zwilsky Story (January 2026) in which Zwilsky joined Aubrey Pomerance, and SCVN Project Lead Dr. Charlotte Schallié to discuss the Zwilsky Collection. Their conversation asks what it takes for a public archive to hold a family’s personal history responsibly, with the survivor himself shaping how his records are described and made accessible. The webinar recording can be accessed here once it has been made available for the public.
Left to right: Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin; Zwilsky family notebook; Aubrey in the archives of the Jewish Museum Belin and Holocaust Survivor, Klaus Zwilsky.
Das Geheimnis des Jüdischen Krankenhauses was edited by Charlotte Schallié with a historical essay by Aubrey Pomerance, and developed within the project’s Holocaust Research Cluster.
The French version of the book Nous ont-ils oubliés ? translated by Hélène Duhamel is set to be released in October 2026 by çà et là.
Many thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for supporting our project, and to the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Jewish Hospital Berlin for their participation.
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives is pleased to announce the publication of Gib nicht auf! Wie eine junge Ezidin den Völkermord überlebt (Don’t Give Up! How a young Yezidi woman survived the genocide), released in German on September 17 by avant-verlag. The graphic novel is co-created by Jilan (pseudonym), a Yezidi survivor of the genocide in Sinjar, and German graphic artist Birgit Weyhe, whose earlier Madgermaneswas awarded the Berthold Leibinger Foundation’s Comic Book Prize in 2015 and the Max and Moritz Prize for Best German-Language Comic in 2016.
Cover of Gib nicht auf! Wie eine junge Ezidin den Völkermord überlebt (Don’t Give Up! How a young Yezidi woman survived the genocide) co-created by Jilian and Birgit Weyhe (2026).
In summer 2014, the Islamic State attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. Jilan, then a young girl, was captured and held as a slave. The book follows her account of that captivity including the fear of death, her eventual escape, her work of coming to terms with trauma, and her first steps toward a new and self-determined life in Germany. It is the first time Jilan has told this story publicly.
The book was built through sustained collaboration between Jilan and Weyhe, in keeping with the project’s central commitment: that the gathering and commemoration of survivors’ experiences should place their well-being, agency, and cooperation at its centre. Jilan’s testimony shapes not only the content of the book but the terms on which it is told and drawn. Weyhe has confronted the question of how to centre survivor narratives before: her Rude Girl(2024) takes as its subject the ethics of drawing another person’s life.
The publication arrives while the conditions it documents remain unresolved. Because northern Iraq continues to be contested by shifting parties, the Yezidis are still not safe in their homeland—a fact that gives Jilan’s account, and the wider work of Yezidi documentation and advocacy, a continuing urgency.
Gib nicht auf! was edited by Kjell Anderson, Leyla Ferman, and Charlotte Schallié, and developed within the project’s Iraq/Syria Research Cluster. Further information on the collaboration is available on the project page and on the Iraq/Syria Research Cluster page.
Many thanks to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for our project funding, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law for supporting additional pages for our graphic narrative.
Gib nicht auf! is now available for purchase from avant-verlag.
Historical testimony influences artistic and pedagogical approaches to episodes of mass violence in a variety of mediums, from comics and graphic novels to films and even works of virtual reality. The Journal of History invites scholars from a broad range of disciplines to contribute to a special issue entitled ‘Historical Testimony and the Arts,’ which will be co-edited by SCVN director Dr. Charlotte Schallié and Holocaust Research Cluster co-lead Dr. Mark Celinscak.
For this special issue, The Journal of History seeks contributions that examine how historical testimony can be used to both represent and understand the past. What are the uses of testimony for researchers, artists, and audiences? What are the limits of those forms of representation in their use of these accounts? How can art and other forms of representation challenge our understanding of history? These questions and more will be considered in the issue.
SCVN is seeking a part-time Digital Communications & Website Lead to maintain the project website and coordinate media outputs. This is a term position, with the opportunity to extend, and is open to Canadian citizens and permanent residents.
The job description is outlined below. Any inquiries may be directed to Project Manager Jennifer Sauter at jsauter@uvic.ca.
We are delighted to announce that SCVN research assistant Ghada Youssef has been selected as one of the five winners of the 2026 Storytellers Challenge, presented by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada!
This challenge was open to postsecondary students, inviting them to show Canadians, in up to three minutes or 300 words, how social sciences and humanities research is impacting our lives, our world and our future for the better. For SCVN’s entry, research assistant Ghada Youssef produced a 3-minute video summarizing the project’s goals and outputs. She was selected to join the top twenty finalists in Montreal, Quebec this June to present the SCVN project to a live audience and jury at the Storytellers Showcase and conference.
Ghada’s selection has since been featured in the UVic News and the VPRI Bulletin article ‘Storytellers on screen’ where she shared that SCVN was among her motivations to pursue her doctoral studies: “I was very excited that the project uses visual mediums to approach social justice topics—it felt like it sat squarely within what I’m already passionate about.”
Congratulations to Ghada and the media and communications team on this achievement! You can watch the winning entry on the SSHRC YouTube Channel below:
Excerpt from Al-Faẓia’ (University of Toronto Press, 2026) by Tobi Dahmen and Akram Al Saud.
We are delighted to announce that SCVN’s third graphic novel, Al-Faẓia’ الفظیع– The Horror: Surviving Syria’s Prisons, will be published in German on May 26, 2026, by Carlsen Verlag. Al-Faẓia’ is the result of a collaboration between artist Tobi Dahmen and survivor Akram Al Saud, including extensive interviews and personal encounters.
In 2010, Akram Al Saud, then a nineteen-year-old architecture student at the University of Aleppo, was unjustly arrested by the intelligence services of the Syrian air force. His detention, the first of four, lasted nine months. After his release, Akram joined the revolution against the Assad regime, but in 2016 he was forced to flee to Europe.
Akram and Tobi’s collaboration was supported by a team of people dedicated to arts-based, trauma-informed, survivor-centred research and storytelling: editors Uğur Ümit Üngör and Charlotte Schallié; research cluster co-leads Dr. Üngör, Kees Ribbens, and Kjell Anderson; and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Funding was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
For more information about the graphic novel, follow the link to our Research Cluster page. Click the cover image on the right to read an English translation of the official Carlsen press kit, or click on the images below.
A companion documentary short film, ‘How to Draw Darkness?’, directed by Lidija Zelović, is currently in post-production, with the official trailer available to watch on our SCVN YouTube channel.
We are delighted to share that the SCVN project has been selected as a finalist in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada’s Storytellers Challenge for 2026! This challenge is open to postsecondary students, inviting them to show Canadians, in up to three minutes or 300 words, how social sciences and humanities research is impacting our lives, our world and our future for the better.
For SCVN’s entry, research assistant Ghada Youssef produced a 3-minute video summarizing the project’s goals and outputs. She will be participating in the second phase of the challenge by presenting the project in front of a jury at a conference in Montreal, Quebec this June 2026, where five winners will be announced.
Ghada’s selection has also been featured in the UVic News and the VPRI Bulletin article ‘Storytellers on screen’ where she shared that SCVN was among her motivations to pursue her doctoral studies:
“I was very excited that the project uses visual mediums to approach social justice topics—it felt like it sat squarely within what I’m already passionate about.”
Congratulations to Ghada and the media and communications team on this achievement! You can watch the submission video on the SSHRC YouTube below:
