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While I was working on the history of Polish Jews, in the writing of my book titled ”The Keys to Understand Poland and the Jews”, I discovered a lost world with an unsuspected richness. One chapter was devoted to the children as victims of the Holocaust. I had choosen, as a symbol to illustrate the first page, one photography of a young boy, taken during the Upraising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Latter on, I made a pen drawing of this photography, and it gave me the idea to tell one whole story about this boy, with paintings and drawings, in the form of a graphic novel titled : “Icek, a boy of the Warsaw Ghetto”. This literary form is a good way to convey memory, and also to present historical and cultural subjects. I asked Christophe Mahieu to come with me in this project.
This graphic novel is not only about the Holocaust, but also about the ordinary life of the Jews in Poland before the Holocaust, with their traditions, habits, joys and issues.
The jewish life before the Holocaust is usually barely mentionned. But we think that this evocation is essential in order to understand this community of long aged Poland, which was the largest jewish population in the world, and very ressourceful in many matters: politics, arts, culture, linguistics, religion… One should get away with this one-sided vision which always consider the Jews as perpetual victims.
While traveling through Poland, one can see that this history comes often to memory and it makes us aware that there has been here, a long time ago, an other world, a life from an other time – one Atlantis of Poland.
The novel is divided into three parts, separated by time, and with three different narrators.
1. The first part takes place nowadays and presents a special encounter between a history professor and a young woman, who is a journalist. They both live in Paris, but their roots are in Poland, where they decide to go together.
2. The second part is the diary of a young polish graphic artist, written between 1939 and 1945, which is the story of the war, and of his passionate love for a polish jewish girl, who is a pianist.
3. The third part describes the meeting in Israel with one survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.
In the three parts of this story in, time is not linear : the past, the present and the future blend together. As a result, the three narratives unveil unsettling perspectives about historical memory and vision. The logics involved in the making has led the authors to give their faces and their voices to the characters of this adventure, which is one of a jewish family of Poland.
The story that we present in this graphic novel is a surreal tale. We intend to make the reader understand the reality, which seems to be simple but is indeed quite complex, of a vanished world still present… as long as we don’t forget it.
Presentation of the story
FIRST PART (2015, Spring) « The Travel »
A tale by Jacek.
Prologue : Paris, 2015, Spring. The encounter between Jacek Rewerski, a polish historian living in France, and Anna Delaunay, a French journalist of polish-jewish descent. Her grand-father, Abraham Krajewski, was a Jew, and he had emigrated from Poland to France in 1939, leaving behind him his younger brother Icek. They were orphans and lived in Cracow. Anna has in her possession some official papers about them, and one photography showing three persons : Abraham, Icek, and a man named Julian. Anna asks Jacek if it would be possible to know the fate of Icek during the war. She also wishes to travel to Warsaw, in order to write an article about the Polin Museum, devoted to the the thousand years history of the Jews in Poland. Jacek agrees to help Anna for her search, and suggests he could accompany her.
In their way to Poland, they stay in Berlin in order to meet one friend of Jacek, Christophe, who studies the history of jewish memory.
Christophe explains to Anna what connects him to the history of Poland and the Jews.
After this short time in Berlin, Jacek and Anna travel to Poland, and especially in Warsaw, and they survey the testimonies of the jewish past in the polish capital city.
They visit the Polin Museum, and the Historical Jewish Institute, one eminent place for memory, because here are kept the archives from the Ghetto.
Anna walks alone upstairs in the Institute, and as she faces the photography of a child from the Ghetto, she goes through the Door of Time. Anna disappears. Jacek will never see her again.
SECOND PART (1939-1944) : « The Story of Hannah »
A tale by Julian.
Traditional daily life in a shtetl through Hannah’s family : her uncle, Rabbi Szymon Krajewski, her aunt Maria, her brother Icek…
rabbi Szymon Krajewski & Maria Krajewska
Icek & Hannah
B. Warsaw August 1939
Hannah is a pianist. She goes to Warsaw with her family, and she has here an audition with Władysław Szpilman, a famous pianist, writer and composer. She meets again with Julian. We discover with them the flourishing jewish neighbourhood of Nalewki, with its stores, fancy restaurants and cottage industry, its numerous synagogues, but also places with misery, slummy districts.
A sweet romance is born between Julian and Hannah.
C. Warsaw, September-October 1944
A. Kazimierz Dolny
At the beginning of the war, Hannah and her family are trapped in Warsaw. From August 1940, the Jews have to settle to a « quarantine area », where they whould eventually all be confined : the Ghetto.
In a bar within the ghetto where W. Szpilman plays the piano, one member of the underground organisation « Oyneg Shabes » comes to Hannah, and offers her to meet Emmanuel Ringelblum, who is at the head of the Secret Archives of the Ghetto. Hannah becomes one of his assistants…
Secret Archives of the Ghetto
Execution of the family Ringelblum
1942, August, 5th : during a round-up, Icek manages to escape. He was with Simon and Maria, who are arrested and led to the Umschlagplatz, where they wait to be deported.
Janusz Korczak with children
They are in the very same train for Treblinka than Janusz Korczak and the children of his orphanage.
1943, May. The last days of the Upraising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hannah notices in a group of prisoners a boy who looks very much like Icek. He is in fact a child who appears on a famous photography already seen in the first part of the graphic novel, in Christophe’s flat, and then at the Historical Jewish Institute. She tries to deliver him, but a german soldier strikes her with the butt of his rifle. Hannah falls on the floor, her head covered with blood.
1944, August, 5th : the first days of the Warsaw Upraising. Julian is an officer in the scout battalion « Zoska » while they set free the 348 last jewish prisoners of a concentration camp located in Warsaw (KL Warschau). Hannah is among these prisoners. The joy as they meet again.
1944, September. A group of fighters from AK is hiding in the former building of the Great Jewish Library of Warsaw (after the war, the site of the Historical Jewish Institute). Among them are Julian and Hannah. They try to break through by crossing the ruins of the Great Synagogue, just next to them. While they run, Hannah stays behind. Everyone falls down on the floor when they hear the whistling of a mortar shell aiming to them. Explosion. When the smoke vanishes, they realise that Hannah has disappeared. Julian has never seen her again.
Część trzecia - Izrael - wiosna 2016
Opowieść Christophe'a
Poszukiwania Anny przez policję nie przyniosły żadnego rezultatu. Jacek wrócił do Paryża, zorientowany, że posiada niewiele informacji dotyczących Anny. Stara się dowiedzieć więcej, ale bez skutku. Równolegle, Christophe poszukując informacji o rodzinie Anny, odnalazł w Warszawie wnuka Juliana, który mu przekazał walizkę z rękopisem przedstawiającym jego dziennik z czasów wojny.
In the meantime, Christophe makes some research about Annas’s ancestors. His discovers allow him to meet with some of Julian’s great-children in Warsaw, who give him a suitcase where Julian had kept notes describing his life during the war.
By using some other Julian’s written testimonies, Christophe manages at last to follow the track leading to Icek : he has emigrated to israel in 1947.
Icek 70 years later
Christophe and Jacek travel to the north of Israel, and they meet Icek in the kibboutz where he lives, the Kibboutz of the Ghetto Fighters (lohamei hagettaot). At this place, a surprise awaits the visitors !
End,
but not really
historia surrealistyczna
The encounter between Hannah and Julian…
the ruins of the Great Synagogue
Historical Jewish Institute
Polin Museum
the Door of Time
This is a story for which the authors are also the main characters.
The main character of the novel is Anna, a French journalist of polish-jewish descent. She wants to know the fate during World War II of her great-uncle Icek.
She plays the leading rôle in the story, and she has many faces. She is at the same time real and fictional, Anna and Hannah, living in the past and in present time, lost and everlasting…
The second main character is a young jewish polish boy, which we named Icek.
The image of this boy is on a photography taken in Warsaw by a SS-soldier in 1943. It has been known all around the world, so that this boy, who is only seven or eight years old, has become a « symbol of the Holocaust ». The name of the boy remains unknown.
Anna goes through the « Door of Time and Memory », which leads her in 1939, in a shtetl named Kazimierz Dolny.
Julian is not a Jew. He cannot stay with them… but, as a member of the Underground Resistance, he has his ways to get into the Ghetto, for the sake of exchanging intelligence, and also to meet Hannah. He writes in a diary about the daily life in the Ghetto, that is the struggle for survival…
THIRD PART – Israel, 2016, Spring.
A tale by Christophe.
Christophe explains what happened after Anna disappeared in the Historical Jewish Institute in Warsaw, as told by Jacek in the first part.
A police inquiry on Anna’s fate after she disappeared gives no result. Jacek goes back to Paris. He realises that he knows very few tangible facts about Anna’s life and existence. He wants to learn more about her, but it is of no avail.
1945, January. Warsaw is a ghost city, the city of ghosts.
