Jessica Redhead was a postgraduate student on the MA in Public History at the University of York in 2017-2018. Jessica joined Personalising History as a placement student in January 2018. In this blog post, she reflects on her experiences creating the graphic novel Rosl and Marc’s Story. In particular, she discusses how the benefits of remediating Holocaust testimony for educational purposes go hand-in-hand with challenges associated with the testifier’s loss of authorial control over their narrative.
At the start of my placement with Personalising History, I attended the City of York Council’s Civic Event for Holocaust Memorial Day 2018. I expected that I would interact with many attendees who shared a common goal to preserve the memory of the Holocaust for future generations. Yet, I observed that the overwhelming majority of attendees had a personal connection to or a notable interest in the Holocaust: survivors, relatives of survivors, academics, or people politically motivated to ensure similar events never take place again. I was shocked that there were only four university students in attendance, including myself and another Personalising History placement student. This suggested to me that although the Holocaust is compulsory content on the curriculum, the younger generation’s interest in the Holocaust is dwindling. Rather, many people who attempt to preserve the memory of the Holocaust may already have a personal connection to the event.
For my placement, I was tasked with creating a resource that school educators could use to teach students about the Holocaust. Inspired by my observations at Holocaust Memorial Day, I wanted to create a resource that allowed students to connect with Holocaust refugees’ personal stories and understand how the Holocaust affected people’s lives. I chose to remediate Rosl and Marc Schatzberger’s oral history testimony into a short graphic novel entitled Rosl and Marc’s Story. Educators often use graphic novels to teach about the Holocaust, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Eric Heuval’s A Secret Family, Trina Robbins’ Lily Renée, Escape Artist, and Personalising History’s very own Suzanne’s Story. Graphic novels are a form of visual media through which readers can, in a sense, see the historical events and figures, which makes the past more real to students. Graphic novels are an exciting medium through which even reluctant readers and students bored by dense textbooks or lectures can engage with complex and difficult historical issues. I thus created a script based on the oral testimony, designed the drawings, and recruited an amateur artist to complete the illustrations.
However, the process of creating a didactic and historical graphic novel revealed the difficulties of “personalising history” for the classroom. Testifiers lose sole authority over their testimony and surrender control to creators who decide how to communicate the memories to their audience. For Rosl and Marc’s Story, I wanted to create a script based on the words spoken in Rosl and Marc’s testimony. In their testimony, they recounted their life stories, but often interrupted each other and flitted between their pre-, during, and post-war memories. Yet, to create a clear and coherent script for students, I had to rearrange and edit the testimony. I decided to narrativize their childhoods in Vienna and their journeys to England, which required me to separate and rearrange the narrative into chronological order. Though this created a more eloquent script, it was I (not the testifiers) who decided what aspects of their experiences to depict and how to present them. Many historians suggest that how a testifier communicates their experience carries implicit meaning and reveals how the testifier understood and remembered their experience. To manipulate the testimony into a script may undermine this and make the experience less personal to the testifier.
I also decided how to visually depict the testimony. Due to time constraints, I had no direct contact with Rosl and Marc, and thus I could not ask for any additional information that could shape the illustrations. I thus drew on historical knowledge, imagination, and artistic license to design the illustrations. For instance, I had no knowledge about how Rosl and Marc looked as children. Consequently, I used photographs of children from Austria in the 1930s and Rosl and Marc’s appearance in the interview as inspiration: Rosl wears a pink pinafore dress and her hair is styled in blonde plaits, and Marc wears a green sweater vest and has brown curly hair. Had I been able to access photographs of them as children, I could have ensured the illustrations better captured their likeness. Though inspired by Rosl and Marc, the story and illustrations become representations of their childhood and journeys to England and do not necessarily capture their personal and ‘authentic’ Holocaust experiences.
Furthermore, I wanted the novel to be complex and detailed. The Holocaust is often taught in schools in the UK in History, English Literature, Psychology, Art, or Religious Studies classes. I wanted to ensure the graphic novel had the potential to be useful throughout the curricula. I added and manipulated the narrative to allow students to develop their primary source analysis. I varied the colour palette to reflect the emotion that Rosl and Marc manifested in their interview. I portrayed the pre-war life in light colours to reflect their innocence and happiness. I literally and metaphorically darkened the images as the Nazi occupation affected their lives and forced them to flee to reflect the danger and sorrow they faced and felt. For instance, Rosl stated that she felt fear when she and her mother and sister fled from Vienna to Prague in the dead of night over the border. I had no description or information about what the border looked like. I thus used colour and imagery to reflect the feelings Rosl expressed: I depicted a jagged barbed wire fence, dark green grass, and a black sky, and a grey road to forebode the treacherous and dangerous journey to stability and safety in England. This captures the emotions she expressed and provides students the opportunity to analyse the drawings. Yet, it does not necessarily or faithfully reproduce the memories.
These are just some of the difficulties that I faced when remediating the testimony into a graphic novel. Transforming testimony into a didactic resource that can be used to teach about the Holocaust, and that students can connect with and see how the Holocaust affected people’s lives, paradoxically may make the experiences less personal to the testifier. The testifier’s experiences are edited, rearranged, and possibly even misrepresented or distorted to make them more suitable for a narrative, for a classroom setting, and for a younger audience. This is something that I believe I could address better and overcome if I had more time and communication with Rosl and Marc, as I could ensure that the illustrations and script at least captured the emotions they felt and did not misrepresent their memories. Yet, we are entering a post-witness era in which soon educators will no longer be able to communicate with Holocaust witnesses. Without new instruction from Holocaust education organisations, or learning from academics that study remediation, testimony, and Holocaust education, the problems that I faced will only become more common.
personalisinghistory.wordpress.com 