Adieu Birkenau
By Ginette Kolinka, JD Morvan and Victor Matet, SelfMadeHero, £19.99

 
IN our present predicament this graphic novel, written by a survivor of Nazi extermination camps, is a valiant testament to the power of witness. 

Ginette Kolinka is a Parisian Jew halfway through her ninth decade. In 1941 she and her family escaped Nazi Paris only to be arrested by German authorities in the free zone.

She was imprisoned and then transferred to the SS-controlled internment camp at Drancy. As part of “the Final Solution” she was transported with her father and her younger brother, Gilbert, to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. 

On arrival, Kolinka’s father and brother are immediately selected for extermination; to her lifelong sense of guilt, Ginette advises her father and Gilbert to take a lift on the fake Red Cross truck waiting to depart, while she will walk to the camp. She never sees them again.

This graphic novel account of the catastrophic whirlwind of cruelty unleashed by fascism in Europe has renewed resonance just as we seem to teeter once again on the edge of depravity.

Adieu Birkenau was written by Ginette Kolinka after a lifetime spent repressing the memories of her ordeal. The book uses filmic jump-cuts reminiscent of Charlotte Salomon’s graphic work, Life? or Theatre? Compared to the Salomon masterpiece, the present work is more straightforwardly documentary in style. The narrative involves Kolinka taking a group of French schoolchildren on an educational trip through Birkenau death camp in Poland. 

Interspersed with their journey and the eventual tour of the vast monument to killing, images switch back 80 years to Kolinka and her family’s experiences. We follow the cattle truck journey to the camps and her endurance of unspeakable deprivations.

What comes through most strongly is the portrait of an indomitable spirit. Kolinka is a disrupter granny pranking the children, feeding them sweets, sensitive to children’s need of reassurance from the adult world.

But she is also unstinting in her descriptions. She misses nothing, noticing for instance how the museum of death has added sanitising improvements, installing multiple toilet holes when the reality was people crowded together, shitting back to back in the most dehumanising way. 

Kolinka’s strength of personality stamps the book with faith in humanity. Despite its abject depictions, lifeforce triumphs over the death drive, although she acknowledges doubting whether you can “hang on to feelings you had before you went to hell.” The reader grapples with an experience of the best in humanity, facing its capacity to be the worst of any species.

Equally striking reading this book is its relevance to events unfolding now. Particularly the nightmarish feel of a society moving inexorably towards the abyss while the world looks on, seemingly paralysed.

The young Kolinka’s naive trust in the authorities, her belief in good intent and that all will be well, are played out against the incremental withdrawal of her rights to exist by an administrative machine. This gives Adieu Birkenau a vital resonance that is beyond the safely historical.

We watch in real time similar catastrophic steps taking place: the crumbling of fundamental human rights protections along with the post-world war II institutions set up to ensure that it could never happen again.

Once more it is happening, and in plain sight: genocide. 

The book ends with a documentary section detailing a timeline of the events illustrated by documents, photographs and artwork secretly made by prisoners. This book is an invaluable educational testament. It is also highly readable and engaging for young people and adults alike.