Maria van Lieshout’s YA graphic novel Song of a Blackbird, brings a little-known piece of World War II history to the fore. Using a mix of drawings and archival photos, van Lieshout takes the reader inside Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to tell the story of an artist who rescued two Jewish children, used her skills to forge documents, and carried out a heist that helped fund the Resistance movement. Her story is fiction but is based on the real work of artists, including women, in the Resistance. The book is also a major departure for van Lieshout, who has a 20-year career as a writer and illustrator of picture books, including Bye Bye Binky and I Sleep in a Big Bed. Song of a Blackbird is set in both 1943 and 2011 and tells two alternating stories of a young woman’s quest to find her grandmother’s family and the artist who rescued her. PW spoke with van Lieshout about the serendipitous find that sent her off in a new direction, the decade-long journey to the completed book, and the importance, now more than ever, of telling stories of resistance.
How did you go from creating picture books to this serious young adult graphic novel?
In 2011 when my grandmother passed away, we found two documents among her belongings. One was about my grandfather’s time in the Resistance and the things he experienced with his good friend Fritz, who ended up being arrested and executed, and the other was a minute-by-minute description of the bombing of their house. Reading those documents moved me tremendously, and I remember talking to my agent, Steven Malk, in 2011 and saying, “I really feel like there’s a book here somewhere.” He encouraged me to do it, but it took me quite some time to figure out what that would look like.
How did you move from those two documents to this much bigger story?
I started with research. I reached out to Fritz’s son, and I started going to the Amsterdam city archives and digging through their files and photos. My grandfather and Fritz had been sort of sideways involved with a bank heist, which when I found the documents in 2016 was not a very well-known story. There’s been a movie about it since [The Resistance Banker]. As I was digging, I became really struck by the role that artists and women had played during this heist, and that was an angle that had largely remained hidden. Even in that movie, the story is very much told from the male perspective and from the bank’s perspective. As I started looking at that story from the perspective of these young artists, especially this one young woman, I realized that is the angle that I was going to take.
This is your first graphic novel, and it’s very different from your other work. How did you develop it, and what part did your editors play in that?
At first I thought I would make an illustrated novel. When I started talking to Mark Siegel at First Second, and he agreed to publish it, he said, “It’s going to be a graphic novel.” I was a little bit intimidated, because I knew how much work that would be, but now I know this is what it needed to be all along.
I worked with two editors, Mark Siegel and Tess Banta. They let me do my thing, and they helped me with the comics aspect of it. My very first version had these really big speech balloons, and Mark was like, “No, they need to be like little puffs, almost.” But they also realized that my vision for the story was something different than what they usually do, and what I loved most is that they gave me the freedom to do that, and they never pushed back or made me fit it in their mold. They just suggested ways to make it a little bit stronger, make it read a little bit easier, or perhaps make the illustrations more interesting, or change points of view. But at the same time, they let me execute my vision, which I really appreciate.
The story is set in two timelines, 1943 and 2011, with the blackbird tying it together as the narrator. Where did that image come from?
My grandparents never talked about the war, but my mother had very vivid recollections. During the Hunger Winter [1944–1945], when things were very, very grave in Amsterdam, she heard a blackbird sing, and she asked her mother, “Does the blackbird realize it is wartime?” And my grandmother answered her, “Yes, I believe that the blackbird knows it is wartime, and it sings so beautifully because of it.” She would always tell us that story.
So once I had decided to make the story about the power of art to fight hate, and of this heroic group of artists and what they did during the war, I decided I would love for the narrator to be inspiration, and the blackbird was a wonderful metaphor for inspiration, given that it gave my mother and my grandmother hope during those really grim days.
Your art mixes drawings and photos, which helps reinforce the fact that the story is based on real events, even though the characters are fictional. How did you develop that style?
That came about organically, because I spent four years researching this story before I ever thought about characters or plot. When I started thinking about the visual story, I realized that I was sitting on a wealth of information. The Amsterdam city archives and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the national war archives, are very generous with their rights. The World War II remembrance community in the Netherlands has decided that it is more important to tell the stories than it is to protect the copyrights of the creators, so it was relatively easy for me to secure the rights for all those photos.
The photographs themselves are acts of resistance, because during the Nazi occupation, photography was strictly prohibited. Those photographers risked their lives, and because of that, many of them stayed anonymous. So this is my way to pay tribute to them.
There are no images of swastikas in the book. Was that a deliberate decision?
Throughout the creation of the book, I was really mindful, especially because I am not Jewish, that people who read the book would see the humanity of the victims, so I was very careful not to put anything in there that was too triggering. I came across photographs that absolutely hit me in the chest when I saw them, but I chose not to include them for that reason. And that’s why I also decided not to include any swastikas in the story.
The second decision I made is that the enemy in my story is the Nazi regime. It’s not the German people. I deliberately made sure that I never once spoke about the Germans as the enemy. I always spoke about the Nazis, because in Germany, there were people in the resistance. There were German people who were willing to sacrifice their lives or sacrifice their freedom to fight the Nazi regime.
At the end of the book, you have a section talking about the real people and events that the story is based on and what happened to them during and after the war. With all that information, why did you decide to do a fictional story?
For a long time, I wondered whether it would be possible to make it a nonfiction story, because I wanted to pay tribute to these very heroic people. In the end, I decided that the best way for me to do that is to fictionalize the story, because it would be more accessible, especially for a younger audience. If I had made it into a nonfiction story, it would have become really difficult, because there were so many people involved in so many different groups, and resistance fighters often took on different names and joined different groups, so it would have become a really complex book to read. When I decided to make it fictional, I felt I needed to change the names so that there would be no confusion about what happened, but I did feel strongly about wanting to include a section in the book where I pay tribute to the actual heroes.
Given the enormous number of books already out there about World War II, what gave you the confidence to do this one?
When I found those documents, and I realized my grandparents had taken the time to commit all of their traumatic memories to paper, even though they were really uncomfortable talking about it, I felt that I needed to do something with it. I’ve been working on this for 11 years, and throughout that period, it became obvious to me that a lot of the stories are already beginning to slip away, despite the fact that there are so many books and movies about this period. It’s our job to perpetuate the story.
I feel that in today’s world, stories and art are more important than they have ever been, because art and stories allow us to see the world through the eyes of another. They are uniting, whereas people all over the world are trying to actively divide us, because they realize that when we’re all divided, they can rule—divide and conquer. Writing stories, telling stories, sharing stories, making books, making art is an act of resistance, because we are contributing to this sense of belonging, to this sense of empathy, to recognizing that we are all much more similar than different. That was actually not something that was in my head when I started this book, but it is very much in my head today.
Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout. First Second, $25.99 Jan. 21 ISBN 978-1-250-86981-4; $17.99 paper ISBN 978-1-250-86982-1
