Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir

“Who will remember them, if not us?” asks Dranger (Miss Remarkable and Her Career) in this meticulous chronicle of her Jewish family’s history of disruption and dislocation. When Dranger was growing up, her grandparents deflected her questions about relatives who “disappeared” in WWII. Dranger details her yearslong quest to fill in this untold ancestry, and how she connects with long-lost living family members. She follows her great-grandfather Aron and his family, who fled pogroms in Russian-occupied Bialystok in the early 1900s, from their arrival in Sweden through the Nazi occupation of neighboring states. Among those profiled are Dranger’s great-uncle, who ran a successful textile factory, and relatives who join a kibbutz. Even in purportedly neutral Sweden, other relatives are forced to separate and relocate to avoid Nazi threats. In one particularly moving section, Dranger discovers a previously unknown cousin from Belarus who seemingly died in the camps as a baby and adds his name to a memorial in a Stockholm synagogue. The storytelling unfolds in a collage of archival photos and documents, which helps anchor the evocative black-and-white drawings. Dranger is dedicated to memorializing those murdered but also empathizes with her elders: “What parent would want to instill such an incomprehensible terror in their children?” It’s a weighty and well-constructed addition to the graphic literature of the Holocaust. (Apr.)