By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Pages from “Remember Us to Life,” by Joanna Rubin Dranger, published by Ten Speed Graphic, 2025 are used with permission from Ten Speed Graphic.

“The aim of the Nazis was to exterminate every Jew in Europe – simultaneously erasing all memories of them. In many villages and smaller localities, everyone was murdered, and there was nobody to remember the dead. Every person lifted up from the sea of oblivion is a victory against Nazism.” – Joanna Rubin Dranger 
Graphic novels and memoirs can take many different forms. Some use panels and read like comic books, although their topics are usually far more serious. Others combine text and illustrations, with both playing a major role in relating the story. Joanna Rubin Dranger uses this latter format to explore her family’s history before and during World War II. Using text, drawings and reproductions of photographs and newspaper articles, Dranger’s “Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir” (Ten Speed Graphic) offers an in-depth narrative about the author’s family, providing information about those who lived in Poland, Lithuania and Russia, as well as her native Sweden, which readers will learn was not as neutral as it claimed during World War II. Translated from Swedish by Maura Tavares, this memoir, which won the Nordic Council of Literature Prize, is an impressive achievement in both tone and depth. 
Each of the book’s sections focuses on different relatives, although there is some overlap due to the nature of Dranger’s research. That’s because as the author/artist follows one thread of her family’s life, she discovers more relatives and incidents of which she had not been aware. For example, a discussion of her Aunt Susanne, who died by suicide in 1993 after experiencing severe depression, led her to explore the life of the artist whose portrait of a young Susanne now hangs on Dranger’s wall. That artist was Lotte Laserstein, a German painter known for her portraits, whose career was derailed by the rise of the Nazis. Lotte not only survived the war, but had her work exhibited in the 1980s when she was in her late 80s. This leads Dranger to tell of when she was a child and took confirmation classes at a church because she didn’t realize she was Jewish. When Dranger does identify as Jewish, she is surprised at the priest’s antisemitic statements. She then explores how Jews are treated as “the other,” noting that “antisemitism is like a rubber face, a flexible construction that can blame ‘Jews’ for just about everything.” 
Dranger writes in other sections of her memoir about how she’s never felt completely safe, mostly likely because she has absorbed the tales of her relatives. Her research led her to stories of Russian massacres of Jews in the areas in which her relatives once lived. She includes real-life headlines and photos from the first decade of the 20th century to depict what occurred. That was the reality her grandparents sought to escape by emigrating to Sweden. Readers will learn that closer to the World War I that safety net was closed as Sweden refused to allow her relatives who were visiting Sweden to remain in the country. Most of them perished in the Holocaust. 

However, Dranger is determined to rescue anyone connected to her family from oblivion. At times, she finds herself overwhelmed by what she’s learned. That includes everything from antisemitic acts in the areas her family lived in before coming to Sweden, the barbarism of World War II and the current acts of antisemitism she sees in Sweden. What she learns during the trips she makes to European concentration camps and Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust museum, which also keeps records of the war) haunts her so much that at one point she needs to take a break from her research. 
Her research makes her incredibly grateful to be living in a world where her children “can be just any children, that they don’t need to know of or harbor the evil that Nazis directed at them, their relatives and friends.” She does wonder if anyone would be interested in her book, a fear that winning the Nordic Council of Literature Prize should have helped expunge. During a conversation with her husband about her book, she tells him, “It won’t be good enough; all the people and names and dates are in the way of making people relate. Nobody will be able to read it. I can hardly read it myself.” Yet, the juxtaposition of the historical events and the personal stories of her family is what make the work so impressive. 
“Remember Us to Life” serves as a reminder of the evil of which mankind is capable and the importance of remembering that evil so as to not repeat it. It is also a sweet story about Dranger’s personal life: in the midst of the horrifying facts her research uncovers, there is still the joy of daily life, even when it is sometimes difficult to access. Her work is an example of the power and depth that graphic nonfiction can attain. 

Anyone interested in 20th century European history or the Holocaust will want to read this. Lovers of graphic works will also be impressed by Dranger’s innovative ways of portraying the history she studied.