From March 9, 2025, the Center for Persecuted Arts is showing a cabinet exhibition on comics and graphic novels about the Holocaust, which have developed into an important medium of remembrance culture in recent years.

The private collection presented in the exhibition does not claim to be exhaustive, but presents various approaches: from eyewitness reports and biographical graphic novels to fictional stories that deal with historical events in artistic form.

The first artistic testimonies of the Holocaust come directly from the victims. These evidence of crime is not automatically art, but as early as 1934, the painter Rudolph Karl von Ripper depicted the persecution of Jews in merciless drawings. Felix Nussbaum painted his despair and anger from the soul in 1938 with the painting “The Desolate Street.” In 1942, in the “Black Book of National Socialism,” the Mexican graphic artist Carlos Mendes illustrated the deportation of Jews to death camps. In 1944, Leo Haas began his graphic series about the fate of Jews in the German concentration camps.

After the liberation of the concentration camps, it was artists such as Zinowij Tołkaczew and George Zielezinski who documented the unimaginable horror with their drawings. They not only served as historical evidence, but were also an expression of the will of those affected to survive. Many drawings were published immediately after the war, but remained known only to a small circle of historians and survivors for a long time.

These early testimonies were followed by a long period of silence. In the decades following the Second World War, the topic of the Holocaust was often taboo — both among survivors and in wider society. Many survivors could not or did not want to talk about their experiences, because confrontation with the past was often avoided in post-war society.

It was only with the Nazi processes of the 1960s and the growing public awareness of the culture of remembrance at the end of the 1970s that the topic increasingly came into focus. During this time, artists and authors began to deal more intensively with the Holocaust — not only in literature, but also in the medium of comics.

One of the world's most famous graphic novels was “Mouse” by Art Spiegelman. A more recent example is “Second Generation” by Michel Kichka. With the Israeli author and cartoonist and his father Henri, a Holocaust survivor, the Center for Persecuted Arts and the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow filmed the documentary “Life is a Cartoon” in 2018.