On March 9, 2025, the Center for Persecuted Arts will open a cabinet exhibition in the literature collection 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 complete, but presents different approaches: from contemporary witness reports and biographical graphic novels to fictional stories that process historical events in artistic form.

The first artistic testimonies of the Holocaust come directly from the victims. These exhibits of the crime are not automatically art, but as early as 1934 the painter Rudolph Karl von Ripper depicted the persecution of the Jews in ruthless drawings. In 1938, Felix Nussbaum painted his despair and anger from his soul with the picture "Rue triste". In 1942, the Mexican graphic artist Carlos Mendes illustrated the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps in the "Black Book of National Socialism". In 1944, Leo Haas began his graphic series about the fate of Jews in 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 an expression of the will to survive of those affected. Many drawings were published immediately after the war, but for a long time remained known only to a small circle of historians and survivors.

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

It was only with the Nazi trials 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.

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