Project

Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir

Program

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

Department

Humanities

Abstract

Ari Richter’s graphic family memoir is an intergenerational collaboration that draws on four generations of first-person written testimonials, recorded interviews, and photo archives. The memoir illustrates the words of his grandparents and great-grandparents as they recount their everyday Jewish lives in prewar Germany, their struggles and losses during the Holocaust, and their experiences as refugees in postwar America. The storytelling is supported by interviews with living relatives, archival research, and travel to family historical sites across Germany, Poland and the United States. A parallel narrative also emerges as the author analyzes his present-day inheritance of this history, both its traumas and privileges, in a world that seems to be forgetting its past. "Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz" will be published by Fantagraphics Books. A post-publication exhibition will expand the book’s historical, cultural and personal themes into an immersive installation of original artworks, ephemera, illustrations and text.