Outlines of Memory

Published by the Pilecki Institute, with the Hoover Institution and Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance as partners, Outlines of Memory presents the accounts of Polish citizens who were victims of German and Soviet totalitarianism crimes during World War II. Their testimonies are supplemented with illustrations drawn by contemporary Polish artists who have utilized their distinct styles and drawing techniques to depict authentic stories.

Outlines of Memories contrasts markedly with the comic books MAUS and Never Will I Again Visit Auschwitz. The differences among the three in storyline, substance, and illustration style are addressed below, with an emphasis on illustration style.

Outlines of Memories are closely bound with the “Chronicles of Terror” project, which was implemented by the Pilecki Institute since 2016. The digital testimony database (ZapisyTerroru.pl, ChroniclesofTerror.pl) is available in both Polish and English, and provides access to the accounts of Polish citizens who were subjected to extreme suffering at the hands of the Germans and Soviets.

The selection of testimonies for Outlines of Memory reflects the ethnic and social diversity of prewar Poland. Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union crushed men, women, and children, Poles and Polish Jews, city dwellers and villagers, and the intelligentsia and the uneducated.

At the heart of the “Chronicles of Terror” project is the belief that the Polish confrontation with the German and Soviet totalitarian systems was an experience without parallel. This belief is undeniably true, as confirmed by the fact that in the first two years of World War II, Poles were the primary target of a coordinated German and Soviet extermination process designed to annihilate them on both sides of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line. 

Storyline

Art Spiegelman’s MAUS is his own story who, a Jewish American cartoonist, tries to portray his coming to terms with the tortured relationship he has with his aging father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. Against a backdrop of guilt brought about by Vladek’s survival, the two engage in a seemingly normal life of many small arguments and unhappy visits.

Ari Richter’s Never Will I Again Visit Auschwitz mainly recounts his relatives from World War I up to the present day and outlines his research on family members who perished in the Holocaust. As part of his research, he and his wife travel to Auschwitz and are highly dismayed by their three-and-a-half-hour tour there. Richter also questions if his anti-Polish bias is his own or was somehow “inherited” from his parents and grandparents.

The storyline of Outlines of Memories is straightforward. It consists of the authentic accounts of Polish citizens who were subjected to the horrors of German and Soviet brutalities during World War II.

Substance

In MAUS, Spiegelman expresses his anti-Polish prejudices by portraying Poles as pigs, while Germans are cats and Polish Jews are mice. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, editors Jerome Klinkowitz and Patricia B. Wallace describe his representation of Poles as pigs as “a calculated insult”. Throughout his comic book, Spiegelman falsifies facts through distortions and material omissions. Poles are portrayed as German sympathizers, which was never the case. All of the kapos in Auschwitz are drawn as Poles, which is complete fiction, as there are numerous eyewitness testimonies by Jews who detail the cruelty and abuses they suffered at the hands of Jewish kapos while in Auschwitz. He portrays Poles helping Jews as greedy and deceitful while conveniently omitting the fact that Poles who helped Jews in any way faced the death penalty together with immediate family if discovered by the Germans.

Spiegelman’s anti-Polish animus, rather than any sense of ethical writing, is the reason he portrays Poles as pigs and a nation of swine. This portrayal was his choice, despite the fact that it was the Germans who perpetrated mass murders against Jews and Poles. The Germans relied on Jewish Gestapo agents to hunt down Jews who escaped from the ghetto, and Żagiew and Group 13, led by Abraham Gancwajch and colloquially known as the “Jewish Gestapo”, inflicted considerable damage on both Jewish and Polish underground resistance movements. Spiegelman instead assigns this role exclusively to Poles, which is egregiously false.

In Never Will I Again Visit Auschwitz, Richter, a visual artist and Professor at the City University of New York, reveals a paranoid anti-Polish bias and profound ignorance of relevant historical facts. Poles are described in a chapter cynically titled “Pole-ish”. While in Poland, he and his wife struggle with suspicion and distrust, “feeling less easy than in Germany – more leery glances like we were strangers out of place.” With this statement, Richter draws two fair-haired Poles, a young man and woman, both with angrily contorted faces, at whom he and his wife exchange the following dialogue: Richter: ‘They’ve been glowering at us this whole time. Is it really so obvious that we’re Jewish? Irin: “No, I think it’s just their faces.”

As the two drive toward Auschwitz, Richter writes “So I tried to keep my inherited biases in check, and to keep an open mind for the rest of our trip in Poland.” As will be seen in the next chapter, titled “Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz”, he predictably fails. He is surprised to learn that Poles were the first prisoners at Auschwitz I and that up to 75,000 died there. He is also unaware that Jews weren’t murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly two years after Poles arrived at Auschwitz I. Richter dismisses the Righteous, Poles who rescued Polish Jews, as inconsequential. Like Spiegelman, he is unaware that Poles who helped Jews in any way faced the death penalty together with immediate family if discovered by the Germans. Richter accuses the post-Communist government led by Lech Walesa of “quietly adjusting the numbers” of Auschwitz’s “non-Jewish deaths”, so that Poles are presented as the primary victims, which is false.

In Outlines of Memories, the narrative’s substance is clear-cut and uncomplicated. There are a total of 20 testimonies; 17 of Poles who were subjected to German and Soviet brutalities and 3 of Polish Jews who were subjected to the same by the Germans.

After her husband and son were executed by firing squad in Auschwitz, Antonina Piatkowska was arrested and ended up in the women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with her colleague Monika Galica, they were able to secretly write down all of the names of Polish women who died there. Antonina writes of carbolic acid and benzol injections administered to all pregnant women and to those who had just given birth, which quickly killed them. Wislawa Chelminska writes of the Germans ordering defenseless Polish civilians out the Saint Lazarus hospital during the Warsaw Uprising and slaughtering them as well as patients who were unable to leave.

Karol Adamczyk was subjected to continuous interrogations and beatings by the NKVD and together with other Poles, was sent in freight cars to a Gulag camp in the deep Soviet interior. Despite weakness from starvation and suffering dysentery, he was forced to fell trees and arrange them in piles at 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Of 240 Poles in his work detail, 35 died within 10 days while forced to extract floating logs from the river. 

Szlama Dragon was sent to Auschwitz among 2,500 Polish Jews, where she was made part of a Sonderkommando forced to carry corpses of those who had died by gassing. She had to help the sick get out of the trucks and undress. After they walked to the chamber, she saw the SS men pour the Zyklon crystals into it, soon after which the inmates died. Szlama was also forced to stack the corpses on steel gurneys and push them into the flaming crematorium ovens.

Illustration Style

As previously explained, in MAUS, cartoonist Spiegelman expresses his anti-Polish prejudices by portraying Poles as pigs, while Germans are cats and Polish Jews are mice. In a recent webinar, representatives of Yad Vashem claimed that Spiegelman was justified to portray Poles as pigs because this was a form of anthropomorphism. The representatives, however, were ignorant of the fact that anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to an animal, a god, or object; it is not the attribution of animal characteristics to a human. The fact remains that Spiegelman’s cartoonist portrayal of Poles as a nation of swine was intentional and reflected his deep-seated animus to Poles.

In Never Will I Again Visit Auschwitz, Richter illustrates his paranoid animus of Poles and glaring ignorance of the history in typical comic book format with graphic elements in frames, panels, and speech and thought bubbles, rather than relying on plain text to create his narrative. Unlike cartoonist Spiegelman, Richter believes his negative portrayal of Poles as he had drawn them is accurate and doesn’t require Spiegelman’s mystifying element of reverse anthropomorphism.

In Outlines of Memories, the artists portray actual documented events. By contrast, Spiegelman and Richter portray events related to them largely through a lens of anti-Polonism. The Outlines artists are Jacek Fras, Pawel Janczarek, Agata Ledzwa, Jacek Michalski, Mateusz Rakowicz, Sylwia Restecka, and Przemyslaw Truscinski. They have illustrated countless comics and books, and created dozens of portraits, murals, and storyboards. Their task was very difficult because their artwork had to depict experiences that were particularly traumatic and cruel. Selecting an appropriate means of artistic expression was an exacting challenge, because the artists had to carefully portray inherently tragic and dramatic events without becoming too graphic, while at the same time showing respect for human suffering. The illustrations not only depict real-life events from the period of the dual occupation of Poland, they also constitute an attempt at capturing the phenomenon of innate evil.The contrast between the three styles of illustration is obvious. In MAUS and Never, Spiegelman and Richter focus on their internal psychological issues. Spiegelman’s cartoons intentionally convey his baseless contempt for Poles while Richter presents his anti-Polish animus through caricatures that he mistakenly believes to be true. It is clear that both believe Poles are inferior to Jews and have worked hard to convey this falsehood, which is held by many in Jewish circles. By contrast, the artists in Outlines made every effort to carefully portray factual, shocking events expressed by Poles and Polish Jews that are devoid of any bias. It is patently obvious that the Outlines artists successfully met this unique challenge while Spiegelman and Richter had no intent to objectively portray their emotions and experiences.