When Sarah Gavron’s father-in-law suggested a family trip, her children were hoping for Legoland. But he had something more unusual in mind. “He said, no, this concentration camp where I was imprisoned as a child,” says Gavron, a British film-maker who lives in London.
The camp was Theresienstadt, notable for the high numbers of artists interned there and to which Ib Katznelson was sent alongside nearly 500 Danish Jews in 1944 when he was two years old.
“When we went, the whole family stood in this extraordinary place that had been filled with artists and film-makers and poets and composers and theatre-makers and had art all over the walls,” recalls Gavron of the family trip in 2016. When she saw the Nazi propaganda film that had famously been made in the camp, and which set out to deceive viewers by portraying it as a place of freedom, she realised Theresienstadt deserved to be better known.
Miraculously, Ib and his parents survived. And Gavron – the acclaimed director of the films Suffragette and Brick Lane – has recorded both their experiences and Theresienstadt’s haunting strangeness in a graphic novel, Ode to Joy, working with the artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer.
The result is a vibrant, multi-layered account, telling not just what happened to Ib, but to his mother Karen, who endured a particularly terrible period in Ravensbrück, where she was put in solitary confinement and where her son ill with diphtheria, was put in a sick ward and almost sent to Auschwitz. It documents what happened to different family members too, including Uncle Bernhard, whose escape is portrayed in a film-noir style. And it recalls the heroism of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, the inspirational Bauhaus-trained artist who was also sent to Theresienstadt and who taught art to hundreds of camp children, preserving some 4,500 of their drawings before she was murdered in Auschwitz.
The novel also details Katznelson-Gavron’s family visit – a framing device that adds a touch of levity. The trip involved eight grandchildren of varying ages (Ib now has nine) along with one child’s class bear. Throughout the book “the kids became these little guides and questioners”, says Gavron, making it relatable for a modern audience.
Ode to Joy is not the first graphic novel to reckon with the horrors of the Holocaust. But having read Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a memoir of the Iranian Revolution, Gavron felt illustration was a particularly empathetic way to explore this slice of history. “Partly because we’re so inured to images of [the Nazis],” she says. “But also because the camp itself was filled with artists who used quite abstract art to get at the truth of it.”
She and Herxheimer – who has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Modern – clicked immediately. Both came from families of German Jews who had fled the country before the Holocaust and whose response had been to shut out Jewishness wherever they could. “Our religion growing up was ambivalence, a really good, well-known branch of Judaism,” smiles Herxheimer. Their collaboration began almost five years ago.
Herxheimer spent days making notes and drawings at Theresienstadt, which is now a museum (one scene in the book dryly notes that Ib, as a former prisoner, could get in for free). She also immersed herself in the artwork that had been produced by the 15,000 children who passed through the camp. “I felt the need to honour their work, revivify their ghosts… and find the language to put their liveliness back into the world. I felt so touched by being in the presence of their work. I just wanted to do something right by them.” She used a mix of techniques, including collage, in a visual reminder of how Europe was ripped up during the period. “I was thinking about tearing, cutting and destruction, and countries that changed shape, and borders and exile and all the different forms of transport.”
She committed to using only recycled materials. “I was trying to echo what the prisoners had done. They had to draw with a twig or toenail, and they did.”
The resulting artwork is incredibly striking. Yet given her career, why didn’t Gavron look to the big screen? In the vast pool of Holocaust films, Theresienstadt is under-represented. “I’m sure there will be films and maybe some sort of future iteration from me,” she says, adding that the two forms have much in common. “You’re playing with image, you’ve got close-ups, you’ve got wide shots, you’ve got visual sequential storytelling.”
The key difference is that film progresses in time; the director, not the viewer, is in control. “You can’t linger, you can’t go back, you can’t explore the page, you can’t decide to revisit Karen in her solitary confinement and think about that a bit more.”
Despite its subject matter, the book is uplifting – truly, an ode to joy. “My intention from day one was to avoid horror,” stresses Herxheimer. She didn’t want to exploit the dead. “I want to let them speak for their life. Before they died, they lived. We should talk about the lives they lived. If only the murder and the death is captivating people’s imaginations, I want nothing to do with it.”
They deliberately decided not to give the Nazis much of a voice. “Because the others had so much to say.”
Ib, who later became Denmark’s deputy permanent secretary for the Ministry of Finance, is now 85. Gavron knows he is one of the last survivors, which merely strengthened her desire to tell his story. “I was aware that when the children were going around the camp, they were the last generation who were going to hear this story firsthand,” she says.
Equally, events in Europe today catalysed a desire to respond. “Historians talk about these 90-year cycles and, sure enough, Europe’s moved more right-wing,” she says. “Authoritarian leaders are manipulating the truth, and propaganda is alive and well and there are devastating wars everywhere and children getting so damaged. There’s a lot that resonates.”
Naturally, they hope the book will help educate people. Herxheimer recalls chatting to a shop assistant who had never heard of the Holocaust or concentration camps. “I said, what about Auschwitz? He said it rings a bit of a bell,” she says. “It’s quite astonishing the level of ignorance. Making more things is vital. It’s just, please, let’s talk about truth.”
But she stresses it shouldn’t be seen only as a Jewish story. “It can be a multicultural, multi-purpose story for all people. We don’t want it to be just Jewish; we want it to be human.”
She also wants to inspire people about the power of art – especially as AI challenges human creativity. Ode to Joy feels distinctly human-crafted; a patchwork of ideas and memories. “We particularly wanted something that was extremely analog. We challenge any robot to do the snipping [of the collage].”
For Gavron, this is more than a story. It’s her children’s heritage, and the book honours Ib as someone who lived fully, despite growing up in the Holocaust’s shadow. “He’s an amazing man,” says Gavron fondly, recalling that he never gets irritated, even when his grandchildren are upset over trivial things.
What does he think about the book? “He very touchingly said he knows the importance of a personal story and he’s seen the effect it has,” says Gavron. “He feels we’ve managed to capture that. We were very moved to hear it.
“Obviously there have been some amazing pieces of work about the Holocaust. But there haven’t been many pieces like this. And it just feels so extraordinary to me, the life of those people. It’s worth honouring them.”
Ode to Joy is published by Pushkin Press
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