Depicting Horror

There are things that are so horrible we cannot really understand them. A concentration camp, like Ravensbrück (in Germany, close to Berlin) is one of these things. People were always afraid. They did not have enough food. Many people were sick. They still had to work very hard. Many people were murdered every day, others died from starvation or illnesses.

It is so difficult to imagine this horror, that we need survivors to tell us how it was for them. Survivors wrote about their experiences. Others created art or painted. When creating the graphic novel, Barbara used survivor testimony and art to understand the horrors of the camp better and draw it. In her work, depicting horror often means the use of dark colors, as you can see in the draft panel below.

In her interview Emmie uses the word "balagan", a Hebrew term for chaos, mess, or fiasco. Barbara takes this term and uses it in the graphic novel. Together with the dark colors, this word becomes a very powerful tool in depicting horror.