The graphic narrative “We Are on Our Own” will be the focus of a free event next week at Bucks County Community College (BCCC) in the Gallagher Room, located inside the Rollins Center building.
BCCC invites the public to discuss the Holocaust memoir “We Are on Our Own” at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, in-person at the Newtown Campus and also online.
In her graphic narrative, Miriam Katin tells the true story of her and her mother’s escape on foot from the Nazi invasion of Budapest. After faking their deaths, the two escape into hiding, disguised as a Russian servant and her illegitimate child.
The discussion, led by world-renown Holocaust scholar Rachel Perry, Ph.D., will focus on Holocaust graphic novels as a medium of memory. She will be joined by three other panelists, including Professor Paula Raimondo, who teaches in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Certificate Program at BCCC.
Raimondo noted that most readers are familiar with written narratives of the Holocaust such as the “Diary of Anne Frank” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” but graphic narratives show us a different perspective.
“Many people have heard of Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ but there is a long history of the graphic narrative used as a medium for recording and remembering the Holocaust, from artists documenting in the camps and ghettos and in hiding, through the immediate post-war period, up to the present,” said Raimondo. “Works like Katin’s, which use both pictures and words, ask us to think differently about the challenges of representing the Holocaust.”
A limited number of copies of “We Are on Our Own” are available, free of charge, at the Office of Social and Behavioral Science in room 301 of Grupp Hall on the Newtown Campus. Reading in advance is helpful but not necessary for attending the talk, which is free and open to the public, Raimondo added.
Perry teaches in the Weiss-Livnat Graduate Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, and in the Holocaust and Human Rights program at Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pa. Her research focuses on the representation and memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War in visual culture. She is currently Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Waltham, Mass., writing a manuscript on Holocaust graphic albums, and is preparing an exhibition on the same topic, “Who Will Draw Our History? Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives by Women Survivors, 1944-1949.” She will be participating live on Zoom.
Also joining the discussion at the Newtown Campus will be Sophie Don, Associate Director of the Philadelphia Holocaust and Remembrance Foundation and poet/visual artist Bernadette Karpa.
Samantha Gross, Dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Science at BCCC, will moderate. This program is supported by a grant from the Mark Schonwetter Holocaust Education Foundation.
Click here for a campus map and directions.
The event can also be viewed live online for those who register in advance at https://bit.ly/41uMs4r.
For those interested in a deeper dive into the subject, the course “Rescue and Resistance” (course number HGNS 140) is offered online from March 24 to May 16. Students will explore why some people help while others “stand by,” the varied forms that resistance can take, and how these powerful responses to genocide and human suffering can help us better understand both our past and present.
For more information about the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Certificate program at BCCC, including current course offerings, contact the School of Social and Behavioral Science at sb@bucks.edu or 215-968-8270.
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