We Are on Our Own
"We Are on Our Own" is a poignant graphic novel by Miriam Katin, illustrating her harrowing experiences during World War II as a child in Hungary. The story centers on Lisa, a representation of Katin herself, and her mother, Esther, who flee their comfortable life as assimilated Jews when the Nazis invade in 1944. The narrative unfolds as they disguise themselves to escape and face numerous challenges, including precarious living conditions and the threat of violence. Katin employs a unique artistic style, with simple pencil sketches that evoke childhood memories and emotional depth, contrasting black-and-white panels depicting wartime with vibrant colors representing adulthood.
The novel explores heavy themes such as trauma, anti-Semitism, and the struggles of motherhood amidst chaos. It deftly captures the complexities of Esther's decisions to protect her daughter while navigating dire circumstances, ultimately highlighting the enduring impact of childhood trauma on adult life. As a late-career work, Katin's memoir underscores the importance of storytelling, especially visually, in preserving personal and collective histories. "We Are on Our Own" stands as an important contribution to Holocaust literature and the graphic novel genre, resonating with readers through its sensitive portrayal of survival and resilience.
We Are on Our Own
AUTHOR: Katin, Miriam
ARTIST: Miriam Katin (illustrator); Tom Devlin (cover artist)
PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2006
Publication History
We Are on Our Own, Miriam Katin’s first full-length graphic novel, debuted toward the end of Katin’s career as an illustrator and graphic artist. At the age of sixty-three and after a career as an animator for Disney and MTV, Katin introduced this compelling memoir about her and her mother during World War II. Katin is both author and illustrator of this single-volume work, relying heavily on her own memories and the experiences her parents recounted to her later in life. Originally published in 2006 by Drawn and Quarterly, the book has since been released in several additional languages through a variety of foreign publishers.
Plot
We Are on Our Own tells the story of Lisa (a representation of Katin and her childhood innocence) and her mother, Esther, who are forced to flee from their family home as the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. They have lived comfortably as assimilated Jews, but to hide, they dress as peasants and flee to the countryside, where Esther tells a farmer and his wife that she and Lisa, who she professes is illegitimate, need a place to stay in exchange for work. The farmer takes them in; they are safe for a while, until Esther becomes the sexual “pet” of a Nazi soldier who has guessed her identity and who coerces her to sleep with him in exchange for keeping her secret. However, their cover is eventually blown, and Lisa and Esther flee to a winery, where Esther seeks work and a safe haven for herself and her daughter.
In 1945, the tide of the war turns, and the Soviets invade Hungary. The soldiers are rough and sexually abuse Esther; she discovers that she has been impregnated and heads with Lisa to the nearest town to seek an abortion. Tired, downtrodden, and terrified, she feels she is all alone, until she encounters David Blau, a family acquaintance and a kind soul, who takes her and Lisa in and helps them back on their feet. Though a romance threatens to blossom between Esther and David, Esther rejects David’s advances and maintains that she will await her husband’s return. As it turns out, Lisa’s father, Károly, has been traveling across Hungary searching for his wife and daughter and trying desperately to follow their trail. Ultimately, David helps reunite Lisa’s mother and father, even though it means that he cannot be with the woman with whom he has fallen in love. Peppered throughout the narrative are scenes from Lisa’s adulthood, in which she is watching her own children play, either grappling with her faith and spirituality or just remembering the past.
Characters
•Lisa represents Katin’s childhood self. Through her eyes, Katin introduces the terror and confusion of the wartime world and the resulting struggles with faith, as experienced by a child. Lisa’s adult self is also depicted, though her adult character receives far less treatment.
•Esther Levy, Lisa’s mother and a Jew who must flee her home as the Nazis approach, is a strong and savvy woman who does whatever is necessary to protect herself and her daughter during the war. Though faced with many troubling decisions and harsh treatment, she maintains her dignity and her hope that her family will one day be safely reunited.
•Éva is a Christian and a good friend of Esther who both helps Esther and Lisa flee and keeps Esther’s affairs in order during and after the war. It is Éva who tells Esther’s husband that the family has survived but is in hiding.
•Anna is the Levys’ maid and another Christian friend who helps protect the family by lying for them about their sudden disappearance.
•Károly Levy is Esther’s husband, who is absent for most of the story as he has been fighting in the war. He is introduced as a frail, war-weary man, but one of dogged determination who will not give up his hopes of finding the family he has lost. Though his faith in God has wavered, he remains devoted to his wife and daughter.
•David Blau is a family acquaintance who first recognizes Lisa and Esther and helps them to safety. Though at first his assistance is largely altruistic, as Lisa and Esther settle into his family home he comes to care deeply for Esther. Nevertheless, his altruism prevails and, when Károly returns and is searching for his lost family, he is instrumental in bringing them together.
•Mademoiselle Delachaux, David Blau’s family governess, helps to take over care of Lisa, first while her mother is in the hospital for her abortion and later as Lisa and Esther come to reside in the Blau family home. The governess teaches Lisa French and helps her return to the upper-middle-class lifestyle in which she would have been raised had the war not interrupted her childhood.
Artistic Style
Katin is the illustrator of her own memoir and renders images with such striking simplicity and insight that it seems possible they have come only from memory. Her pencil sketches have a cartoonlike quality to them, perhaps the product of Katin’s career as an illustrator and cartoonist, but just as likely a depiction of the haziness of the finer details lost in childhood memory. The panels illustrating the wartime experiences of her childhood are rendered in black and white; the only color panels are those depicting her adulthood, which receives relatively sparse attention in comparison to her memories of her and her mother during the war.
The lettering of Katin’s narrative is particularly intriguing. Though the text and thought bubbles are fairly standard throughout the story (spoken words appear in square text boxes and thoughts appear in wavy-lined bubbles), the text seems to waver, almost as if it were written with a shaking hand, which reflects the troubling nature of the subject matter.
The panels are laid out primarily in squares that make comfortable use of the page space. They are not cluttered, but they leave little white space—only enough to distinguish the panels. The story is broken into “chapters” by single-image panels centered on a page of dark space that usually indicate specific changes in the course of Katin’s life or in the tide of the war. When a specific event from her childhood relates in some way to a memory of her adulthood and her experience as a mother and wife, Katin interjects with a page of full-color illustrations. Though these sketches are no more detailed than the black-and-white images, the memories depicted therein seem sharper because of their brightness and vividness.
Themes
Set during the Nazi invasion of Hungary during World War II and the subsequent Soviet invasion toward the end of the war, We Are on Our Own addresses the profound effects of childhood traumas, particularly those of the wartime experience, and the lasting effect they have on one’s psyche. In crafting this memoir, Katin addresses many challenging subjects, including anti-Semitism, death, rape, abortion, and lost faith, as well as her mother’s sometimes challenging choices. Through both her pencil sketches and her narration, Katin poignantly and sensitively provides insight without graphic imagery or violence.
Drawing on her own personal experiences as a child during World War II, as well as her understanding of her mother’s experience as she tried to protect her young daughter, Katin crafts a compelling portrayal of the fears and questions of a child who is traumatized by what she is witnessing and is grasping for understanding. The reader sees the wartime world through the eyes of Lisa, a child and a projection of Katin as a toddler, who begins to piece the puzzle together through metaphor and understatement.
Katin also depicts the experiences of the adult that child grows to be, navigating the sometimes turbulent waters of marriage and parenthood and making choices for her own child. Through the interjected panels of her adult experiences, Katin reveals her struggles with spirituality and the loss of faith she experienced as a result of her childhood traumas. The contrast of the childhood experience and adult experience and her memories of each reveals a personal history that is saddening and inspiring and tells a largely universal story of the child’s struggle to come to terms with traumas and the adult’s struggle to maintain faith in spite of these experiences.
Impact
Published twenty years after the first installment of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), which tells of his father’s experiences during World War II as a victim of the Nazis, Katin’s We Are on Our Own cannot help but be compared to Maus and others in the body of literature chronicling the World War II experience of Jewish families and individuals. While the work itself has not yet had any profound influence on the graphic novels genre, Katin’s debut draws together the artistic styles and thematic treatments of many of her predecessors, creating a finished product that is remarkable for the sensitivity with which it treats its subject matter as well as for the force of the narrative it conveys. More important, by publishing this story so late in her career, Katin sends the message that it is never too late to tell one’s story and that sometimes such a story can better be told with images than with words. In that respect, Katin’s work likely has a greater impact on the body of Holocaust and World War II literature than on the graphic novel genre or format. Nevertheless, hers remains an important voice in the graphic novel industry and will likely serve to inspire future writers as they craft their own memoirs and narratives.
Further Reading
Lemelman, Martin, and Martin Lemelman. Mendel’s Daughter (2007).
Sfar, Joann. Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East (2006).
Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986, 1991).
Bibliography
David, Danya Sara. “Journeys of Faith and Survival: An Examination of Three Jewish Graphic Novels.” M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 2008. https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/2453/ubc‗2008‗spring‗david‗danya‗sara.pdf?sequence
Katin, Miriam. “In Plain Sight.” World Literature Today 81, no. 6 (November/December, 2007): 14-18.
Vasvári, Louise O. “Women’s Holocaust Memories/Memoirs: Trauma, Testimony, and the Gendered Imagination.” In Jewish Studies at Central European University, edited by András Kovács and Michael I. Miller. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008.
Vasvári, Louise O., and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009.