Skip to main content
Advertise Buy the paper Contact us Shop Subscribe Support us
Genocide, then and now
FIONA O’CONNOR detects contemporary relevance in the depiction of a society heading into the abyss while the world does nothing

Adieu Birkenau
By Ginette Kolinka, JD Morvan and Victor Matet, SelfMadeHero, £19.99


 
IN our present predicament this graphic novel, written by a survivor of Nazi extermination camps, is a valiant testament to the power of witness. 

Ginette Kolinka is a Parisian Jew halfway through her ninth decade. In 1941 she and her family escaped Nazi Paris only to be arrested by German authorities in the free zone.

She was imprisoned and then transferred to the SS-controlled internment camp at Drancy. As part of “the Final Solution” she was transported with her father and her younger brother, Gilbert, to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. 

Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Short Story / 7 February 2025
7 February 2025
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.
BenchMarx / 28 January 2025
28 January 2025
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
Best of 2024 / 3 January 2025
3 January 2025
A landmark work of gay ethnography, an avant-garde fusion of folk and modernity, and a chance comment in a great interview
Theatre review / 29 November 2024
29 November 2024
ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
Similar stories
Books / 6 August 2024
6 August 2024
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
Book Review / 30 July 2024
30 July 2024
FIONA O’CONNOR relishes an artfully restrained novel whose style is perfectly in tune with the petit bourgeois existence it portrays
Film of the Week: / 11 July 2024
11 July 2024
MARIA DUARTE is chilled by a documentary that brings together the son of Rudolf Hoss with a Jewish Auschwitz survivor
Fiction / 14 May 2024
14 May 2024
FIONA O’CONNOR assesses a dense and overpopulated novel that isn’t satire and doesn’t go deep