“Unveiling the Past: Joanna Rubin Dranger’s Graphic Memoir Reveals Hidden Stories of Resilience and Remembrance”
HMM: Your book is such a beautiful witness of your family’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust, and it also offers an important narrative about the impacts of antisemitism and hate carried out at a catastrophic scale. How did you prepare yourself to write this book?
JRD: When I first began working on this book, I had no clear sense of where it would lead. I actually started with what I believed to be a surprisingly positive story — my grandmother’s parents’ immigration to Sweden in 1906 after fleeing violent pogroms in Białystok. They settled in the southern Swedish countryside, built a prosperous life, and in our family their story had always been told almost like a love story between my grandmother’s family and Sweden.
