Jessica Bab Bonde

We’ll Soon Be Home Again has the testimonies of six survivors of the Holocaust that are presented in comicbook form.

I found this to be a bit choppy here and there. I would be in the middle of reading about being in the concentration camps and the next page would be about being in a refugee camp in Sweden. I was reading an ebook version and I would constantly be sliding back and forth between my pages thinking I was missing some.

It has good illustrations and it was able to show things that the current narrator/speaker weren’t always talking about. The way other victims of the Holocaust were drawn - skeletons, hollowed, sunken eyes - those are images that have stayed in my head.

This graphic novel is aimed towards young readers and it hit that marketing point well. It shows the horrors of the Holocaust in all its grim without being overbearing. It’s a great door opener for more conversations.… (mehr)

A fine remembrance of the Holocaust based on the oral histories of and interviews with Jewish survivors living in Sweden. Putting the stories of six children into just 95 pages left me wanting more detail, especially as each account went from the start of the World War II to the end of the war, causing a lot of repetition between the stories. It might be more effective to spread out the reading a little, maybe a chapter a day.

I have some problems with the end matter of the book. The timeline provided breezes by Swedish collaboration with the Nazis, to spend more time on the Swedish refugee program that brought Jewish survivors to Sweden at the end of the war. Each of the stories ends with that Swedish rescue effort. It makes this seem a little more like self-serving propaganda. As this article shows, Sweden is still not owning its full history even today:
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.MAGAZINE-is-sweden-censoring-...

More egregious, the glossary of this book mentions four times that the Holocaust targeted Jews and Romanians. ROMANIANS? This is a copyediting error that gives a slap in the face to the Roma or Romani people, who were targeted with genocide by the Nazis in conjunction with the Jewish genocide. Highly unfortunate.

p.s. One more taint on the project: Dark Horse's English edition was edited by Scott Allie, who was finally fired this year for sexual abuse allegations dating back over a decade.… (mehr)