Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir

Blending text with illustrations, photography, and found objects in this graphic memoir, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Dranger offers a dense, deliberate excavation of her Jewish ancestry in the 20th century, including the loss of much of her extended family during the Holocaust, interwoven with an explication of Sweden’s role in World War II. As Dranger attempts to uncover names, dates, experiences, and images of the deceased to honor and preserve their memory, she discovers family members she didn’t even know she had lost. This complex personal history is contextualized by the book’s interrogation into Sweden’s role in abetting the Holocaust: tracking Jewish Swedes as the Nazis came to power, obstructing Jewish immigration in the lead-up to the war, and allowing some Nazi infiltration of the Swedish government. Dranger reckons with her family’s survival by luck of their location, when so many others in her extended family perished in part because of that same country’s neutral stance—a difficult, cathartic exercise.