> Par Laurence Le Saux (BoDoï) : Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz ***
25 oct. 2011 ... En noir et blanc, à l’aide d’un dessin assez minimaliste – et sans abus de décors -, Jérémie Dres raconte son périple : en Pologne, il rencontre différents interlocuteurs qui lui expliquent la place de la communauté juive. Aux lecteurs, il livre une bande dessinée documentaire, notant scrupuleusement les conversations (qui comportent parfois des passages superflus) et les étapes du périple. Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz se révèle à la fois bavard et enlevé, avec des traits d’humour et des tranches d’émotion. Un travail de mémoire fortement humanisé, réalisé avec humilité.

A memoir of a French Jew about his trip to Poland with his brother, searching for their family's history. ( )

22. We Won't See Auschwitz by Jérémie Dres (2011, 200 page paperback, Read Mar 18-19)
translated from French by Edward Gauvin
preface by Jean-Yves Potel

Not much to see here. Dres graphically chronicles a trip he took to Poland with his brother to look at his family's history and at the existing Jewish life there. He makes an effort to avoid covering the Holocaust, to focus instead on Jewish life now and on Poland's sense of its own Jewish history.

I didn't know that almost all Jews left Poland in 1968! There were only 300,000 survivors of WWII out of 3.5 million per-was Jews. Mostly the survivors were those exiled to Russian Gulags when Russia controlled eastern Poland before the German invasion. Of those 300,000, maybe 40,000 stayed in Poland after WWII (I don't recall the exact number). But in 1968 all Polish Jews had their Polish nationality revoked and practically all of them left the country.

So, unfortunately, this doesn't leave much for Dres to cover, other than a rushed search for his family's history. (He only had about a week in Poland). So, there is not much to the book.

It's very much a journalist's trip and I guess a journalists book. So we get a somewhat detailed look at specific people he met and interviewed, but only an anecdotal overall picture with lots of details that hint at some things but don't clearly say anything. Either he lost the big empty picture in the details, or maybe he exposed the emptiness of the big picture with the details. Depends on your perspective, I suppose. But it's odd to read his expressed optimism, and that leads me to think the former.

The artwork is much like the cover, but without color.

2015
https://www.librarything.com/topic/185746#5113935

After their grandmother dies, Jérémie and his brother travel to Poland to learn more about their Jewish roots. Although the Holocaust has affected their family, they decide not to go to Auschwitz and visit the places their ancestors’ are from.

FINALLY a work where people don’t take a daily bathe in self pity (no offence)! I’ve waited such a long time to get a different view on this matter – needless to say my expectations were high. Note to self : You should have known to be more careful… it often turns out to be a painful experience!

It wasn’t a total nightmare, I DID enjoy a lot of the interviews, especially those which taught me a bit more about Polish Jews’ history. I just wished it was a bit smoother. Now I had the impression it was a combination of a diary and a notebook & thrown in some drawings. Things were too chopped up for my liking.

No, this was not the graphic memoir I so desperately wanted it to be… ( )

The name Auschwitz means many things to many people, but what is first and foremost in everyone's mind is the horror and death that was unleashed by the Third Reich in occupied Poland during World War II. For many Jewish people, it is a horror too painful to revisit as the title of this graphic nonfiction suggests, and instead, when author Jérémie Dres and his brother Martin embarked on a week-long visit to Poland, it was in the words of Jean-Yves Potel, Guardian of the Shoah Memorial for Poland, "...this beautiful journey to an ancestral land became an exchange, a veritable conversation among descendants of a world that death had left littered with hate and rancor. By sweeping stereotypes aside, these conversations have made a clean breast of things."

We Won't See Auschwitz by Jérémie Dres , and translated by Edward Gauvin, is a magnificently illustrated journal of the author and his brother Martin's visit to Poland in search of their cultural heritage which they undertake one year after the death of their grandmother. In the book, Jérémie Dres has painted a beautiful picture of his impression and observations and the languishing state of Judaism in post-World War II Poland. But in the midst of neglect and decay, the author also express optimism ostensibly sparked by the sound of Jewish music in a synagogue and a festival that honors Poland's Jewish history.

Jewish people have a rich legacy to be proud of and a dream to be fulfilled. When the future holds so much promises there's no reason to wallow in self-pity and suffer over the horrors of the past, and Jérémie Dres is resolute in his stand: We Won't See Auschwitz! ( )