‘It leaves holes inside of you’: graphic novel aims to remember the history and horror of genocide

The artist Dana Mashoian Walrath’s new book honours the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. But she also expects it to get her banned from Israel.

That is because The Book of Genocides also contains a chapter that portrays Palestinians forced to live as second-class citizens and watch their homes bulldozed or bombed. “What does it mean to be starved?” the narrative asks. “To know that perpetrators have themselves experienced genocide and now commit genocide against you?”

There are many more questions posed by Walrath’s graphic history, which is quite unlike any other book about humanity’s periodic descents into the abyss of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing over the past five centuries.

In an experimental blend of anthropology, memoir and visual art, which encourages readers to cut the pages and create three-part interactive figures, she offers 10 case studies ranging from the killing of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans to the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Palestine and the persecution of the Rohingya.

Walrath, 66, an artist, writer and anthropologist, travelled to all 10 places represented in the book and has a personal connection with genocide. She is Armenian-American, the granddaughter of survivors who fled the systematic destruction of the Ottoman empire’s Armenian population during the first world war. For decades, her family’s survival story was condensed into a single narrative fragment.

When she asked her mother about her own mother’s childhood in western Armenia, she replied: “After her parents were killed, she hid during the day and ran at night with Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice from their home in Palu to the orphanage in Aleppo.”

It was only recently that deeper, more horrifying layers of that journey were revealed. When her mother, Alice, was diagnosed with dementia and moved into her home, Walrath took a leave of absence from her academic career to engage in full-time creative work, eventually publishing a verse novel about the Armenian genocide, Like Water on Stone.

The Genocide of Black Americans. Photograph: Harvard University Press

“She was taken into enslavement with her son. I also learned that my grandmother, at one point probably after sex, hit her enslaver on the head with a stone and the two of them fled. This is what my aunt told me. Can I verify it? Can I find these facts? I don’t know.”

This inheritance of violence and survival has haunted Walrath’s life and given her a personal connection to genocide, wherever it happens. She reflects: “It’s knowing what it does to people and knowing how it leaves holes inside of you and that you have to figure out how to overcome the desire to get even.

“You have to figure out how to transform the anger and the hurt into something productive and I feel like I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to figure out how to do that. Writing the novel let me exorcise a lot of demons and then writing this book was so gratifying because I could literally bring people together.”

Walrath committed herself to traveling to every location depicted in the book, seeking out survivors and descendants to sit with them in their grief. She spoke with survivors of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Phnom Penh, met with perpetrators and survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and visited Rohingya refugees in the sprawling camps of Bangladesh.

This deep exposure to human suffering took a severe toll on her physical health. The 66-year-old recalls via Zoom: “I got physically sick at various times and it would usually take the form of a terrible chest cold. Grief is supposed to live in the lungs and I got very sick after Auschwitz. I got very sick in 2013 when I crossed into the West Bank through the wall to go to Bethlehem with a bunch of Armenian pilgrims.”

Dana Mashoian Walrath in her studio Photograph: Harvard University Press

“Then I went through no, no, I have very good supports and live in nature and, at this moment in time, as America is well on its way into a very scary place, I felt like I could get up every morning and have something concrete to do to push back. When I reread the book recently it was even more shocking how many elements of USA 2026 are present in all these genocides.”

To convey these heavy histories, Walrath turned to a medium distinctively suited to representing the unrepresentable: comics. In the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, The Book of Genocides uses the graphic form to bridge the gap between abstract history and raw empathy.

“Comics are very active. I love cinema and it’s a very powerful medium for learning about things that might be outside of your experience but it is passive. You sit in your seat and you take it in. Comics are probably closer to cinema than anything else but they’re active. They’re created by a series of fragments that the reader has to take in and process and put together in an active way and because of that it gave me a vocabulary to talk about these horrors without making people run away from them.”

Walrath deliberately avoided drawing explicit, realistic acts of violence, opting instead for metaphorical representations. “I left out drawing most of the horror and was always walking the line between making sure the image was gonna draw people in, even if it was talking about something horrible,” she says.

The book’s unsettling interactive design aims to force readers to confront the systemic patterns of dehumanisation that make such horrors possible. Readers are invited to cut certain portrait pages into thirds, creating a “turn-the-flap” sequence – a structural device reminiscent of the surrealist game of “exquisite corpse”. As the reader flips the segmented pages, the illustrated human subjects transform back and forth between recognisable faces and non-human creatures – beasts, predators, vermin and parasites.

The Palestinian Genocide. Photograph: Harvard University Press

“We’ve invited people to cut the pages to get people thinking about how we’re taught: what’s allowed and what isn’t allowed. We’re not supposed to desecrate books. We love books and yet we’re taught that war is OK, that it’s OK to kill other people. I wanted it there in an interactive, metaphorical but also subconscious way, rather than saying, this is what we do. People take it in differently when they’re interacting with it.”

The Book of Genocides relies on the concept of genocide developed by Lemkin and enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention: ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” and marked by a process of dehumanisation of the targeted group.

As an anthropologist, Walrath finds a common thread running through half a millennium of genocidal violence. She argues that they are often less spontaneous outbursts of tribal hatred than highly planned, bureaucratic operations, with material interests – particularly land – playing a central role.

“Land theft almost always. The only exception is not really an exception; it’s enslavement. The Europeans stole Africa but then also stole African people and then put them into the transatlantic slave trade so, even though the land stealing was going on within the Americas, it was dependent upon European colonisation. Settler colonialism is nearly always there.

“Dehumanisation is part of that and then systemic injustices within the societies. These are precursors to massacre. What’s the difference between prisons in the US and many other countries where strictly disenfranchised people are the majority of the prisoners, and the Warsaw Ghetto?”

Perhaps the most controversial decision in The Book of Genocides is its chapter that addresses the history of Palestinian displacement and the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. The inclusion of Palestine under the banner of genocide is a move that Walrath knew would draw fierce criticism and potentially severe professional consequences.

Dana Mashoian Walrath in her studio. Photograph: Harvard University Press

“It would be great for someone to try and say why it is and isn’t genocide, and at the same time. I think that the way I’ve employed the term is aligned with Raphael Lemkin’s intention about what genocide was. It’s aligned with the convention, with the Rome statute, and what we’re watching is political machinations making the convention useless.”

Walrath adds: “Indiscriminate bombing of any place is a war crime for sure. When we’re killing babies and killing children and keeping people from healthcare and selectively bombing hospitals and journalists, I have no doubt in my mind that this is a systemic attempt to eliminate a people.”

She is clear-eyed about the fallout of this stance in Israel. “I probably won’t be allowed to visit again, which would be sad because I have respect for the real peace activists there. Honestly, going to Jerusalem as an Armenian was incredibly powerful. But maybe this will change and in my lifetime maybe I’ll live long enough that I will be able to go back but I know right now after this book comes out I will no longer be able to arrive at the airport.”

Despite the harrowing terrain of her subject matter, Walrath remains fundamentally an optimist. She rejects the jaundiced view that human violence is an evolutionary inevitability. “I am sure that’s not true. I am sure that we’re hardwired to care for one another. Every time we see dehumanisation get undone in the midst of a war it’s because someone’s heart has been touched.

“It’s governments that perpetrate genocides and it’s baked into our systems and structures and because those systems and structures and governments are all human-made creations, we can make better ones. A rugged as the content is, the message is an underlying message of hope and that we can change this. It’s not inevitable.”

• The Book of Genocides is out on 8 September