Arrested with her family in her native Holland, deported, held in a series of Nazi concentration camps, and orphaned – all by the age of seven – Emmie Arbel transformed her childhood survival into a lifelong mission to stand against any such other horrors. With her home now in Israel, to where she and her brother emigrated with their foster-parents in the wake of the Holocaust, she still frequently travels abroad to report and record her testimony.
Working closely with Emmie herself, the acclaimed German graphic artist Barbara Yelin has created a brilliant portrait – what she calls a “visual biography” – of this remarkable woman: her rebellious spirit, her resilient humour, the seriousness of her contemplation. “Surviving is not over,” Emmie reflects. “Surviving is every day.”
Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory is at once a haunting portrayal of a historical atrocity; an inspiring account of a modern friendship; a beautiful work of art; and a meditation on memory itself. Because, as Barbara Yelin has put it, “The long arms of history wrap right around the present.”
Barbara Yelin
Barbara Yelin was born in 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She became known as a comic book artist in France for Le Visiteur and Le Retard. Her first publication in Germany was Gift, based on a script by Peer Meter. This story of a historical criminal case brought her to the attention of a larger audience in Germany. She has subsequently published a collection of her Riekes Notizen comic strips, which were originally printed in Germany in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. Yelin was a co-publisher of the anthology Spring for many years and gives workshops around the world. She lives and works in Munich.
Charlotte Schallié
Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria and co-director of the SSRHC-funded Partnership Grant "Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives". As part of her work on centring the testimony of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, Dr Schallié edited the multi-award-winning But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New Jewish Press, 2022) and co-edited Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory (Reprodukt, 2023; SelfMadeHero, 2026).
Alexander Korb
A German historian specialising in the Holocaust and genocide and Central and Eastern Europe, Dr Alexander Korb was a lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leicester from 2010 until he became the Director of the Memorium Nuremberg Trials in June 2024. He provided the afterword for Barbara Yelin's Irmina (SelfMadeHero, 2016) and went on to co-edit another of her graphic novels: Emmie Arbel, The Colour of Memory (Reprodukt, 2023; SelfMadeHero, 2026).