The Stories of Survivors

Daniela Shapiro ’20 was three years old when she began expressing herself through art.

“My dad always had his shirts dry-cleaned, and I’d draw stories on the cardboard pieces that came with them,” she says. “No words, just pictures. I’d draw about family dynamics, or a bad grade I received in school. My dad was cleaning out under his bed one day and found stacks of these stories.”

Now a senior at Rochester, Shapiro is still drawing upon her feelings.

But for the philosophy major from West Orange, New Jersey, the topics she explores have taken a darker, more meaningful turn. In 2017, as a first-year student at the University, Shapiro completed The Story of Survivors, a slim graphic novel that recounts the true stories of six people who lived through the Holocaust.

Shapiro says writing about dark topics is a way to “process through emotions and personal history.”

“It’s always been hard for me to externalize my emotions verbally,” she says. “But when you have these feelings in your head, it’s important to externalize it in some manner. Some people do it through writing, or poetry. For me, it has always been drawing.”

Shapiro began The Story of Survivors as a high school senior thesis and completed it during her first year at Rochester.

Attending Jewish schools from kindergarten through graduation, she had learned about the Holocaust at an early age. Survivors often came to her schools to speak, and her mother told her stories of relatives who fled Nazi oppression and who perished in concentration camps.

Before arriving on the River Campus, Shapiro visited several concentration camps in Poland as part of a senior trip. “It really is like looking at a nightmare,” she says. “You walk through the gas chambers and see scratch marks on the walls. You can’t believe this actually happened.”

The experience helped convince her that telling a story through images is a powerful way to reach people.

In the tradition of author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus used art to tell his family’s story of the Holocaust, Shapiro found inspiration in the lives of real people. But while Spiegelman relied on an allegorical cast of animals, Shapiro outlines the lives of young people when they were caught in the ugly net of Nazi persecution.

“I wrote about people my age so my peers could relate to it,” she says. “I read Maus my senior year of high school and loved it. I’ve heard directly from countless Holocaust survivors, but none ever made me feel as connected to my cultural history as Maus.”

Among those whose stories she tells were Lucille Eichengreen, who was held at four concentration camps before being liberated in 1945; Shapiro’s great-grandmother, Rose Markus, who was 15 when she fled Europe for the United States with her aunt and uncle, never to see her parents again; and Bill Lowenberg, whose mother, father, and sister were killed at Auschwitz. At 18, he weighed 84 pounds when he was liberated by American troops in 1945. He moved to the United States, enlisted in the US Army during the Korean War, and started a successful real estate company in San Francisco. He was a cofounder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

“I tried to find details in the survivors’ stories that were relatable, like not having your own bed or a pillow to sleep on,” Shapiro says. “[Lowenberg] had to sleep in a bed with five strangers. He woke up one day and one of them was dead.”

The drawings are black and white—“it just felt intuitive to do it that way,” she says—but many pages accentuate traumatic symbols such as blood or the Nazi swastika in red.

Shapiro decided to study philosophy at Rochester after taking a course her first year. “I’d never been exposed to that way of thinking and explaining,” she says. “I learned how to articulate arguments soundly. Philosophy influences my art because it affects the way I perceive and process emotions, events, and facts.”

Joshua Dubler, an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Classics, describes Shapiro as “an undisciplined thinker, in the best sense of the term.”

“She is uncompelled by authority and willing to follow her thoughts where they take her,” he says.

Shapiro plans to continue creating graphic novels and pursue a career in graphic design after graduation. The Story of Survivors will always be special, and not because of the publicity it generated.

As she writes at the end of the book: “Rejecting the Holocaust as a reality is unfair to those who perished—and those who survived. That is why

I hold the torch. And so do you. Absolutely never forget.”


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