Chaim Kaliski’s ‘historical comics’ and the belated remembrance of Belgian Jews

Francesco Guccini recounted in an interview with Aldo Cazzullo that in 1964 he had written ‘Auschwitz’ – which he sang as a very young man, without a beard, on television as a guest of Caterina Caselli – because “people knew what had happened in the extermination camps, but nobody talked about it”.

For a few years after the war – particularly compared to today, when people go on trips to Dachau – there was a general silence surrounding the Holocaust. Everything was known, but little was said about it, and even those directly affected sometimes did not wish to revisit those devastating years: in Western Europe, there was a sense of optimism fuelled by economic prosperity, which sat ill with thoughts of crematoria.

It was not until the late 1980s that public attention to the issue began to grow in Belgium – 28,000 Belgian Jews had been killed, almost half of the total population at the time. This also helps to explain figures such as Chaim Kaliski, a Jew born in Etterbeek in 1929, who only began recounting his stories of the Holocaust in the 1990s. Kaliski, encouraged by his sister to take up drawing when he was already in his sixties, began using ink and watercolours to recreate those scenes from his childhood that he remembered so vividly, with painful clarity, frozen in his mind as if they had happened the day before. Today, Kaliski—who died in 2015—is being honoured at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, in that old hotel in the Marais built for the dukes of the Ancien Régime, with an exhibition that allows us to view these comic-style illustrations. In his drawings, devoid of perspective, Kaliski depicts the stages of the Nazis’ seizure of power, the capitulation of the kingdom, the synagogues set ablaze, the piled-up furniture carried away from Jewish homes, Kristallnacht, castor oil, men wearing kippahs forced to hand over their radios to the occupiers, round-ups in the streets outside their homes, and the demonstrations by the Jewish community in Brussels in 1938 against anti-Semitic and nationalist parties, and against restrictions on travel to Palestine. Kaliski depicts, without idealising, that pre-war period in which immigrants from the East – who worked with leather and traded in textiles – settled in the Cureghem neighbourhood, which his father Abram, who had arrived at the age of seventeen from a shtetl, called ‘the Jerusalem of Brussels’.

Life was hard for them even before that, despite newspaper cartoons portraying them as ‘kings of finance’ and puppet-masters. Kaliski also attacks and mocks Hergé, who published in the pro-Nazi daily Le Soir, partly because the Tintin album The Mysterious Star features stereotypical Jewish villains portrayed as manipulative bankers; thus, Kaliski writes in a drawing: “For us, Hergé’s mysterious star is also the yellow star” to be sewn onto one’s coat. He produced only a few purely autobiographical works, dedicated to his father, who was arrested and taken away, and later killed at Auschwitz.

He depicts his father dancing with his wife near a gate bearing the inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – the title is ‘Abram and Fanny’s Last Tango’. To him, his father was an invincible man; yet, as we see in a drawing where he is holding his father’s hand, he is powerless against the Nazi fury. As a child, Chaim was saved because he and his mother were hidden by Catholics.

The drawings by this self-taught, late-blooming underground artist, who describes himself as ‘perhaps a creator of historical comics’, also serve as a reminder that these things happen step by step, not all at once, from one day to the next. Just like in a story, just like in a graphic novel, there is always a beginning.

Kaliski recounted in an interview shortly before his death: “It all began one day. We were at home when we heard screams in the street. We looked out from the balcony and saw an elderly man on his way to the synagogue being beaten by a group of people. I will never forget it.”