The plot of Miriam Katin’s graphic novel We Are On Our Own is an episodic memory of her own real life experience. There were parts that she couldn’t remember in as much detail because this event happened when she was very young. Victoria Ho wrote an article on Katin for Mashable, an online magazine “she pieced together the story with her mum's help and a lot of research”. Her mother, would fill in the gaps of her memory in order to give a full picture of certain events. Katin’s personal experience of World War II through the Nazi occupation of Hungary and running away with her mother formed the backdrop of this novel.
Katin’s book had two main characters, herself as a very young child and her mother, Esther, as seen in flashbacks, as well as her older self with her own child and husband many years into the future. Though other people would enter and exit the story at certain points, the housekeeper, landlord, a farmer and his wife, Nazi commandant, old friend, and her father.
The setting was of the city of Budapest in the summer of 1942, the early days of the Nazi Occupation. We were able to see a small glimpse of the life Katin and her mother had before they were forced to run away. We were able to see that they had an ordinary life with friends, gossiping neighbors, pets, a housekeeper, even a nasty landlord. The setting drastically changed after this as they hid in countryside outside Budapest. At first, they lived with an old farmer and his wife and had some semblance of a normal life, they were not home but felt safe with all that was happening at the time. It wasn’t long before a Nazi commandant noticed Esther’s beauty and she was forced to become his mistress to keep them safe. As bad as this was their situation got worst when the Russians began bombing the area. They hid in a wine cellar which soon became over-crowded once other people started arriving in search for safety. The Russian soldiers eventually found the cellar and when an injured soldier was found dead in Esther’s bed they had to fled from the cellar believing that they would be blamed for his dead.
The next few pages were among the hardest for them to get though as they had to tread through deep snow during a storm, in the dead of night, not knowing where they were going. They were been haunted by Russian soldiers and because they were blamed for the death of the wounded soldier. These pages had some particularly dark imagery but these were some of the only pages that had no dialogue or writing on the pages whatsoever. However, we could tell that they were been blamed and hunted and shot at. They waited out the storm in a hut and made their way into another village where they stayed with a man and his mean wife and many children. For survival they would go out into the field where dead men laid and scavenged the bodies for anything they could use or sell, such as rings, coats, and boots. By the spring of 1945 Katin and her mother left the village and went into a nearby town when she found out the she was pregnant.
In a small town called Bordsvar they were recognised by an old friend from Esther’s past named Zoltan, he decided to take them in even thought about the possibility of having a life with Esther and her child. Katin had a governess who was trying to teach her French and ballet. Esther would soon leave to have a procedure done to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. We see Katin getting closer to Zoltan, which bother’s Esther as she never gave up hope that she would find her husband again. Katin’s father, Karoly, return’s home and begins his search to find them. Eventually his search leads him to Zoltan’s office and Zoltan gives his home address to Karoly. We see the family reunited and Karoly makes the statement “We are on our own” in response to Esther questioning how can they go on without thanking God for bringing them back together. The last few pages we see just how deeply the war had traumatised Katin as she plays aggressively with her toys under a table.
There was a thread been weaved thought the book surrounding Katin’s faith, the book started with a verse from the Old Testament of the bible and had a ended with her questioning her faith from a very young age. We see throughout the book her referencing God as a child and as an adult her reading the bible stories to her own son, though she does not believe what is written within it.
The plot of Katin’s story is unfortunately one that probably hundreds of thousands of people went through due to the Nazi threat and the deviant behaviours of people during war times. It is probably likely that a lot of people questioned their faith in God or stopped believing altogether.
Ho, Victoria. “How a Holocaust survivor's graphic novel helped her work through the pain.” Mashable, 2017, https://mashable.com/2017/01/10/miriam-katin-world-war-ii/. Accessed 1 Nov. 2019
This article points out the process that Miriam went through to write the graphic novel We Are On Our Own. Having to separate her emotions, talking with her mother to fill the gaps in her memory, and the historic research she did to pull all together. The article also discusses another of her other writing Letting It Go, which was written to help her process the knowledge that her son was moving to Berlin, Germany.
