My Son’s Holocaust Storyboard

“Why do you hang that on your wall? It’s depressing.” So says our first-born son Nathaniel, who is visiting on a client trip to New York from Los Angeles where he’s lived the past decade.

He’s referring to an illustration series he made as an art school senior in 2007, preferring not to face it as he sits down to a brunch of pastrami salmon, bagels and potato pancakes before rushing to the airport. But while we eat I catch him glancing up at it and know he’s proud of this highly personal work, produced long before he moved into high-paying commercials as an ad agency creative director.

My wife and I wouldn’t dream of not displaying the piece, called “Witness,” which Nathaniel describes as “a Holocaust-inspired narrative incorporating graphite, watercolor and gouache.” It’s not only a trophy of our shared Jewish heritage but a reminder of our son’s talent in ways that Photoshop and video reels can’t reveal.

My wife and I wouldn’t dream of not displaying the piece, called “Witness,” which Nathaniel describes as “a Holocaust-inspired narrative incorporating graphite, watercolor and gouache.” It’s not only a trophy of our shared Jewish heritage but a reminder of our son’s talent in ways that Photoshop and video reels can’t reveal.

“Witness” unfolds in six panels, opening with a comfortable pre-war European family of five (two boys and a girl, like ours) about to begin a Friday night Shabbat dinner, the candles radiating a glowing, spiritual light over the room. The older son stares at his bearded father as he lifts his wine cup in prayer facing mother and children. In an artful touch, mother’s knotted hair imitates the folds of the braided challah

Contrast that homey setting with Panel Two, showing the savagery of Germany’s Kristallnacht in 1938. Swastika-banded Gestapo goons head-lock the eldest son in front of a window-shattered storefront under a scrawled sign announcing “Juden.” As the boy clutches at his captors, an unhinged officer roars insults at their prey.

In the next sequence, a group of women is being marched into cattle cars. Their faces are hidden under shawls, except for our family’s daughter, who turns her head and reaches out to her brother, who is crammed into the train with fellow round-ups destined for the camps. A raging SS officer with a stiff, black-gloved arm directs her to keep moving downline. You can almost hear him yell, “Mach Schnell!”

Looking at these stylized scenes, rendered like a graphic novel, I think back to Nathaniel’s final year of college, fighting off the pressures of an unruly frat, a challenging relationship and constant basketball injuries. He moved home, working past midnight on his senior thesis, which, he later wrote, “turned into a much deeper obsession.” I’d peek into his bedroom and see him hunched over his ink drawings, listening to his favorite Burl Ives and Roy Rogers songs for calm mood music. When it came to his illustration, Nathaniel always showed extreme powers of concentration in pursuit of perfection.

Panel Five is a cinematic nightmare, with the elder son arriving at Auschwitz alongside a tattered group of inbound prisoners. As they head toward the camp’s notorious signpost declaring “Work Sets You Free,” the crematoria chimneys spew forth a miasma of tortured dead souls tumbling across an ugly brown sky.

This Spielberg-like tableau sets up the penultimate chapter. The son – now gaunt and aged in striped concentration camp garb – is depicted solemnly pushing corpses in a wheelbarrow, digging graves and hauling sacks of belongings along barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, as a fellow inmate is shot in the head. Nathaniel later wrote in an accompanying text, “Those able to work are pushed beyond their limits to keep the factories of death running smoothly.”

Jump ahead 65 years to the final scene in a crowded New York subway, where first son is now an elderly survivor, identified as “the only living member of his family.” He is exchanging glances with a young Black boy wearing a sideways baseball cap as bright red as the Nazi armbands in earlier scenes.

The boy is mesmerized by the numbers tattooed on the older man’s exposed arm – he bears witness to an ordeal of which he knows little but grasps its horror. Other riders are oblivious – comically asleep or lost in their headphones. But the connection between these two at opposite ends of life experiences feels genuine. It’s a connection that has been slipping away between generations, driven further by tribal differences.

“Witness” won gold-medal awards from illustrator societies and was included in gallery shows. Brandeis University used a panel for its Kristallnacht commemoration in 2013. These days, Nathaniel barely puts pen or brush to paper, though his visual direction produces commercials for top ride-hailing apps, soft drinks, vodka and basketball shoes. With Yom Hashoah’s Day of Remembrance upcoming May 6, I make a fresh inspection of “Witness” and its narrative arc. Far from depressing, this epic Holocaust storyboard leaves me in awe.

Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.