Nora Krug, who was raised in Karlsruhe, Germany, several decades after the Holocaust, has created an intriguing graphic memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (Scribner). Combining text, illustrations, family letters and archival documents, Krug tries to penetrate her gentile family’s history amid the greatest crime of the 20th century, the Nazi regime’s mass murder of European Jewry. In particular, she delves into the life of her paternal grandfather, Willi, who worked as a chauffeur for a Jewish linen merchant, and her father’s brother, Franz-Karl, a teenage SS soldier killed fighting in Italy. Krug also explores the concept of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where identity is passed from one generation to the next. — Mordecai Specktor
