‘It leaves holes inside of you’: graphic novel aims to remember the history and horror of genocide — SkimNews
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- Dana Mashoian Walrath, an Armenian-American artist and anthropologist, published "The Book of Genocides," a graphic novel covering 10 cases of mass extermination over 500 years including the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Palestine.
- The book features an interactive design where readers cut portrait pages into thirds, with illustrated figures transforming between human faces and dehumanized creatures — beasts, predators, parasites — to illustrate the process of dehumanization Walrath identifies as a precursor to genocide.
- Walrath explicitly calls Israel's campaign in Gaza "a systemic attempt to eliminate a people," citing indiscriminate bombing, the killing of children, and attacks on hospitals and journalists as evidence she says fits Raphael Lemkin's 1948 Genocide Convention definition.
- Walrath anticipates being banned from Israel over the Palestine chapter, which portrays Palestinians as second-class citizens whose homes are bulldozed or bombed; she traveled to Bethlehem in 2013 via the West Bank separation wall with Armenian pilgrims.
- Walrath visited all 10 locations in the book, meeting survivors of Pol Pot's killing fields in Phnom Penh, perpetrators and survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and Rohingya refugees in camps in Bangladesh; the emotional exposure repeatedly made her physically ill, including after visits to Auschwitz and the West Bank.
- Walrath's personal stake traces to her Armenian grandmother, who hid in an urn while her father was dismembered, was later enslaved, and fled after striking her enslaver on the head with a stone — a story Walrath says she only learned five years ago from older relatives.
- The book sits in a lineage Walrath cites explicitly: Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Joe Sacco's "Palestine," using metaphorical rather than graphic depictions of violence to make horror legible without driving readers away.
Why it matters: Walrath, granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, is using the graphic-novel medium — borrowed from Maus and Palestine — to argue genocide is a bureaucratic process rooted in land theft and dehumanization, not spontaneous tribal hatred. Her decision to apply the 1948 Genocide Convention to Gaza places her in the same contentious professional space as scholars and rights groups making the same comparison, and she says she expects to pay for it with a likely travel ban.
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