* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times The Boston Globe San Francisco
Chronicle NPR Comics Beat The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Kirkus Reviews and Library
Journal This "ingenious reckoning with the past" (The New York Times) by award-winning
artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family's wartime history in Nazi
Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime but the Second World
War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe Germany. Yet she
knew little about her own family's involvement though all four grandparents lived through the
war they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US Krug realizes that living abroad
has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn't dare to as a child. Returning to
Germany she visits archives conducts research and interviews family members uncovering in
the process the stories of her maternal grandfather a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the
war and her father's brother Franz-Karl who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this
extraordinary quest "Krug erases the boundaries between comics scrapbooking and collage as
she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history the Holocaust her German heritage and
her family's place in it all" (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive "thoughtful engrossing"
(Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir Belonging "packs the power of Alison Bechdel's Fun
Home and David Small's Stitches" (NPR.org).
