Matt Huculak was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for his work with researchers, artists, Holocaust survivors, and educators to help develop a graphic book about the Holocaust. We recently spoke with Huculak, who is now director of KULA: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria, about the vital importance and relevance of that work and how it came about.

LJ: How did the opportunity to work with Holocaust survivors and artists who wanted to make a graphic Holocaust book come about?

Matt Huculak: I’m in a very special place here in Victoria because our university librarian, Jonathan Bengston, came here in 2012 with a new vision for librarians, that librarians are more than just collectors of knowledge or objects. We’re connectors of people. There’s been a shift over the past decade in the library’s training and hiring around making librarians an integral part of the research process as it happens on campus. Liaison librarians have expertise in how a particular discipline does its research, and therefore have a special role to play in things like data management, preservation, and storytelling. The libraries have invested in our digital object preservation and access platforms. We redid part of our third floor to create the Digital Scholarship Commons to create a more collaborative space, not just for relationships, but to create the space for this to happen. We invited two other units on campus from a grant-funded humanities project to share space with us. One of those is the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, wonderful colleagues who work primarily with humanities, and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL).

The reason why this is important is that one day, one of my colleagues from the ETCL introduced me to Dr. Charlotte Schallié, who was applying for a grant to bring graphic novelists and Holocaust researchers together to learn about the storytelling process. We met serendipitously because of this collaborative space. Charlotte said she was looking for a way to share the drawings of the experience together in one place, but hadn’t thought of the library as that place. She didn’t realize that we were building infrastructure that would allow us to create a space where we could co-create the experience together. And I said, “If you need someone to go to Germany, I’ll go and teach your team how to do this.” That’s literally how this relationship started.

That’s how you ended up going to the Ravensbrück camp in Germany? What was that like?

It’s harrowing. It’s like a bowl. The only buildings that still exist are the perpetrator buildings, the administrative buildings. It was a camp for women and children, which makes it even more intense. It’s separated from the town by a lake, and it has a crematorium. The barracks had all been torn down. There are some remnants of the railroad station and some factories. You have the administrative buildings at the bottom of the bowl, then up above, you have this Alpine village where the SS officers lived. You see this dark contract of how this horror was structured architecturally.

I’m coming at this as a librarian because it’s so intense from so many different perspectives. I can’t speak to all of them of course, but they’ve turned the female guard cabins into dormitories now, so you’re sleeping in the perpetrator buildings, separated from the city.

What did you learn while at Ravensbrück?

It opened my eyes to the worst of what we can be in a way I’ve never had before, given the great privilege I had growing up. I wasn’t raised with much, but still, more than many. [Now] I was in a camp where children were sent to prison with their mother, [while] in the U.S., we were imprisoning children at our border at the same time. It was the dissonance of what I thought my country [was], and just the everyday actions and uncaringness of bureaucratic system.

How did a graphic book come out of this experience?

The book, But I Live [Univ. Toronto Press],is about three Holocaust survivors. One of the major figures of the book is Emmie Arbel. She was a five-year-old when she and her mother were sent to Ravensbrück. When we were doing our workshops on art and how to do graphic novels, we talked about what is it about the human spirit that persists. Emmie, as a young girl, had only been represented in the camps by perpetrators. The Nazis were great archivists. They documented everything, and her pictures of her memories are all from Nazi photographers. But when she worked with the graphic artist team, it was the first time she was able to [be visually represented by] an artist that wasn’t a perpetrator. She worked very closely with Barbara Yelin, the artist we paired with her. They formed an extremely tight special relationship. [Read more about their work together here.]

There was that dynamic happening from a librarian, archival point of view. One of my roles on this project is to think about ethics and archiving ethics and documenting a process. Charlotte developed a new methodology to work with genocide survivors, to convey their life story in an ethical, consensual way. The artist doesn’t do anything that the survivor doesn't consent to.

We also have psychologists on the project who can work with the survivors if they start to become triggered by what they're remembering. Emmie started remembering things that she had completely forgotten about her life. She’s in her late 70s now. She and Barbara did a new book called The Color of Memory, coming out in English this year. It’s published in German and French, and it’s about that relationship and process that they developed making this book. It’s winning a lot of awards.

What did you take away from it?

The ultimate thing I learned is what made the Nazi machine so efficient and brutal. It was diabolically genius. The reason why they invented the gas chambers is because, psychologically, the Nazi soldiers couldn't handle all the murders they were doing. They were having psychological breakdowns.

So the way they arranged it was that no one was responsible for anything more than just one small task. This soldier took the prisoners from this train car to another spot, and then another soldier took them from there to the fence. It was compartmentalized so no one actually had to think about what role they were playing within the system of death that was happening. Then again, diabolically, they made what we call the Kapos, the Jewish prisoners, do the final bit of bringing people into the gas chambers. It had never occurred to me that that type of bureaucratic, systematic thinking is a problem. When you take the humanity out of decision making, when you take the humanity out of the system, this is what happens. This is what can happen. I think we’re seeing this again. When we remove the human we remove our human empathy and communication from the process.