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NOVEL ART: Shapiro says graphic novels offer her a medium for processing emotional history on difficult subjects, such as her work (below) about young people who survived concentration camps during the Holocaust. Photograph by J. Adam Fenster

Daniela Shapiro ’20 was three years old when she began expressing herself through art.

“My dad always had his shirts dry-cleaned, and I’d draw stories on the cardboard pieces that came with them,” she says. “No words, just pictures. I’d draw about family dynamics, or a bad grade I received in school. My dad was cleaning out under his bed one day and found stacks of these stories.”

Now a senior at Rochester, Shapiro is still drawing upon her feelings.

But for the philosophy major from West Orange, New Jersey, the topics she explores have taken a darker, more meaningful turn. In 2017, as a first-year student at the University, Shapiro completed The Story of Survivors, a slim graphic novel that recounts the true stories of six people who lived through the Holocaust.

She’s currently working on a graphic novel called Fault, about the trauma of sexual assault. And she’s collaborating with Edgar Yau ’20 on a graphic novel titled Room 4—about a hospice nurse who listens to several patients tell their life stories before they die.

Shapiro says writing about dark topics is a way to “process through emotions and personal history.”

“It’s always been hard for me to externalize my emotions verbally,” she says. “But when you have these feelings in your head, it’s important to externalize it in some manner. Some people do it through writing, or poetry. For me, it has always been drawing.”

Shapiro began The Story of Survivors as a high school senior thesis and completed it during her first year at Rochester.

Courtesy of Daniela Shapiro ’20

Attending Jewish schools from kindergarten through graduation, she had learned about the Holocaust at an early age. Survivors often came to her schools to speak, and her mother told her stories of relatives who fled Nazi oppression and who perished in concentration camps.

Before arriving on the River Campus, Shapiro visited several concentration camps in Poland as part of a senior trip. “It really is like looking at a nightmare,” she says. “You walk through the gas chambers and see scratch marks on the walls. You can’t believe this actually happened.”

The experience helped convince her that telling a story through images is a powerful way to reach people.

In the tradition of author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus used art to tell his family’s story of the Holocaust, Shapiro found inspiration in the lives of real people. But while Spiegelman relied on an allegorical cast of animals, Shapiro outlines the lives of young people when they were caught in the ugly net of Nazi persecution.

“I wrote about people my age so my peers could relate to it,” she says. “I read Maus my senior year of high school and loved it. I’ve heard directly from countless Holocaust survivors, but none ever made me feel as connected to my cultural history as Maus.”

Among those whose stories she tells were Lucille Eichengreen, who was held at four concentration camps before being liberated in 1945; Shapiro’s great-grandmother, Rose Markus, who was 15 when she fled Europe for the United States with her aunt and uncle, never to see her parents again; and Bill Lowenberg, whose mother, father, and sister were killed at Auschwitz. At 18, he weighed 84 pounds when he was liberated by American troops in 1945. He moved to the United States, enlisted in the US Army during the Korean War, and started a successful real estate company in San Francisco. He was a cofounder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

“I tried to find details in the survivors’ stories that were relatable, like not having your own bed or a pillow to sleep on,” Shapiro says. “[Lowenberg] had to sleep in a bed with five strangers. He woke up one day and one of them was dead.”

The drawings are black and white—“it just felt intuitive to do it that way,” she says—but many pages accentuate traumatic symbols such as blood or the Nazi swastika in red.

The resulting 22-page book was published by Teaming Sure Entertainment Co., her father’s start-up, and received attention from several quarters. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called to offer congratulations, the book was highlighted by the Los Angeles Times and the Jewish Journal, and last summer Shapiro was an invited guest speaker at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

The New Jersey State Department of Education named The Story of Survivors a “recommended book” for Holocaust education, and Shapiro was chosen as one of The New York Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36,” a profile of emerging young leaders who have demonstrated initiative, creativity, and leadership.

Jordanna Gessler, director of education at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, called the book “a very powerful educational tool.”

Shapiro decided to study philosophy at Rochester after taking a course her first year. “I’d never been exposed to that way of thinking and explaining,” she says. “I learned how to articulate arguments soundly. Philosophy influences my art because it affects the way I perceive and process emotions, events, and facts.”

Yau, a linguistics major from Hong Kong, says Shapiro expresses “deep, honest, vulnerability in her art.” The two met while members of In Between the Lines, a University improvisational comedy troupe.

“More than anyone I know, she’s willing and able to excavate her emotions, no matter how painful, and find the most powerful images possible to express herself,” Yau says. “She’s fearless when it comes to confronting difficult topics. She has a deep respect for survivors of trauma and takes great pains to bring to light their humanity, rather than just their suffering.”

Joshua Dubler, an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Classics, describes Shapiro as “an undisciplined thinker, in the best sense of the term.”

“She is uncompelled by authority and willing to follow her thoughts where they take her,” he says.

Shapiro plans to continue creating graphic novels and pursue a career in graphic design after graduation. The Story of Survivors will always be special, and not because of the publicity it generated.

As she writes at the end of the book: “Rejecting the Holocaust as a reality is unfair to those who perished—and those who survived. That is why

I hold the torch. And so do you. Absolutely never forget.”

For more about Shapiro’s work, visit Thestoriesofsurvivors.com.