Serena Katt’s attempt to make sense of her Polish grandfather’s ties to the Hitler Youth is extraordinary
In Sunday’s Child, Serena Katt pieces together the story of what her German grandfather did during the war using some of his words, a few of her own and, most powerfully of all, her magnificently unsettling, largely monochrome illustrations. The result brings to mind an old photograph album, except that even the most seemingly innocent images on its pages come with a strong historical resonance. A family crowded around a radio. A crowd gazing at posters pasted on a wall. A group of teenagers marching with their backpacks through a forest. In some other book, these things would not be out of the ordinary. Here, though, they tell, with utmost concision and great eloquence, a story of war, propaganda and collective blindness.
Katt’s grandfather, Günter, came originally from Polish aristocratic stock, and perhaps it was this that fuelled his fervent desire always to belong: his parents, down on their luck, were only immigrants to the country where, in 1938, he joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 10. In Sunday’s Child, we see him in uniform attending summer camps, and we look on as he wins, some years later, a place at an elite teacher training academy for particularly talented National Socialist students. We are there, too, for his military training, and at the moment when, in 1944, he receives his call-up papers – only to be unaccountably sent home by the first officer he meets.
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