Achtung Zelig! comic book bords Museum of the history of Polish Jews

"Achtung Zelig! The Second War" is one of the most outstanding Polish historical comic books. The black and white album of Krystian Rosiński (script; under the pseudonym Rosenberg) and Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz (drawing, lettering) was published in Poland in 2004, and in 2005 also on the Francophone market – in a colour version. The innovative nature of the comic lies, among others, in the fact that the subject of the Holocaust had never been previously touched upon in Polish culture with the application of grotesque or surreal poetics. In the comic book by Rosiński and Gawronkiewicz, these are already introduced by the appearance of the main characters, the Zeligs, father and son (one of them resembles a monster from the Alien movie series, the other – a frog), who escaped from the transport to the death camp, as well as by the demonic figure of the German commander – the dwarf Emil. The comic also reflects various cliches and stereotypes about World War II, mainly those created by the popular culture of the People's Republic of Poland. They influenced the authors’ generation born at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. "Achtung Zelig!" Is full of references to representations from propaganda comics, films and series, board games or battle brochures. They intersect with images taken from the Polish Romantic tradition (nostalgic representations of the forest) and even Disney fairy tales (some trees). The album was being created in the course of many years, starting in 1993. The original boards, most of which the POLIN Museum acquired for its collection, document the change in Gawronkiewicz's working method in the course of a protracted creative process. A few years after the first charts were created, the cartoonist started also to work on a computer (around 2000). Previously, he glued additional elements to the basic card of the board, but later he could simply scan separate cards that contained elements to be added, and then compose the whole thing in a graphics program. Hence, in the collection, apart from the boards with all the glued-on elements, there are also boards that consist of several cards, e.g. basic cards and cards with pictures for frames with lettering. The purchase of comic books for the museum collection was co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, from the Culture Promotion Fund within the framework of the programme "Regional collections of contemporary art", 2018. Joining the programme was possible thanks to the support of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.