Indoctrination Through Education in Nora Krug’s “Belonging”

Nora Krug begins her graphic memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home with an anecdote about one of her first encounters in New York. On the rooftop of a friend’s apartment building, an elderly woman struck up a conversation with Krug, asking her where she was from. When Krug affirmed that she was from Germany, the woman began to relate “how she had survived the concentration camp” because a female guard kept her out of the “gas chamber sixteen times at the last moment.” This guard enacted “merciless violence” against everyone else, but showed compassion for the woman. The woman assumed it was because the guard had a crush on her.

While detailing the conversation, Krug inserts a page with the photographs of nine guards at a concentration camp, in rows of three. In between each row, Krug adds the following lines: “16 times on the edge of the gas chamber. 16 times escaping immediate death by a hairsbreadth. 16 times seeing others walk to their deaths while you must live.” The visages, staring out at us from the page, worked in the concentration camp, guarding women like the one Krug talked to and sending women to their deaths. They stare out of the page, looking like everyday citizens, everyday people one would pass on teh street, but we know the role they played in the genocide of millions. The question, of course, arises, “How…