In October 1942, thirteen-year-old Rózia Handelsman (Rose Lipszyc) manages to escape certain death as her family is being deported from their home near Lublin, Poland. Alone and terrified, she flees to a neighbor’s house and is reunited with her aunt, Róza Finkielsztajn. With the help of friends and strangers, the two Roses adopt false identities and disguise themselves as Polish gentile sisters. Against all odds, they survive the war in a forced-labor camp in Nazi Germany.

A collaboration between award-winning graphic novelist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor Rose Lipszyc, this book illuminates a crucial part of our shared history with care, honesty, and creativity.

Contributor: Miriam Libicki Graphic novelist Miriam Libicki is a sessional instructor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. A recipient of the career achievement Inkpot at San Diego Comic-Con, Libicki has published widely and received many awards for her comic arts work . --- Contributor: Rose Lipszyc Holocaust educator and survivor Rose Lipszyc was awarded the Order of Canada in 2021. Lipszyc still meets with Canadian and Polish youth to recount her wartime fate as a witness to history. --- Contributor: Mark Celinscak Award-winning author Mark Celinscak is the Louis and Frances Blumkin professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Executive Director of the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. --- Contributor: Charlotte Schallié Charlotte Schallié is a professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria. Her areas of interests include memory studies, visual culture studies, genocide education, care ethics, and more. She also edited the award-winning collection of graphic novels But I Live. --- Contributor: Timothy Snyder Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

“Two Roses is a tour de force that breaks new ground in Holocaust re-imagining and retelling.  Both the text and drawings in this graphic novel emerge from sustained, meticulous collaboration between the survivor and the artist.  Their work was supported by a brilliant team of historians, archivists, interviewers, filmmakers, writers, and photographers.  In character, insight, and action, the work resembles a feature film.  It deserves to be a blockbuster.”

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“Two Roses is an important book that belongs to an increasingly rare tradition of Holocaust memoirs written directly from the perspective of a living survivor. Libicki’s sumptuous ink and watercolor illustrations are a perfect complement to Lipszyc’s nuanced story of chance, chutzpah and heroism in the face of humanity’s cruelest impulses. Two Roses is accessible to both adult and young readers, ensuring its relevance to future generations of Holocaust learners.”

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“Miriam Libicki bears witness on the page with her most stunning and compassionate work yet, expertly carrying us through horror, faith, and human connection. Two Roses is an essential testament to the transformative, empathetic power of comics.”

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“The graphic narrative Two Roses contains two real-life stories. The first depicts, in hauntingly delicate visual form, the perilous experiences of its eponymous heroines, two Jewish women who survived the Holocaust by passing as non-Jewish Polish forced laborers in Nazi Germany. The second relates the extraordinary process of co-authorship of the graphic narrative as a close collaboration between one of those women, the survivor Rose Lipszyc; the renowned comics artist Miriam Libicki; and an entire research and editorial team dedicated to generating this remarkable text.”

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“Swearing in Polish, suppressing the familiar Yiddish, and wearing a cross necklace were common strategies for Polish Jews to become ‘invisible’ during the Nazi regime. Two Roses, the story of the survival of Rose Lipszyc and Rose Finkielsztajn, is the first graphic narrative ever to recall it. Drawn in vivid style by Miriam Libicki, Two Roses challenges the taboo of the Polish antisemitism in a blunt and charming way. This book is absolutely one of a kind.”

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“Through graphic storytelling, Two Roses creates a beautiful and heartbreaking mosaic of memory and testimony. In concert, text and image weave together a story of loss but also of resilience and survival. This is a narrative of both individual and collective trauma that bridges the distance between past and present. Miriam Libicki’s stunning images reanimate those who were so tragically lost to the devastation of history, reminding us of our obligations to memory.”