No Pretty Pictures

In the Prologue, Lobel states, “I was born in Krakow, Poland. In a wrong place at a wrong time” (xi). The wrong place and time relate to World Word II and the Holocaust, during which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi political party in Germany invaded many countries in Europe and committed genocide, imprisoning and killing millions of Jewish people, political dissidents, and other minority populations such as Romani people, people with disabilities, and gay people.

During World War I, Adolf Hitler served as a runner in the German army, so he relayed messages. After Germany lost the war, he worked for the army and investigated subversive political parties like the one that would eventually become known as the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. Hitler quit the army and became the party leader. The Nazis weren’t socialists, and they lacked a coherent ideology. In The Coming of the Third Reich, the historian Richard J. Evans says Hitler achieved success “by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear” (Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin, 2003, p. 171). Evans argues Hitler “reduced Germany’s complex social, political, and economic problems to a simple common denominator: The evil machinations of the Jews” (Evans 172). By tapping into preexisting antisemitism to create false, simple explanations for complex problems like poverty, Hitler and the Nazi party grew in popularity. As Anita and her family were Jewish, this was a deadly time for them to be in Europe.

The Nazis gained control of the German government through democracy. People voted for Nazis in fair elections, and their popularity made Hitler the chancellor in 1933. He used his authority to replace democracy with totalitarian fascism. The Nazis gained something approximating total power, so Anita got “[s]wept into the events of World War II, which no grown-up around [her] could control” (xii). The Nazis had most of the control, and one of their primary goals was to kill the Jews in Europe—a genocide that’d become known as the Holocaust and killed between five to six million Jews.

Hatred of Jews—antisemitism—existed long before the Nazis, and many European Jews managed to excel in the face of prejudice. For example, Anita’s dad owned a chocolate factory, and she and her family had “comfortable lives” in Poland (xii). Through bigoted laws and violence, the Nazis gradually segregated Jews from everyday life. They took away their jobs, assets, and freedom, relocating them to rundown ghettos in their cities before deporting them to concentration camps and extermination camps. While both types of camps were brutal and resulted in mass death, there are key differences that separate them. Concentration camps were initially created to contain political prisoners like communists and trade unionists. Later, other populations deemed “asocial” by the Nazis, including Jewish people, were detained indefinitely in these camps. Those imprisoned in concentration camps were subjected to hard labor like breaking rocks and digging tunnels. Extermination camps came later, operating between 1941 and 1945, and were designed exclusively to kill people, mostly Jews, en masse.

With the other European countries depleted by World War I, the hyper-militarized Nazis quickly invaded and occupied them, like Anita’s Poland. The war would eventually include Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, so it became known as World War II. When the Nazis took over a new country, they targeted its Jewish population. The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and in No Pretty Pictures, the near-total power of the Nazis manifests in the constant movement of Anita and her family. Her mom got a document that said she was not Jewish, and she sent Anita, her little brother, and Niania to a village to create distance between them and the Nazis’ genocidal program. Inevitably, the Nazi threat appeared, and they had to go someplace else—even the religious convent couldn’t keep the Nazis out.

To facilitate the mass murder of Jewish people, the Nazis created mobile killing units that could kill thousands of Jews at a time. The members of the death squads weren’t oblivious to what they were doing, so to accelerate and depersonalize the killings, the Nazis built gas chambers in some of the camps. In the book, Anita notices Nazis trying to burn evidence of their crimes in Auschwitz. The Nazis also gassed and systematically killed political opponents, gay people, Romani people, people with intellectual disabilities, people with physical disabilities, and almost anyone that didn’t conform to the strident Nazi edicts and Hitler’s idea of a supreme human. There were multiple genocides, and the relentless violence and death left Lobel with “very few pretty pictures to remember” (xiii).