Writer: Terry Eisele
Artist: Jonathon Riddle

With Only Five Plums is set in Germany and Czechoslovakia before, during and after World War II. It is told through the real-life recollections of one of the Lidice massacre’s few survivors, Anna Nesporova.   The story alternates between visual recreations of the shocking events of 1942 and Anna’s pained reactions to recalling these events as an old woman sat in her living room talking to interviewer Eisele.

The bold framing device that Eisele has chosen to employ instantly turns this book into an intensely personal story, rather than simply a historical recreation of an unspeakable act of evil. Similarly, illustrator Jonathon Riddle’s powerful use of imagery and his exhaustive research in recreating everything as accurately as possible gives the book a sense of urgency and immediacy that is difficult not to be moved by.

For all intents and purposes, the first half of the book serves as a fairly unassuming (though undeniably intriguing) account of life in a small Czechoslovakian village in the 1930’s.  Eisele’s gently-paced interview with Anna allows her to recall all the small moments that made up her formative years and forged her incredibly powerful relationship with her family, her brother in particular.

There’s a sense of uneasy serenity to the initial pages, a sort of ‘calm before the storm’ with the reader forced into the role of powerless bystander as things slowly begin to take a turn for the worse.  The German occupation is powerfully stated without descending into melodrama, and seeing the effects these events have on the gentle, unassuming townsfolk truly hammers home the horrific sense of helplessness these people must have felt.

With the assassination of high-ranking Nazi Official Reinhard Heydrich coupled with a series of almost infuriatingly unfair events, Lidice finds itself firmly in the crosshairs of the Nazi reprisals, and it’s at this point where the book starts to deliver the barrage of gut-punches that makes this such an uncomfortable but ultimately essential read.

Spared from certain death by her pregnancy, Anna’s experiences in the Nazi hospitals are utterly horrific, and made all the more poignant when you consider just how many others suffered the same fate up and down the country at the hands of the occupying Germans.  It seems almost unimaginably cruel at times reading the events that transpired, but with every page turned I had to remind myself that this wasn’t simply a writer trying to tell a moving story, but the tortured recollections of an old woman who had suffered these atrocities first-hand.

Comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus are unavoidable, and while the subject matter is undeniably similar, the personal connection to Anna via her interviews and reactions to telling these stories provides an additional layer of investment to the story, to me at least.

A powerful tale of memory, loss and survival, With Only Five Plums (essentially a Czech saying for ‘with only the clothes on your back’, to signify the way they were forcibly removed from their village) has two more volumes available, both of which I will be reviewing in the weeks to come, and is a difficult but ultimately worthwhile read that helps to provides an all-too human insight into one of the most truly horrific periods in human history.

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You can buy all three volumes of book, find out more about the story behind it, and take a look at an excerpt at the writer’s WEBSITE.

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The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson (aka Ceej)
Article Archive: Ceej Says