Danila Botha’s Vidal is a vivid historical fiction graphic novel inspired by her family’s history. It follows Vidal Ben Soussan from a lively Sephardic Jewish childhood in Tiberias to the freedom and glamour of Paris, then into the terror of the Holocaust. The first-person narration makes Vidal feel immediate and complicated. He’s charming, impulsive, affectionate, vain, creative, and sometimes painfully selfish. That complexity gives this graphic novel its energy. Rather than presenting history as a sequence of dates, Botha builds a life out of family rituals, multilingual conversations, food, flirtation, artistic ambition, and the small decisions that become devastatingly consequential.

The early chapters are especially rich in sensory detail. Tiberias smells of jasmine, coriander, garlic, mint tea, and Vidal’s mother’s Moroccan cooking, while Paris offers lace, pastries, cafés, studios, and the excitement of becoming an artist. These pleasures matter because they establish exactly what war destroys. As this Jewish historical fiction story moves into occupation, antisemitic restrictions, the Vel d’Hiv roundup, resistance work, and Auschwitz, the tone tightens without flattening Vidal into a symbol. His decision to hide his daughters, even against his wife Sylvie’s wishes, becomes the emotional center of the book. It saves their lives, but it also leaves a wound that survival can’t simply close.

The artwork is central to the storytelling. Botha uses thick black lines, distorted faces, layered blocks of saturated color, handwritten text, and collage-like page designs that resemble journals, family albums, street posters, and painted memories. In the Tiberias and Paris sections, pinks, oranges, blues, and greens crowd the pages with warmth and movement. As the book enters its Holocaust passages, the palette grows harsher and more claustrophobic, with barred windows, crowded figures, repeated uniforms, identification papers, and cramped architectural shapes. The images don’t aim for photographic realism. They capture how memory feels: bright in places, fragmented in others, and sometimes almost unbearable to look at.

What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that survival includes contradiction. Vidal lives because he’s adaptable, persuasive, talented, reckless, and lucky, yet those same qualities complicate his relationships long after the war. The ending, in which he reunites with daughters who barely remember him, is moving because it allows love, estrangement, grief, and relief to occupy the same space. Vidal works as a Holocaust memoir-inspired graphic novel, a family saga, and a portrait of an artist whose hunger for life persists through catastrophe. It’s an intimate, visually distinctive book about memory and inheritance, told with color, tenderness, and a clear understanding that being remembered means being remembered whole.

Pages: 120 | ISBN: 1998779920