Towards the end of World War II, when the city of Warsaw revolts against the Nazis, a woman emerges from the rubble to defend freedom. Follow her in L'insurgente de Varsovie, published by Delcourt.
History and Fates
The Warsaw Insurgent is the second volume of the History and Destiny series that follows characters who remain in the shadows but plunged into the torments of different wars. In the first volume, the famous commander Massoud allowed to discover his bodyguard during the war in Afghanistan. In The Warsaw Insangiary, the reader is immersed in a little-known event of the Second World War. In 1944, the Polish resistance rose up to liberate Warsaw in the hope that the approaching Red Army would come to their aid. After two months, the situation becomes dramatic because these rebellious civilians lack weapons or ammunition. Yet they are holding firm. In the midst of men, the young Maria Sabina Devrim, fights for the city. She is even tasked with leaving Warsaw, although surrounded by the enemy, in order to find help. The siege of Warsaw is however only the beginning of his ordeal because the Russian Allies are far from reliable…
Hell in everyday life
Jean-Pierre Pécau has become a key screenwriter of historical comics and proves it in The Warsaw Insurgent. He brilliantly takes the reader back to a city in ruins by following an Anglai bomberand then into a cellar serving as a refuge for a resistance cell. We feel a group at the end of its rope. It is the children who take up arms. Barely older, Sabina guides them through a ravaged neighborhood to find a container sent by the Allies. If she carries out heroic actions, her words are also very accurate. It comes out of the Manichaeism of propaganda. Yes, Polish women have fallen in love with Germans. Moreover, Poles did not show solidarity when their fellow Jews were persecuted and then massacred in the ghetto. Hatred is the most shared feeling against enemies but not only in The Warsaw Instalgen. To be as close as possible to history, we feel at the end of the volume that the screenwriter is based on the words of Maria Sabina Devrim, living since the end of the war in France. Serbian cartoonist Dragan Paunovic has a realistic style that accurately transcribes the apocalyptic setting of besieged Warsaw. Whole parts of the city are emptied of their population and the streets to cross avoiding snippers seem gigantic. We can also praise his precision in the representation of tanks, planes and uniforms. He is supported by the colorist Bertrand Denoulet to render an atmosphere that is both infernal and realistic. This pedagogical desire is reflected in the text at the end of the volume, which places the Warsaw Uprising and the life of Sabina Devrim in the context of the end of the Second World War. Paunovic shows us heroism while Pécau tells the daily life of a country subjected to the Nazi yoke. The whole country seems disorganized: children no longer go to school. There are hardly any Polish soldiers alive but civilians do not know how to take over. Discover a tragic episode from World War II in The Warsaw Insurge. With Jean-Pierre Pécau and Dragan Paunovic, you are no longer in 2021 but in a cellar in Poland in the middle of trapped resistance fighters. With this comic, the two artists finally pay tribute to this moment still too little known. If you are a fan of historical comics, you can find other chronicles on 18 Brumaire and L'étoile de Koursk also written by Jean-Pierre Pécau.
