“One Way Ticket to Sobibor”
“One Way Ticket to Sobibor” Enkele reis Sobibor by Guida Joseph, translated by Marjolijn de Jager
In 2020, Guida Joseph and Marjolijn de Jager introduced English-language readers to The Red Thread, a graphic memoir exploring the intergenerational weight of a father’s Holocaust survival and a mother’s slow decline.
The collaboration earned Joseph the Holocaust Literature Prize and established de Jager as a rare translator capable of honoring both the verbal and visual dimensions of the graphic novel form.
Their second collaboration, One Way Ticket to Sobibor (2025), completes a kind of arc. Where The Red Thread traces trauma through a survivor’s long life, this book follows the journey of someone who did not survive — Joseph’s grandmother, deported from Amsterdam on March 5, 1943, believing she was going to find her son in a labor camp.
She never arrived. She was murdered at Sobibor.
What makes the book extraordinary is its source material. Seventy-eight years after the deportation, while clearing out her family home, Joseph discovered postcards her grandmother had thrown from the moving train — small dispatches describing what she was seeing, feeling, and thinking on that final journey.
Guida Joseph
One Way Ticket to Sobibor is built around those cards. It is an act of witness and of restoration, giving voice one last time to a woman the camps were designed to silence permanently.
Joseph’s visual style — colorful, collage-like, full of the humor and lightness that characterized The Red Thread — might seem an unlikely vessel for such material. But as with its predecessor, the contrast is precisely the point.
The brightness does not diminish the horror; it insists on the full humanity of the people inside it.
De Jager’s translation carries all of this with the steadiness the material demands. The grandmother’s voice, reconstructed from those thrown postcards, must feel authentic without feeling invented — a narrow and difficult passage.
De Jager navigates it with the same precision and emotional intelligence she brought to The Red Thread, ensuring that English readers receive not just the words, but the person behind them.
