Roger Sutton: This is such a change for you. What part of it got to you first: the story, that you wanted to write a graphic novel, that you saw a blackbird, what was it? What was the first thing?

Maria van Lieshout: The first thing was that my grandmother died in 2011, so quite some time ago. During their lifetimes, my grandparents did not like to speak about the war because there was just too much trauma there. Their house had been bombed. A lot of their friends lost their lives. They lost all their belongings. They lost too much to name. So whenever we would ask them about the war, they would basically say, “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just talk about happy things. This is behind us. This is not what we’re living today, and we just want to move on.” When my grandmother died, about a decade after my grandfather, we believed that all the stories were gone, until when we were cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment, we stumbled upon several documents that described in detail what had happened during those years. Those documents were written in the 1980s by both my grandparents. One detailed the whole situation that happened around the bombing of their house—a literal minute-by-minute recording of what that was like. The second document was about my grandfather’s time in the Resistance with his close friend Frits and what the two men experienced together. It ended with Frits being assassinated by the Nazis. I did not know these stories. I knew their house had been bombed, I kind of knew my grandfather was involved in the Resistance, but all of a sudden having all this information sent me on a huge scavenger hunt.