Following the death of his beloved grandmother, Jérémie Dres, a young Parisian illustrator, and his elder brother, Martin, decide to travel to Poland, where she grew up. The idea is that they will discover something of their Jewish roots and along the way, slay a few dragons. In the family, you see, Poland has always been a taboo subject. Controversially, though, they decide not to visit Auschwitz. Before the Holocaust, Poland had a Jewish population of three-and-a-half million, the second largest in the world; it was the cradle of Yiddish culture. And it's this that interests them, not the trauma of the camps. So they will visit Warsaw, his grandmother's home town; Zelechów, the village where their grandfather was born; and Kraków, which now hosts Europe's biggest festival of Jewish culture.

Nothing, however, turns out the way they expect. Somewhat to Jérémie's amazement, Poland is having a Jewish revival of sorts, and it turns out that their quest, which had seemed extraordinary and rather brave back in Paris, is increasingly commonplace. Every day, foreigners contact Poland's many Jewish organisations – in spite of the best efforts of both Nazis and communists, there are still some 20,000 Jews in Poland – with queries about their ancestors. Even more startling, inside Poland itself, it has become, in certain cities at least, fashionable to reclaim one's long-buried Jewish heritage. One archivist even tells Dres a funny story about a man who came to her convinced he was a Jew: when she broke the news that this was probably not the case, his disappointment was so great, he dashed from the room in a huff, leaving all his precious family papers behind.

Out in the country, of course, it's a slightly different story. In rural Poland, antisemitism definitely hasn't gone away, and photographing their great-grandparents' graves in an abandoned Jewish cemetery makes Martin so nervous, he tells Jérémie he's going to wait in the car. Jérémie is wryly honest about this episode, just as he is about the fact that they concoct, for the benefit of the Zelechów archivist, a cock-and-bull story about how they're searching for a friend's relative rather than their own – and it's this kind of honesty, I think, that makes We Won't See Auschwitz so enjoyable. For all that they are terribly serious about their quest, there are times when they just can't wait to get away from all the proselytising rabbis and obsessive genealogists and head to the nearest restaurant for gefilte fish and marinated herrings. We Won't See Auschwitz is Dres's first book, but it reminds me strongly of the brilliant travelogues of the French-Canadian cartoonist, Guy Delisle (Burma Chronicles, Jerusalem): a little bit of history; a little bit of politics; the occasional joke. Both men refuse to be weighed down by the complexity of a situation – and their comics cut through the silt of the opinions of thousands of others gracefully, and with seemingly astonishing ease.