Meet Misha

“I am running. That’s the first thing I remember. Running.” 

He’s a boy without a name, surviving in the shadows of a city about to change forever. He thinks his name is “Stop Thief,” as that is the only thing he has ever been called. He is the eyes through which “Milkweed” is told. While thousands of first-person memoirs have been written about the Holocaust, “Milkweed” serves as a blank and universal canvas – a stark reminder of what can happen to any of us when stripped of our identity and humanity.

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Art Director Annita Soble created a few renderings of this character and this opening scene. Misha doesn’t have any personal history that he can recall. He survives day today by taking what he needs. He enters the story with no context. He's a blank slate. On the one hand he's an innocent child caught in a time of great evil. On the other hand he's a thief.

As Annita developed this scene and his character she went from giving him  mischievous eyes and a devious grin to big deep set eyes and a small flexible smile more akin to what we think someone "innocent" looks like. She also went from showing him in the scene to showing only his arms holding the stolen bread and others reacting in horror. 

If we recreated Misha in our current world, what would we think of him?