Charlotte Salomon was murdered in a gas chamber shortly after her arrival at Auschwitz in October 1943. She was 26 and pregnant. Salomon was supposed to be forgotten, erased from history, along with the millions of Jews murdered in the 1940s. But after the defeat of Nazi Germany, her father and stepmother – who in genocide’s lottery survived their daughter – found a cache of her paintings that included one of the most astonishing autobiographical documents of the 20th century. Before she was put on a train to her death, Salomon had set down everything about herself, her family and her world in a coruscating expressionist comic book that she named Life? or Theatre?

To be caught up in Salomon’s modern masterpiece is to meet her, love her – and mourn her. Through this intimate visual narrative, we come to know Salomon. Today, we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust with monuments: ranks of concrete blocks or libraries of books closed for ever. But Life? or Theatre? is an open book that makes more sense today than when it was found because it is, in fact, that most contemporary of things: a graphic novel.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visual narrative … Charlotte Salomon’s extraordinary record of her life. Photograph: Charlotte Salomon Foundation

Death shadows it from the start. In pre-first world war Berlin, a young woman called Charlotte drowns herself. We see her parents by the lake where she died, read the terse newspaper report. This was the aunt the artist was named after. In brilliantly compressed gouache paintings that combine rawness with clever perspectives and intercutting, Salomon shows how her parents met in a field hospital and married during the first world war. The scene depicting their honeymoon has three layers on top of each other, with the newlyweds’ feet coming down a red carpet watched by a bell boy, then entering a hotel bedroom – until finally we glimpse the couple in bed together in the dark.

It’s like a storyboard for a Wes Anderson film. Cinema was clearly one of the sources for Salomon’s storytelling experiment. Born in Berlin in 1917, she grew up when the pioneering films of FW Murnau and Fritz Lang were streaming out of the city’s studios. They invented purely visual storytelling – the vampire’s shadow or a row of derelict houses are enough to tell the Dracula story in Murnau’s Nosferatu. As a child of expressionist Berlin, Salomon can communicate startling amounts of information and emotion in a single image. Her telling of Kristallnacht – the Night of the Broken Glass, in 1938, when Jewish people and property were attacked – takes just two images. In one, a crowd of tiny people read a giant poster that spits race hate. In the next, they are attacking Jewish shops.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rise of the Nazis … a parade on the day Hitler became German chancellor. Photograph: Charlotte Salomon Foundation

Yet the story Salomon tells is hers and hers alone. There was something tragic about the Salomon family, before their fate was defined by their Jewishness. After an apparently idyllic start to her marriage, and as parent to a young child, her mother sank into despair and threw herself out of a window. Salomon shows her mother’s suicide with precision. The image of herself as a young child dwarfed by her mother’s grave in a blue and black cemetery is overwhelming. Yet Salomon displays an irrepressible capacity for happiness: she makes her governesses’ lives hell with her mischief until she gets one she likes, a young woman who can play the lute and takes her to the seaside.

Life? Or Theatre? is subtitled a “singspiel”, meaning a light opera, and songs are even specified for many scenes. In one, a singer on a stage belts out a lyric about love and death. You can listen to the same sad song on headphones nearby. As you do so, your eyes move towards a painting of uniformed Nazis parading in the street after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933.

Young Charlotte’s world was getting brighter, though. The singer in this crackly recording is Paula Lindberg, a star in Weimar Berlin who would marry Salomon’s father, Albert, a celebrated doctor, after her mother’s death. She is portrayed as a gregarious, beautiful, joyous character who lifts the family out of their melancholy. Through Lindberg’s connections (who included Albert Einstein) Salomon meets a charismatic music teacher and artistic guru called Alfred Wolfsohn and becomes his lover.

By now she’s an aspiring artist, but is she any good? Salomon seeks reassurance from her lover. A sequence where she waits to meet him in a Berlin park, before they touch hands across a cafe table as he tells her she is capable of creating something special, is so intimate you feel you are there beside them. The affair is portrayed with total candour. In a later scene, they meet and he asks whether they should talk in the street or go upstairs. Next thing they’re in bed, looking at a stain on the wall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Capacity for happiness … Charlotte Salomon with her father Albert, around 1927. Photograph: Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam/Charlotte Salomon Foundation

It is one of their last meetings. After Kristallnacht, everything gets worse for Berlin’s Jews. Salomon’s father is sacked from his job, then lumpen thugs in raincoats take him away. We see him hunched over a spade in a labour camp. Only his wife’s charm persuades the Nazis to release him – for now. At a dinner party, everyone discusses escape.

There’s a devasting twist to Salomon’s story, even before her life was cut short, that I won’t reveal. But there’s triumph, too. In a picture of herself in art class – she got in despite the severe restrictions on Jewish admittance – Salomon is drawing a nude male model alongside fellow students who include one wearing Nazi uniform. Who remembers him? With each year that passes, meanwhile, Salomon’s art gets more acute and alive.

• At Jewish Museum, London, from 8 November until 1 March.