Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman

Today I'm looking at a pair of graphic novels created by Art Spiegelman collectively known as Maus. Maus follows the life of Art's father, Vladek Spiegelman, through the 1930's and then through World War II. Vladek and his wife, Anja, were Polish Jews who lived in the city of Sosnowiec. Vladek worked as a salesman and eventually invested in a factory while Anja's family owned multiple textile mills in the city. Life for them in the thirties was fairly good but, as can be expected, when war broke out in 1939 things took considerable turns for the worst. The story is divided into two volumes, volume one My Father Bleeds History, talks about Vladek's life from the 1930's until early 1944 when he was sent to Auschwitz. The second volume,  And Here My Troubles Began, tells Vladek's story of survival in Auschwitz, Dachau, and the last few tense months of World War II before being rescued by American G.I.'s.

Framing Vladek's story of survival is Art's own struggles to interview his father, create this book, and understand his relationship with his father. Based on the evidence, Vladek was a very difficult man to live with, ranging from obsessively hoarding money and valuables, to keeping items that most other people would throw away in case they might come in useful, to strained emotional relationships with his wife and his son. Vladek comes across as a flawed and incredibly human person, and while it's clear that life hiding from the Nazis and living in the concentration camps affected him severely, it may have only exacerbated underlying aspects of Vladek's personality. It makes Vladek appear all the more three-dimensional as a character and as a person. Vladek isn't all good, but he isn't all bad either. Like most people he's a mix, but he took action and managed to survive the worst genocide in human history. It makes him very compelling and realistic.

The subject matter is, of course, hard to talk about. This is the worst abuse of human rights, the worst genocide, the worst of man's inhumanity to man, the worst of uncountable crimes in all of human history. There's a reason it's referred to as only The Holocaust. Any other description becomes inadequate in consideration of the cruelty involved. So many people might justly ask, is talking about the Holocaust in cartoon format, where all the characters are depicted as anthropomorphic animals, really the proper way to talk about this? And incredibly, yes, Spiegelman manages to create a depiction that is not only sensitive but emotionally engaging.

The decision to depict Jews as mice is an incredibly brilliant one on multiple levels. First, there is the history of Jews being described or depicted as vermin in Nazi propaganda, pests that needed to be wiped out for the health of the Reich. Spiegelman effectively reclaims that imagery and turns it on its head. Mice, after all, are survivors. Mice hide, mice scavenge, and despite being hunted ruthlessly, mice are still around. For the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who hid, who scavenged, and who managed to survive, a determined mouse is an apt symbol.

I have not read many Holocaust survivor stories. I'm familiar with the narrative in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaining, another Auschwitz survivor, so there are many similarities in there, but any story by a Holocaust survivor is going to be very emotionally heavy. Maus is no exception, because it not only tells the story of the Holocaust, but also explores the life of the survivor afterwards and shows how years of life spent hiding and suffering can have lasting effects on individuals. We see Vladek surviving not just in the past, but in the future, and it shows we can never really leave the past behind.

I think I would definitely recommend this story to people. It's a very hard read just because of the emotions involved and I find myself thinking maybe I shouldn't have plowed through the books in a couple of days. But it's a very emotional and very real story and well worth taking the time to check out.

- Kalpar