Maus by Art Spiegelman

I became excited when I heard that the required reading  this week would be the graphic novel, Maus, by Art Spiegelman. Maus was one of those books that I would see all of  the time whenever I would go out shopping, and just by the cover alone, I was intrigued. I had always heard that it was an extremely good piece, but for one reason or another, I never got a chance to read it before. So when Maus became our next assignment in my class, the first thing I did was to go out and buy the hardcover complete edition of the book.

Maus is a story that recounts the life of the author's Polish Jewish father, Vladek, during the mid-1930s and the Holocaust through a series of interviews that the adult Art Spiegelman conducts with him over the course of the book. Despite being a take on  a true story, all of the characters are depicted as various animals, more than likely as a way to help push the idea of racism that was occurring during this time of World War II as well as possibly being more pleasing to the reader due to the idea that "Reality is too much for comics... so much has to be left out or distorted". In Maus, all Jewish people are portrayed as anthropomorphic mice. The Germans are depicted as the mice's primary predator, cats. Also, the Polish people are drawn as pigs, the French as frogs, and all Americans as dogs. As a way to show the Jewish people trying pass themselves off as polish people, the mice wear pig masks. Despite portraying humans as different animals, Spiegelman still includes the real life photos of his father and others, probably to remind us, the readers, that this was not a work of fiction.

Each chapter of Maus is divided into two sections. The first part takes place in recent times with the author visiting his elderly father, interviewing him as part of a book he is writing on his father's life, with the second part of the chapter being told in a flashback sequence. The story follows the life of Art's father, Vladek, and Art's mother and Vladeks first wife, Anja, starting with how they first met and Anja's sudden breakdown after the birth of their first son and their stay at a sanatorium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the Nazi takeover. At first their life is perfect, but all of that soon comes crashing down, starting with Vladek being drafted into the Polish army and then captured by the Nazis. However, he is released and allowed to return home, but instead of taking him home, the Nazi's plan to kill him and numerous other Jewish soldiers that were granted freedom. Vladek is able to narrowly escape and return home. From here, Vladek, his wife and their family begin life in their now Nazi occupied Polish community. One after another, their family is killed, either due to being sent to Auschwitz and to the gas chambers or, as in the case of their son, poisoned along with other relocated children due to their caregiver refusing to allow them to be taken away. Now with just the two of them left, Vladek and Anja go on the run until, in an attempt to be smuggled into Hungary, are betrayed and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After that, Vladeck and his wife are separated, and we are shown Vladek's life in captivity, his release, his rescue by some American soldiers and his eventual reunion with his wife, Anja.

After all of the years of anticipation, I can safely say that I was not disappointed at all when reading Maus. To me, the Holocaust is probably the one point in history that leaves me the most emotional. When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. as a young child, I was probably actually too young to handle it, and I literally had a breakdown and had to sit down for a few minutes before going back to the exhibits. Seeing the video footage and the actual artifacts from the victims touched me deeply and left a great impact on me. Despite that, I don't regret my trip at all, and it is probably because of that experience that I have become so sensitive and emotional on this subject and the events. I thoroughly enjoyed Maus, and I think this is a perfect way to  not only introduce younger people to the horror of the Holocaust and the life of a Jew during that time, but I feel that this is a book that everyone needs to read, especially in recent years as numerous people have been trying to bury tragic events such as this, almost as if they had never happened.