Maus

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History & Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

By Art Spiegelman
5/5 Stars
Reviewer: Nichole

 

Nothing you’ve read about the Holocaust can prepare you for what these two graphic novels are going to deliver.  This isn’t just the story of a man’s experience in Auschwitz during WWII.  This isn’t just a graphic novel cleverly depicting each race of people as a different animal, Jews being mice, Americans as dogs, Poles as pigs, Germans as cats, etc.  This isn’t simply a collection of haunting images of death, destruction and unimaginable cruelty and loss.  This is the story of a father and son.  And if you’ve ever looked at your parents and thought they were irritating or embarrassing to you, you know some of Art’s pain dealing with his father Vladek.  This is a story of Art interviewing his father about his history, getting to know a young Vladek, tortured away, and how this affected Art’s relationship with his dad.

This is not an easy read.  This is not a light afternoon-at-the-beach book.  This will move you.  This will make you think.  This will make you ache.

What is striking in the books is the disparity between “present day” and “pre-war” Vladek.  He begins as a charismatic, carefree, wealthy man, married into big money, and they were a family of influence.  He and his wife Anna had a young child and they were happy, with confidence and resourcefulness enough that the ominous talk about the anti-Jewish feelings in Hitler’s Germany may at some point have an impact on their world in Poland.  Maybe.  Slowly, they lost more and more: their factories, their home, their valuables, they sent off their child to a safe haven to find out he died there, their family was taken away to camps, killed, until it was just Vladek and Anna, hiding, going from one barn or basement to another, until they ended up in Auschwitz.  Vladek’s focus the entire time he was in the camp was to survive and find his way to Anna.  People died all around him, were shot or beaten to death for no reason, were sent to the gas chamber and then the ovens, and he witnessed inhuman cruelty.  And though you know he and Anna survive, it’s harrowing to experience just reading it.  But the story is coming to you from a neurotic, stubborn, miserly, racist man, and though all of these traits were present in the younger version of Vladek, they helped him survive the Holocaust, and they became overwhelming elements of his personality until his death.

Part of what makes the book so special is that it’s brought to you by the Vladek’s son, through his drawings done from interviews he did with his dad, despite their strained relationship, which are incorporated into the books themselves.  And Art is not shy or dishonest about his own intolerance of his father, which plagues him with guilt, as well as being the son of a survivor, which has even greater psychological impact, and we find that Art is struggling as much as Vladek, trying to make sense of what the Holocaust did to their family, and how it affects them throughout their lives.

Read it.  Not because it won a Pulitzer Prize or because it may teach you something.  Because it will make you feel something.  And maybe, you may learn something about yourself.