Maus

“You know, you should be careful speaking English—a ‘stranger’ could understand.”

Vladek reveals his self-taught linguistic skills while courting Anja before the war. His knowledge of Polish, Yiddish, English, and German is an asset to him in wartime as writing letters and teaching English helps him earn extra food and avoid headcounts. This also forms a tragic bookend to the end of Part 1, as he doesn’t consider whether the Polish smugglers can listen in on his Yiddish conversations with Mandelbaum.

“Here was the first time I saw, with my own eyes, the Swastika. One fellow told us of his cousin what was living in Germany… He had to sell his business to a German and run out from the country without even the money. It was very hard there for the Jews—terrible! Another fellow told us of a relative in Brandenberg—the police came to his house and no one heard again from him. It was many, many such stories—synagogues burned, Jews beaten with no reason, whole towns pushing out all Jews—each story worse than the other.”

Art Spiegelman introduces the Nazis with a page-dominating panel of his parents’ train passing by a Nazi-controlled town. As they hear horror stories from other passengers, Spiegelman depicts several panels of soldiers humiliating and abducting Jews with the Swastika in the background, ending with a village that has a “This town is Jew free” banner overhead. Since the trip took place just after Richieu’s birth in late 1937, this scene would have happened just before the Kristallnacht pogroms of late 1938, when Nazi-backed rioters destroyed Jewish businesses and institutions. The pogroms set the stage for further state-organized violence and became the first story of Jewish persecution to receive widespread notice in the United States (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Kristallnacht.” Holocaust Encyclopedia).

“And on September 1, 1939, the war came. I was on the front, one of the first to ACH! So TWICE I spilled my drugstore! It’s my eyes. Ever since I got in my left eye the hemorrhaging and the glaucoma, it had to be taken out from me. And now I don’t see so well. And now I have a CATARACT inside my one good eye. You see how I have to suffer?” 

The two timelines depict not only a difference between war and peacetime but also the difference between the young and old Vladek. Surviving the Holocaust does not end his suffering, as he exercises and takes pills to counter everyday heart, diabetic, and eye problems—though the typhus and starvation he suffers in the camps may have aggravated these conditions. These scenes also demonstrate the difficultly of living with him, as Vladek spills the pills himself both times but reflexively blames Art at first, then bemoans his condition only to insist on recounting them himself.

“I am not going to die, and I won’t die here! I want to be treated like a human being!”

Vladek goes against the other POW camp prisoners, first by bathing in the cold water to ward off disease and then by volunteering to do hard manual labor for better living conditions. He maintains this attitude in Auschwitz, where he obtains what cold comforts he can find in terms of better food or fitted uniforms. The other prisoners’ concerns that this is a trap are founded, though; the Nazis regularly use tricks to trap Jewish citizens, and once Vladek leaves the camp, he no longer has Geneva Convention protections.

“One time I was going to see Ilzecki. This was late in 1941, I think. His house was very near to a train station… and it was going on there something TERRIBLE. I had to pass near—and they were grabbing Jews, if they had papers or no! What had I to do? Will I walk slowly, they will take me… Will I run, they can shoot me!”

After secretly returning to Sosnowiec and working on the black market, Vladek needs work papers and hiding places from Nazi raids. However, eventually the Nazis start ignoring papers and make an example of some of Vladek’s associates with a weeklong hanging. This passage also demonstrates the storytelling styles of both Spiegelmans. Vladek describes the scene in real time in his accented English. Spiegelman depicts the vague scene with imagery of soldiers beating citizens with batons and ends with Vladek in a panel shaped like the Star of David.

“Right AWAY we heard… Even from there—from that other world—people came back and told us. But we didn’t believe. Then this same news came more and more, so we believed. And later on, we saw… even WORSE!”

While Polish Jews were suspicious of Nazi orders, such as the convalescent home ruse that claimed Anja’s parents, they remained in denial of the concentration camps until stories from the rare escapees made it unavoidable. That makes the decision to participate in the stadium registration a life-or-death matter, especially for those who are not healthy workers. The older Zylberbergs stay alive thanks to a relative, but Vladek’s father chooses to enter the condemned line to be with his daughter’s family. The phrase “that other world” foreshadows how brutal Auschwitz is, and the retelling causes so much stress that Vladek stops pedaling.

“He drives me crazy! He won’t even let me throw out the plastic pitcher he took from his hospital room last year! HE’S MORE ATTACHED TO THINGS THAN TO PEOPLE!”

Mala’s feud with Vladek paints him in a less sympathetic light. He treats her poorly, accuses her of wanting his money, and even considers legal action against her. Mala also gets frustrated with his habit of hoarding freebies like hotel stationery and bank calendars—even though he destroys Anja’s diaries and throws out Art’s coat without much thought. In the middle is Art, who changes the subject as soon as tensions bubble up and complains to Françoise about Mala and Vladek driving each other crazy.

“Congratulations!... You’ve committed the perfect crime… YOU put me here… shorted all my circuits… cut my nerve endings… and crossed my wires!... YOU MURDERED ME, MOMMY, AND YOU LEFT ME HERE TO TAKE THE RAP!!!” 

Speaking from a prison cell at the end of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” Art accuses Anja of ruining his life. She dies just as he is recovering from his own mental health episode; their final encounter ends on bad terms, and family friends blame Art for her death by suicide. This contrasts with Art’s views of Anja in Maus, where he admits he prefers her to his father. Vladek, who still mourns his wife, understands that the comic is something that allows Art to explain his complex emotions. In the comic, Spiegelman understands that this ending is self-loathing as another prisoner tells him to shut up afterward.

“NO! I won’t go to their gas chambers!... And my CHILDREN won’t go to their gas chambers.”

As the Nazis kill the Jewish Council and eliminate her ghetto, Anja’s sister, Tosha, resolves to kill herself, Richieu, and the other two children under her care. Spiegelman depicts the dialogue over three panels and zooms onto Tosha’s face as it turns from defiance to desperation. Vladek calls it a “tragedy among tragedies,” as putting Richieu into hiding sooner could have saved the life of his “happy, beautiful boy” (111). The Spiegelmans only found out about this later, and Art recounts that they searched orphanages across Europe after the war.

“Haskel took from me father-in-law’s jewels. But, finally, he DIDN’T help them. On Wednesday the vans came. Anja and I saw her father at the window. He was tearing his hair and crying. He was a millionaire, but even this didn’t save him his life.”

The Zylberbergs were a wealthy family who could prolong their survival by trading their valuables and using connections to the Jewish Council. This advantage eventually disappeared, as the Nazis were going to take their wealth one way or another. Meanwhile, Haskel affirms Vladek’s belief that the war eliminated even family bonds: While Haskel did tell his cousin upfront that he could not save Anja’s parents, the police officer could have refused the payment. Spiegelman juxtaposes the father-in-law’s anguish with the present-day Vladek looking down at the ground.

“‘NO, darling! To die, it’s easy… But you have to struggle for life! Until the last moment we must struggle together! I need you! And you’ll see that together we’ll survive.’ This always I told to her.

As Anja falls into despair over Lolek’s choice to willingly go to the camps—potentially sharing the fate of her child and relatives—Vladek tells her the value of life and the need to struggle for it. This belief echoes both his past dedication to her at the sanitarium and his current grief over her suicide. This sentiment also connects to Judaism itself, a minority religion with a large diaspora that survives long past many suppressors (Schorsch, Ismar. “Torah and Jewish Survival.” The Jewish Theological Seminary, 18 Jan. 2003).

“The mothers always told so: ‘BE CAREFUL! A JEW WILL CATCH YOU TO A BAG AND EAT YOU!’… So they taught to their children.”

Vladek recounts a time in hiding when Polish children identified him as a Jew—a situation where running away would confirm their suspicions. The scare story he refers to is the “blood libel,” a myth dating back to the Middle Ages that Jews are inhuman and engage in ritualistic child murder that Europeans often use to justify violence. It demonstrates how entrenched antisemitism allows other Europeans to enable or ignore the Holocaust, and how the blood libel myth continues to resurface in modern conspiracy theories (“A Brief History of Antisemitism.” Anti-Defamation League, 2013).

“You BURNED them? CHRIST! You save TONS of worthless shit, and you […] God DAMN you! You—You murderer! How the hell could you do such a thing!!”

Art erupts upon learning that his father destroyed Anja’s diaries. His anger comes from a professional perspective of wanting her diaries to bring balance to the narrative and the personal betrayal of losing something that his mother, a fellow creative, wanted for him. While he eventually understands his father’s mental state at the time, the diaries would have been a more valuable gift than the windbreaker and inheritance Vladek forces on him in earlier chapters.

“Just thinking about my book…It’s so presumptuous of me. I mean, I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father…How am I supposed to make sense of Auschwitz?...of the Holocaust?”

In writing Maus, Spiegelman takes on multiple challenges. The writing of the book forces him to confront his strained and problematic relationship with his father, as well as the enormity of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Both tasks are overwhelmingly difficult, and Spiegelman, as the memoir’s main character, acknowledges this directly.

“‘It’s so claustrophobic being around Vladek. He straightens everything you touch—he’s so anxious.’

‘He never learned how to relax.’

‘Maybe Auschwitz made him like that.’

‘Maybe. But lots of the people up here are survivors—like those Karps—if they’re whacked up it’s in a different way from Vladek.’”

One of Art’s frustrations with Vladek is his extreme frugality and preoccupation with not spending money. Though he understands the likelihood that this is a result of the trauma Vladek experienced at Auschwitz, he notes that other survivors do not share these extreme idiosyncrasies. Much of Art’s dissonance involves wavering from feeling frustrated and impatient with Vladek and then experiencing guilt for these feelings.

“‘Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right—that he could always survive—because he felt GUILTY about surviving. And he took his guilt out on you, where it was safe…on the REAL Survivor.’

‘Um...Tell me, do you feel any guilt about surviving the camps?’

“No…Just sadness.’”

Pavel helps Art to consider Vladek’s side of their relationship by pointing out the ways that the high standards for Art that Vladek has always demanded may stem from his survivor’s guilt. That Pavel has a different response than Vladek to his own experiences at the camps is important because it underscores the ways that no two survivor experiences are the same. 

“‘So, do you ADMIRE your father for surviving?’

‘Well…sure. I know there was a lot of luck involved, but he was amazingly present-minded and resourceful.’

‘Then you think it’s admirable to survive. Does that mean it’s NOT admirable to NOT survive?’

‘Whoosh. I—I think I see what you mean. It’s as if life equals winning so death equals losing.’”

Here, Art realizes how problematic all responses to the Holocaust and its survivors can be. There is no one clear “right” way to feel or respond. Genocide is illogical and fraught with pain and harm that is not easily understood.

“‘Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’

‘Yes.’

‘On the other hand, he SAID it.’

‘He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.’”

Art’s reference to the Beckett quote alludes to the once commonly held belief that the correct response to the Holocaust was silence—that is, because the events were so horrific, nothing could be said that could do justice to their magnitude. Secondly, Spiegelman enacts silence by including a panel with no dialogue, as if following Beckett’s command. Interrupting the silence brings a moment of comedy while underscoring the impossibility (and harm) of remaining silent on such a topic.

“I learned a little shoe fixing watching how they worked when I was with my cousin in Miloch, there in the ghetto shoe shop. […] You see? It’s good to know how to do everything.”

One of the key factors that aids Vladek in his survival is his willingness to take on any job, even if he does not truly know how to do it. He pays attention to things around him, observing in case what he can acquire will be useful in the future. Indeed, this proves to be the case numerous times during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.

 “‘You left the box in the barrack? How could it not be taken?’

‘I didn’t think on it…’

‘But everyone was starving to death! Sigh—I guess I just don’t understand.’

‘Yes…About Auschwitz, nobody can understand.’”

Art is frequently confronted with the reality that it is impossible for him to know exactly what Auschwitz was like, having never lived through it. Resigning himself to this is a key step in extending a courtesy to his father, of validating Vladek’s experiences even though Art cannot relate to them.

“You heard about the gas but I’m telling not rumors. But only what really I saw. For this I was an eyewitness.”

Vladek stresses that he was an eyewitness of the gas chambers’ existence to emphasize the truth and validate the reality of his experience. His words underscore the vast misinformation, propaganda, and lies that were circulated to see to the mass slaughter of entire populations. His words, too, speak indirectly to the present-day phenomena of Holocaust deniers, who insist the Holocaust never happened.

“Marcus, my closest brother, and Moses, went to a camp, to Blechamer. […] A guy, he saw them die, but wouldn’t tell me how. My other brothers, Leon and Pinek, they deserted out from the Polish army to Lemberg in Russia. A family of peasant Jews kept them safe. Pinek, he married one of them, but Leon got sick. Doctors said it’s typhus and he died of a bad appendix. So only my little brother, Pinek, came out from the war alive…From the rest of my family, it’s nothing left. Not even a snapshot.”

Though he is an adult, Spiegelman is learning these details of his ancestry for the first time. The pain Vladek feels as he recalls his late brothers is palpable. Importantly, the visuals of this page reinforce the trauma caused by the deaths of his brothers to Vladek: Spiegelman depicts Vladek’s body across several frames, showing the way he is symbolically “in pieces” and un-whole as a result of his grief. Just as nothing remains of many of his family members so too can Vladek never fully be made whole again.

“‘I passed once a photo place what had a camp uniform—a new and clean one—to make souvenir photos. Anja kept this picture always. I have it still now in my desk! Huh? Where do you go?’

‘I need that photo in my book!’”

In a postmodern moment that is fitting for the book—which frequently references its own writing—Spiegelman once again draws the readers’ attention to the act of making art. Including the photo humanizes Vladek in a way that the mouse depictions may undermine. The photograph reinforces the triumph of Vladek’s Survival in the Face of Adversity.