Maus

Spiegelman published “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” for an underground anthology in 1973, and its style is completely different from Maus. “Prisoner” uses all-black backgrounds with distorted, nightmarish human figures, and Spiegelman depicts himself wearing an Auschwitz prisoner uniform. The story reveals much about Art: his stay at a mental health hospital, his choice to recite from a Tibetan Buddhist text at Anja’s funeral, and his anger toward his mother. He resents her “tightening the umbilical cord” when he sought comfort right before her death (105), and he insinuates that her suicide was intended to leave him with his grieving father and condemnations from family friends. At the same time, Art is enraged when he learns of Vladek burning Anja’s diaries beyond just the loss of an information source. Art and Anja share a history of mental health issues, and the diaries would help him reconcile his feelings about her. For Art, family archives like these lost diaries are invaluable as sources of both historical and personal information, and he makes no distinction between the historical and the personal. As he wrestles with the double grief of losing his mother and losing the information contained in her diaries, he is also considering the challenges of Preservation of History and the Subjectivity of Historical Records.

Surviving in Srodula requires a combination of ingenuity and luck. Spiegelman provides diagrams of his family’s bunkers and how they allow them to escape capture: Even bloodhounds could do nothing but bark at a brick wall. However, their encounter with the informant is the first time that Vladek’s charity backfires. Once in the camp, Vladek benefits from having cousins in administrative positions to prolong his survival. But when Art asks why Vladek needs to pay family members, his father stresses that “it wasn’t anymore families. It was everyone to take care for HIMSELF!” (116). Vladek expands on this point when his discusses how the governess rescinds her offer to shelter the Spiegelmans and how another person reports the Jews they are sheltering after they run out of money. Vladek’s relationships sustain him throughout his ordeal, providing ample evidence of The Value of Bonds. However, the horrors of the Nazi regime often force people to betray their closest friends and kin, and these betrayals convince Vladek that he can rely only on himself.

Vladek also describes the activities of the Jewish council and Jewish police who cooperate with the Nazis. He notes that the councils of each district have varying loyalties, as Persis of the Zawiercie council takes better care of his citizens and is able to keep his 90-year-old father alive—unheard of at the time. The Jewish police often treat citizens as harshly as the Nazis, and Haskel intentionally loses card games to his superiors to curry their favor. Ultimately, however, the Nazis eliminate anyone who outlives their usefulness, whether they are councilmen, police, or informants. This extends even to children: Spiegelman depicts a gruesome scene of a soldier killing a child by slamming him against a wall, and the registration event marks Fela and her children for death. These stories convince Tosha that poison is a better fate than Auschwitz.

Art questions why Vladek believed that entering Hungary would be any safer than Poland. His father responds that the situation there didn’t worsen until the end of the war, when he saw thousands of Hungarian Jews killed in Auschwitz to the point that no one could bury them all. Several factors influence Vladek’s decision to trust the smugglers even though he’s witnessed similar escape attempts end in betrayal. Anja could not move freely, because she has a more ethnically Jewish appearance, which Spiegelman depicts in one panel as an exposed mouse tail. She worries about Vladek whenever he leaves and is already upset about Richieu and Lolek. Vladek himself risks sitting in the Nazi officials’ rail car because the Polish car may identify him more easily, and he has close calls with the raid on Motonowa’s goods, people following him on the street, and a group of schoolchildren who believe that Jews eat kids. Miloch’s situation involves living in filth behind a house with suspicious family members after helping the Spiegelmans escape Srodula.

While recording the interviews, Art finds himself in the middle of the feud between Vladek and Mala. On the surface it is about money: Vladek believes that Mala is a gold digger, but Mala counters that Vladek provides her with a miniscule allowance and contends that none of the Holocaust survivors they know remain as frugal as him. But it is also about Anja: Vladek still mourns her death, and Mala believes that he stays with her because of her resemblance to his first wife. Art recognizes his father’s stinginess and gets annoyed over his refusal to pay for marriage counseling, but he ultimately doesn’t want either side to bother him. Vladek continues to struggle with the emotional fallout of his ordeal, demonstrating The Generational Impact of Trauma and Survivor’s Guilt.